CPQ

Companies call it “eating your own dog food.” Have you ever wondered where that phrase originated? I sure did, so I googled it before writing this article. One urban legend states that a CEO got on stage and literally ate the company’s dog food in front of shareholders to show how good it was. Not sure that there is any truth to that one, but I thought I’d share my research. But to translate the meaning of the phrase, it refers to companies who use their own product, when it makes sense.

Let’s look at some examples

Let’s Imagine some worst-case scenarios. You walk through the Apple campus and you don’t see a single MacBook or IMac resting on any desks. Or you’re a trailer manufacturer hauling equipment on another’s brand’s product. 

Top 10 Reasons to Choose Epicor CPQ

This quick-reading download walks you through the top 10 reasons that customers choose us for their CPQ. From our 2D/3D visualization and robust rules engine technology to our great people, learn about the qualities that make Epicor CPQ used and loved by over 10,000 customers globally.

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In the tech space, specifically software, I’ve heard of large companies that don’t always use their own product for their intended purpose.  For example, companies who put their customer data into someone else’s CRM, their inventory into another ERP, and run processes through another Project Lifecycle Management tool. The question that immediately comes into my mind is: WHY?

Why would a software company not use their own product? Does this speak to the complexity of their implementation process? Or is it too hard to get it to work? Or it’s actually not as good as they claim? 

Eating our own dog food

At KBMax, I was excited to see the realistic potential of our product for internal purposes. When we’re showing potential customers how they can configure, price, and quote their products in an elegant and automated way why wouldn’t we use the same tool to do our own quotes????

So we did. It started with our salespeople using our configurator to build proposals with the editable pricing and rules that automatically feed into a dynamic sales document.

And most recently we looked at having a design firm build us a value calculator for our website to help customers. But, we thought, “Hey, KBMax could easily solve this for us!”

Launching our very own value calculator

So today we launched our own CPQ value calculator built and powered by KBMax. You can put in business metrics like the # of orders, sales reps, and engineers and we illustrate the tangible value that KBMax CPQ can provide across your organization.  We wanted to show how much value a common platform for your customers, sales, and engineering can bring you. It also eliminates the painful napkin sketches, non-standardized pricing, and slow deal cycles when selling your manufactured goods.

By building it using KBMax’s configurator, we can easily make changes to it whenever we receive updated customer metrics. We can also continuously grow the tool without suffering the expenses that will eventually come by depending on a custom solution.