Configure-to-Order, CPQ
Cibele Castro
20. July 2026
The skills shortage affects B2B sales at a particularly sensitive point. When experienced sales engineers retire, a company does not simply lose an employee. It also loses decades of accumulated knowledge about which product combinations work, where customers typically ask questions, and how technically complex inquiries can be priced realistically. Companies that respond to this loss of knowledge with traditional succession planning alone often underestimate how much expertise was never written down, but existed only in the minds of individual people.
At the same time, younger generations tend to stay with one employer for shorter periods. Knowledge must therefore be available and usable for successors much more quickly if sales teams are to remain effective.
This leads to the central question of this article: Can sales knowledge be transferred into a CPQ system in a way that keeps it available independently of individual employees? The brief answer is yes — provided that product rules, pricing logic, and configuration knowledge are consistently transferred from the minds of experienced salespeople into a central, traceable rule set before they leave the company.
This article explains why the skills shortage affects sales particularly hard, which knowledge is at risk of being lost, and how a CPQ system can preserve this knowledge systematically — from the initial assessment through to the onboarding of new sales employees.
Sales teams working with highly configurable products are especially vulnerable because technically complex quotes are rarely based on formalized knowledge alone. They also depend heavily on experience.
This includes questions such as: Which special design has proven successful in practice? Which combination of size and material is technically critical? Which customer expects which type of quotation? This experience-based knowledge develops over years of direct customer contact. It is rarely documented systematically because there appears to be little need to do so as long as the person carrying that knowledge remains in the company.
The situation is made more difficult by the fact that, in many medium-sized industrial companies, a large proportion of experienced sales employees will retire in the coming years. New employees are increasingly difficult to recruit for these roles. Even when a replacement is found, it can take years to build up a comparable level of product and customer knowledge. This makes the transition particularly critical. The company does not lose the knowledge gradually, but often abruptly — including the expertise that makes the difference between a suitable quote and a technically risky one.
There is also a structural factor that distinguishes technical sales from more standardized sales roles. Onboarding cannot be shortened through product training alone, because a substantial share of the relevant knowledge only develops through handling specific and often unusual customer inquiries. Companies that ignore this and rely solely on replacing the position risk a transition period in which both quote quality and processing speed decline — with direct consequences for conversion rates and customer satisfaction.
The first thing to be lost is usually implicit knowledge — experience that was never documented as a rule, formula, or checklist, but existed only as a routine in one person’s mind. Unlike documented processes, this knowledge cannot simply be passed on in a handover meeting. Even experienced employees are often unable to explain consciously why they make one decision rather than another in a particular situation.
This loss of knowledge typically affects the following areas:
Each of these areas may appear manageable on its own. Taken together, however, they often determine whether a quote works at the first attempt or enters several correction loops. This combined expertise disappears when the person who applies it intuitively is no longer available.
The risk is especially high where the knowledge was never documented because it was considered self-evident. An experienced sales engineer rarely needs to look up which special design works for a certain customer type — they simply know. That apparent self-evidence makes the knowledge invisible to everyone who does not already possess it. It also makes it particularly difficult to capture once retirement is imminent rather than still several years away.
A CPQ system addresses this problem by storing product rules, pricing logic, and technical dependencies centrally instead of leaving them in the experience of individual employees. What previously happened as an implicit decision in the mind of an experienced salesperson becomes an explicit, documented rule in the system — traceable for anyone who later handles the configuration.
The difference between person-dependent and system-based knowledge can be summarized as follows:
A CPQ quoting configurator therefore takes over the function that was previously fulfilled by the experience of a single person. It checks configurations for technical validity, applies the stored pricing logic consistently, and reduces dependence on whoever happens to handle the inquiry — whether that is a long-serving sales engineer or a newly hired employee.
A CPQ system speeds up onboarding because new employees no longer need to accumulate years of experience before they can create technically correct and commercially competitive quotes. Instead, the system actively guides them through the configuration process and prevents technically invalid or commercially unsuitable combinations from the outset. Knowledge that previously had to be transferred through years of close support from experienced colleagues becomes available in the system from the first working day.
The skills shortage in sales cannot be stopped completely. Its greatest risk, however — the sudden loss of product, pricing, and customer knowledge when experienced employees leave — can be reduced significantly through timely knowledge transfer. Companies that systematically capture experience-based knowledge and transfer it into a central CPQ rule set become less dependent on individual people. At the same time, they accelerate the onboarding of new sales employees. A CPQ quoting configurator provides the technical foundation for this — provided that the knowledge transfer begins while the experienced employees are still available.
Traditional succession planning usually transfers responsibilities and formal processes, but rarely captures the implicit knowledge that experienced salespeople have never consciously documented.
Without a structured process for collecting this knowledge, it leaves the company together with the employee — regardless of how well the formal handover was organized.
Priority should be given to rules that are used most frequently or involve the highest risk of error. These may include frequently used special configurations or central pricing logic. Rare exceptions can be added gradually once the most important rules have been mapped reliably in the system.
No. A CPQ system primarily maps technical rules, pricing logic, and product knowledge.
Consulting skills, negotiation expertise, and the ability to build customer relationships remain experience-based capabilities that still require time and personal involvement.
This depends on the complexity of the product portfolio and the number of special rules.
In many cases, a large proportion of the most frequently used rules can be collected and implemented within a few months. Rare exceptions are then added gradually over a longer period.
STEFAN JUNGEN
Team Lead Sales
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