The person who understands your CPQ model best has no time for it.
I see it in almost every organisation. There's someone who knows the product inside out. Who understands how sales thinks. Who resolves exceptions before they turn into a problem. Who bridges engineering and the field team.
That same person is also the one who should be maintaining the CPQ model. But they're far too busy with everything else.
The people best suited to building models are exactly the people the organisation needs everywhere else. Their knowledge makes them indispensable — and that same indispensability is precisely why the model doesn't get kept up to date.
New products don't get added because there's no time. Price changes get handled manually, outside the system. Changes that should have happened last quarter are still sitting on the list.
"The model is falling behind reality. Not through unwillingness — through lack of capacity."
A CPQ model that isn't kept current quickly loses its value. Sales people stop trusting it and start working around the system. Quotes get put together outside the model — with all the risk of errors and inconsistency that comes with it. Meanwhile, the backlog keeps growing.
The product expert sees this every day. But there's always something more urgent taking priority.
This is exactly the situation where outside CPQ support is most valuable. Not to replace the product expert — their knowledge is essential and stays that way. But to take model building off their plate.
I work alongside that in-house expert. They provide the substance: product knowledge, sales logic, exceptions. I translate that into the model. That way the knowledge stays in the organisation, but the busiest person doesn't have to do the work themselves.
The result: a model that stays current, an expert who can focus on where they truly make a difference, and an organisation no longer dependent on one person's schedule.
Does this sound familiar? I'm happy to walk you through what that looks like in practice.