Profit optimization solutions enable an organization to efficiently manage and optimize the price of its goods and services, and to offer and manage off-invoice rebates. These solutions also offer a growing range of sales intelligence advice, such as next best action recommendations and customer churn warnings. Profit optimization solutions often integrate with, but are considered separate from, configure, price and quote (CPQ) applications. Profit optimizations solutions are used primarily by back-office product management, sales operations, pricing management and deal desk teams, although the outcomes and recommendations are surfaced in sales channel tools such as CPQ.
Gartner defines configure, price and quote (CPQ) applications as software that enables sales organizations to automate and optimize the creation of quotes and capture of orders. A CPQ application is a sales tool that captures the new goods and services a customer wants to buy or the changes a customer wants to make to existing goods and services. While generally focused on assisted sales channels, CPQ capabilities such as product configuration and pricing must be shared with the self-service commerce channel. The new purchases and changes must be priced and a binding contract must be formed with the customer before sending an order to downstream fulfillment systems.
Gartner defines contract life cycle management (CLM) market as a solution that proactively manages contracts from initiation through negotiation, execution, compliance and renewal. In this context, a contract is any agreement or contractual document containing rights and obligations that affect an organization now or in the future (e.g., a nondisclosure agreement). CLM solutions allow organizations to create, negotiate and store contracts in a centralized repository. Using these solutions helps mitigate organizational risk by enabling regulatory and policy compliance, providing governance over what is signed and with whom, and role-based access to terms and obligations with third parties. CLM solutions drive visibility, consistency and efficiency in the contracting process across an enterprise. Use cases are primarily aligned to parts of the process, such as presignature and postsignature. Different departments often prioritize a certain use case based on their involvement in the contracting process.
CCM software is defined as both a strategy and a market-fulfilled by applications that improve the creation, delivery, storage and retrieval of outbound and interactive communications. It supports the production of individualized customer messages, marketing collateral, new product introductions and transaction documents. It is a collection of computer programs that composes, personalizes, formats and delivers content acquired from various sources into targeted and relevant electronic and physical communications between an enterprise and its customers, prospective customers and business partners. It delivers targeted communications through a wide range of media including mobile, email, SMS, Web pages, social media sites and print. The CCM market has evolved from the convergence of document generation/composition and output management technologies. Current CCM solutions include the core elements of a design tool, a composition engine, a workflow/rule engine and multichannel output management.
Gartner defines digital commerce as the technology that enables customers to purchase goods and services through an interactive and self-service or assisted experience. The platform provides necessary information for customers to make their buying decisions and uses rules and data to present fully priced orders for payment. The commerce product must support interoperability with customer data, product content (e.g., price, availability) and order functionality and data via APIs. Digital commerce is commonly delivered as single or multitenant SaaS, or as single-tenant hosted or managed hosted (PaaS) applications. It could be offered for on-premises implementations in some circumstances. Digital commerce enables customers to purchase goods and services through an interactive and self-service or assisted experience, providing the necessary information for customers to make buying decisions.
Electronic signatures are a digital representation of an individual’s agreement that is intended to be the equivalent of a “wet” signature. Electronic signatures encompass a set of methods that can be applied to a digital document to capture intent to sign, and consent to sign electronically. They do this by electronically gathering metadata related to all signing events, and creating an audit trail that is cryptographically sealed to ensure document authenticity, nonrepudiation and integrity of the electronically signed document. This audit trail may also contain various supporting evidence of the individuals signing the document, such as names, email addresses, identity proofing and authentication steps. Evidence details may vary with each product, but the audit trail provides evidence to support the legal value of the document. A digital signature (as it relates to document signing) is a type of electronic signature that, in addition to the requirements of an electronic signature, also requires that each signer sign the document with a digital certificate that is explicitly issued to them.
As business processes become increasingly advanced, providers are creating reliable partnerships to scale profitable and growing markets in the PRM industry. Providers that have a large number of partnerships need assistance to reduce the administration complexities caused when working with each other. Hence, PRM software can play a vital role in reducing these business complexities. Partner relationship management (PRM) applications market as a set of tools used by providers to interact with their indirect channel partners on a one-to-one and one-to-many basis. PRM tools enhance communication, facilitate training, and support partner sales and marketing activities. PRM applications are used to help providers scale their partner programs and improve partner experience. PRM applications help organizations to simplify and integrate the process of working with partners, thereby providing partners with resources and efficient communication to increase sales on an organization’s behalf. PRM applications streamline both the management distribution and deal registrations to help reduce costs and labor involved. In parallel, they increase partner satisfaction and reduce channel conflicts.