Rebuilding Revenue at the Source: Why CPQ and Revenue Lifecycle Transformation Should Be on Every CIO’s Agenda

Most CIOs spend their time thinking about major transformations: cloud modernisation, AI adoption, cyber resilience, data strategy. But there’s an area of the business quietly eroding value, slowing growth, and obstructing automation — and it rarely gets CIO‑level visibility: the revenue lifecycle.

In a recent CIO WaterCooler digital boardroom, we were joined by Ruskin Kerslake from Conga to explore this often‑overlooked part of the enterprise technology stack. While every organisation configures, prices and quotes in some form, very few have connected these processes in a way that supports scale, agility and accuracy. The result? Complexity, revenue leakage and operational drag that impacts everything from forecasting to customer experience.

Despite the diversity of organisations represented in the session, the themes that emerged were remarkably consistent. The message was clear: your CPQ, contracting and billing processes are now strategic — and they should be treated as such.

Why CPQ Has Become a Strategic Issue
Configuration, pricing and quoting has traditionally been seen as a sales function: something to optimise later, once “more important” transformation work was complete. But Kerslake highlighted why that thinking is now outdated.
Modern organisations are facing:

• rapidly expanding product catalogues, often inflated by acquisitions
• new pricing models (subscription, usage, consumption, bundles)
• more complex contracts, often with tight regulatory or compliance requirements
• fragmented data, spread across CRM, ERP, spreadsheets, legacy tools and email
• heavy manual handoffs between sales, legal, revenue operations and delivery

These forces make the revenue lifecycle one of the most complex — and often least automated — areas of the business.

The irony, as Rushkin pointed out, is that most organisations believe their biggest barrier to growth is pipeline. In reality, it’s often the inefficiencies baked into the quoting and contracting process that prevent deals from closing quickly, accurately and profitably.

The Cost of Complexity: Revenue Leakage and Slow Cycles
One of the most compelling parts of Kerslake’s perspective came down to a simple truth: complexity is the enemy of revenue.
That complexity shows up everywhere:

1. Bloated product catalogues
Acquisitions, localised variations and outdated SKUs build up over time. What begins as a structured catalogue becomes a maze of duplicated entries, inconsistent pricing and legacy rules that few people truly understand.

2. Manual contract creation
Even when a quotation is accurate, moving it into a contract often involves a “swivel‑chair” motion: passing data to legal teams who re‑key information into templates. Every manual step introduces cost, delay and risk.

3. Disconnected systems
CRM manages leads and opportunities, but rarely the full depth of configuration or pricing logic. ERP manages fulfilment or billing, but often receives incomplete or inconsistent data. CPQ may exist — but on outdated platforms not built for API‑first, multi‑cloud architectures.

Together, these challenges lead to slow approvals, inconsistent pricing, and contractual inaccuracies that directly impact margin. Rushkin described it plainly: this is where revenue leakage hides.

Why Legacy CPQ Tools Aren’t Keeping Up
Another clear theme was that many CPQ tools haven’t evolved quickly enough to support today’s selling environment.

Legacy platforms often struggle with:

• high volumes (e.g., thousands of product line items)
• complex configuration rules
• modern pricing structures
• real‑time integration with ERP, billing or fulfilment
• AI‑driven optimisation or automation
• self‑service or partner‑led commerce
• multi‑cloud or hybrid deployment models

Rushkin explained why Conga rebuilt its platform on modern, cloud‑native infrastructure to address these issues — just as Salesforce is attempting to do with its new Revenue Cloud Architecture (RCA). In both cases, vendors are acknowledging the same problem: the old generation of CPQ platforms can’t support the next decade of commercial models.

The Foundations of a Modern Revenue Lifecycle

Across the discussion, a set of core principles emerged — ones CIOs should pay close attention to when evaluating new or replacement systems.

1. Scope Determines Success
Too often, organisations begin with massive requirement lists accumulated over years. Many of these requirements reflect old constraints, not future needs. Kerslake has seen implementations fail because teams insisted on recreating historical workflows that no longer add value.

The right approach:
Start with business outcomes, not features.

2. Prioritise Configuration Over Customisation
Custom code increases cost, risk and technical debt. Modern revenue lifecycle platforms should allow most business logic to be delivered through configuration — “drag and drop” rule-building — rather than development.
Rushkin stressed:
When you customise CPQ, you’re customising the most delicate part of your commercial engine.

3. Bring the Right People in Early
Pricing owners, product managers, legal teams and sales leaders must be involved from the start. This isn’t IT‑led — it’s business‑critical. Change management is essential, especially when rationalising catalogues or redesigning quoting processes.

4. Focus on Data Quality and Catalogue Governance
AI‑driven quoting, guided selling and margin optimisation are only as good as the data underneath. As Kerslake noted, there is no such thing as “bad data” — only data that is misunderstood or poorly structured.

5. Evaluate Platforms Through a Revenue Lens
The key questions CIOs should ask include:

• How much value is the organisation leaving on the table due to pricing inconsistency?
• How quickly can we produce accurate quotes today?
• How much revenue leakage is hidden in contract errors or manual processes?
• How integrable is our current CPQ with our CRM and ERP systems?
• Can our current tools support modern pricing and AI strategies?

These are not IT questions — they’re organisational performance questions.

A New Strategic Frontier for CIOs

The session reinforced a broader shift happening across technology leadership: CIOs are increasingly responsible for the systems that directly generate revenue, not just those that support it.

The revenue lifecycle is no longer a back‑office problem. It is a strategic lever with measurable impact on:

• revenue growth
• margin protection
• speed to quote
• customer experience
• compliance
• operational efficiency

As organisations embrace more complex commercial models and more frequent product innovation, the ability to configure, price, contract and bill consistently becomes mission critical.

The challenge — and the opportunity — for CIOs is to bring discipline, architecture and clarity to an area of the business that is often fragmented and resistant to change.

Those who do will help their organisations unlock margin, accelerate sales cycles and build foundations for AI‑enabled commercial operations.