CPQ at a Crossroads: What End of Sale Really Means—and What Comes Next

CPQ at a Crossroads: What End of Sale Really Means—and What Comes Next

For years, CPQ has been a quiet workhorse inside sales organizations. Rarely celebrated, often misunderstood, and almost always critical. When CPQ works, deals move faster, pricing stays consistent, and sales teams spend more time selling instead of fixing quotes. When it doesn’t, everything slows down.

Today, CPQ is entering a turning point. End-of-sale announcements, shifting product strategies, and expanding revenue platforms have forced many organizations to stop and ask an uncomfortable question: Is our CPQ still serving the business—or are we serving the tool?

To answer that, it helps to understand where CPQ came from, why it mattered in the first place, and what recent changes actually signal for the future.

What CPQ Was Always Meant to Do

CPQ—Configure, Price, Quote—exists for one reason: to bring structure and speed to complex selling. As soon as products gained dependencies, pricing tiers, discounts, bundles, approvals, or customer-specific terms, manual quoting stopped scaling. Spreadsheets multiplied, errors crept in, and deals stalled while sales waited on operations or finance.

CPQ promised order. It encoded product logic, pricing rules, and approvals into a system that sales teams could rely on. Quotes could be generated quickly and consistently, and leadership could trust the numbers flowing into the pipeline.

At its core, CPQ was never about automation for automation’s sake. It was about removing friction from revenue.

How CPQ Evolved—and Became Heavy

Early CPQ solutions were standalone tools. Powerful, but disconnected. As CRMs matured, CPQ followed, becoming embedded directly into sales platforms. This was positioned as progress: one system, one workflow, one source of truth.

And for a while, it was.

But as organizations grew, CPQ implementations grew with them—often without restraint. More rules were added to handle edge cases. More objects were layered in to support reporting. Custom logic replaced process clarity. Over time, CPQ became less about enabling sales and more about maintaining a fragile structure few people truly understood.

Sales teams adapted by working around the system. Operations teams absorbed the burden. Leadership saw adoption numbers drop but assumed the answer was more configuration.

This is the state many businesses find themselves in today: CPQ technically works, but practically struggles.

Why CPQ Still Matters—Even Now

Despite its challenges, CPQ remains essential. The need it was designed to solve hasn’t disappeared. In fact, it’s more relevant than ever.

Modern sales are more complex, not less. Subscription models, usage-based pricing, bundled services, and custom agreements are now common—even for mid-market organizations. Without CPQ, accuracy suffers and velocity drops.

The issue isn’t that CPQ is obsolete. The issue is that many CPQ implementations stopped evolving alongside the business.

That’s what makes recent end-of-sale announcements so important.

Understanding “End of Sale” Beyond the Label

When a CPQ product reaches end of sale, it means new licenses are no longer available. On paper, that sounds manageable. Existing customers can still use the product. Support may continue. Nothing breaks overnight.

But end of sale is not a neutral event. It’s a signal.

It means the product is no longer a strategic investment for the vendor. Innovation slows. Roadmaps thin out. The best engineering talent moves elsewhere. Over time, support becomes reactive rather than proactive.

End of sale is rarely the final step. Historically, it’s followed—eventually—by end of support. And end of support is where risk becomes unavoidable. No fixes. No patches. No safety net.

For a system that directly impacts revenue, that’s not a technical concern. It’s a business one.

Why End of Support Is the Real Inflection Point

Revenue systems don’t exist in isolation. They touch pricing, forecasting, contracts, billing, and customer trust. When support ends, organizations face a difficult reality: maintain a critical system without vendor backing, or migrate under pressure.

Neither option is ideal.

This is why many CPQ conversations today feel rushed or reactive. Businesses aren’t exploring options because they want to—they’re doing it because the runway is shortening.

That urgency has created space for broader platforms to step in.

Revenue Cloud: Strategic—But for Whom?

Revenue Cloud represents a shift toward an all-encompassing quote-to-cash platform. From a vendor perspective, it’s logical. It centralizes revenue processes, increases platform dependency, and expands contract value.

For large enterprises with complex billing, compliance, and revenue recognition needs, that breadth can make sense.

But many businesses don’t need an ecosystem. They need quoting to work. They need pricing to be accurate. They need approvals to be clear. And they need sales teams to actually use the system.

For those organizations, broader platforms can feel like an answer to a question they didn’t ask—introducing more complexity, cost, and change management than the problem warrants.

Which brings the conversation back to first principles.

CPQ Was Never About the Tool

CPQ succeeds or fails based on one factor: alignment.

Alignment between how the business sells and how the system is built.

When CPQ reflects real sales behavior, adoption follows naturally. When it reflects historical assumptions, platform limitations, or edge-case logic, friction grows. Training becomes harder. Workarounds appear. Data quality declines.

This is why many CPQ challenges can’t be solved by swapping tools alone. The underlying problem is not software—it’s mismatch.

A Different Path: The CT Optimize CPQ Approach

CT Optimize approaches CPQ from the opposite direction. Instead of starting with a product and forcing the business to adapt, the process starts with how the business actually operates.

The CT Optimize CPQ solution is not theoretical. It exists today, in a working form, delivering the same core capabilities businesses expect from traditional CPQ—configuration, pricing logic, approvals, and quoting—without the excess weight.

What makes it different isn’t just technology. It’s intent.

The focus is not on replicating every feature of legacy CPQ platforms. It’s on delivering the functionality that matters, in a way sales teams understand and adopt.

Designed for Adoption, Not Just Configuration

One of the most common failures in CPQ is assuming that if the system is configured correctly, adoption will follow. In reality, adoption is earned.

CT Optimize pairs CPQ design with practical, role-based training. Sales teams don’t just learn which buttons to click—they understand why the system works the way it does and how it supports their goals.

That understanding is what turns a CPQ system from a requirement into a tool.

Platform-Agnostic by Design

Another critical difference is flexibility. The CT Optimize CPQ solution is not bound to a single vendor roadmap or licensing strategy. It’s designed to work within modern CRM environments while remaining adaptable as businesses change.

That reduces long-term risk. No looming end-of-sale announcements. No forced migrations. No dependency on tools whose future is uncertain.

Instead, businesses gain control over their revenue process.

“A Working Version That Can Be Yours”

This isn’t a promise of future capability. The CT Optimize CPQ solution is already built, tested, and in use. It can be tailored to match a company’s products, pricing models, and approval flows without starting from scratch.

For organizations evaluating their options after CPQ end of sale—or simply tired of fighting a system that no longer fits—this represents a third path. Not legacy. Not oversized. Purpose-built.

The Bigger Question Businesses Should Be Asking

The real CPQ question isn’t “Which product should we choose?”
It’s “Who controls how we sell?”

End-of-sale announcements force that question into the open. They expose the risk of tying critical revenue processes too closely to vendor strategy rather than business reality.

The companies that navigate this moment well will be the ones that step back, reassess their sales motion, and choose solutions aligned to how they operate today—and how they plan to grow tomorrow.

Final Thought

CPQ didn’t fail. It evolved faster than many implementations did.

As the landscape shifts, businesses have an opportunity—not just to replace a tool, but to reclaim ownership of their revenue process. The right CPQ solution should reduce friction, not add to it. It should empower sales, not slow them down. And it should adapt to the business—not the other way around.

That’s the future of CPQ. And it doesn’t require waiting for the next vendor announcement to begin.