How can variant management and engineering be managed in B2B sales

Berlin was not just the venue in June. It also served as a good indicator of the topics currently shaping industrial companies. With Smart Variant.CON and the parallel Konstruktionsmanagement Summit, two formats came together that addressed the same core question from different angles: How can complex products be organized today so that they remain understandable in sales, usable in engineering, and applicable in downstream processes?

Our on-site team, including Achim Angel, Holger Reimsbach, Luca Nagel, Stefan Jungen and Byron Wells, was not only present in Berlin as exhibitors, but also contributed to the programme with a presentation by Luca Nagel at Smart Variant.CON, a CTO+ session led by Stefan Jungen, and a further presentation at the concurrently held Construction Management Summit. Against this backdrop, three insights stand out that go beyond the events themselves.

Just because a product is technically compliant does not automatically mean it is the right one

CPQ and variant management create reliability. Products become rule-compliant, calculable, and feasible to build. That is a core benefit of digital configuration processes. At the same time, a gap remains: a product can be configured correctly from a technical standpoint and still miss the actual customer requirement.

In many configuration processes, users mainly see:

What is often missing is the actual product in its configured form. This is exactly how misunderstandings arise. They do not become visible during the conversation, but only later, when the quote has already been created or expectations have already been set.

Trust therefore does not arise only at delivery. It starts during configuration. Visualization plays an important role here. It helps to: make abstract configurations easier to understand, secure decisions earlier in the process and make misunderstandings visible before an order is placed. This means visualization is not just representation. It becomes a building block of sales reliability.

CTO+ is not just a question of the product modular system

In many companies, the boundary between CTO and ETO is still treated as if it were primarily technical. In practice, many requirements are not ETO because they truly have to be, but because knowledge, rules, and variants have not been sufficiently standardized and modeled.

Any manual intervention in the quotation process may indicate untapped CTO+ potential. This is because wherever experts regularly make decisions, there is, in principle, knowledge that could be modelled – provided it were systematically recorded and made available across departments.

The real questions, therefore, are not just how variants are configured, but also:

Anyone who sees CTO+ only as a product model mainly looks at variants and rules. Anyone who understands CTO+ as a process model looks at handovers, data quality, responsibilities and system boundaries. This is exactly where the most relevant friction often arises in practice.

Product data has long been a key sales issue

Anyone downloading CAD/BIM data or dimension drawings is usually already planning concretely, seriously evaluating a solution, and often signaling purchase intent before a classic sales dialogue is even visible. Product data is therefore not merely the output at the end of a process, but part of the journey towards that end.

It is not only in the industrial sector, though this is particularly evident there, that the role of product data is shifting from being merely a basis for planning to becoming an active component of digital sales processes.

Typical barriers in data provision are:

What companies actually need

At its core, the issue is not more data, but the right data in the right system.

Depending on the use case, this may require:

What matters is not the number of systems, but whether the underlying product data can be provided in a consistent, system-neutral, and reusable way.

What these three insights have in common

Companies today are no longer only faced with the task of digitizing individual process steps. They need to organize complex product worlds in a way that makes them faster in sales, easier to understand for customers and technically connectable. Trust in configuration, CTO+ as a process issue, and product data as an active part of sales are therefore not separate discussions. They describe three perspectives on the same task.