What’s New in HubSpot CPQ?
At Inbound 2025, HubSpot made important announcements around their configure price quote (CPQ) functionality and their overall approach for quote to cash. These significant improvements go a long way toward closing the previous capability gap with Salesforce Revenue Cloud, making HubSpot a viable competitor in the enterprise CPQ space. This is exciting for both existing customers and anyone considering making a switch to CPQ technology.
Here at Hyperscayle, we partner with both HubSpot and Salesforce, so we do a lot of work in both ecosystems. We pride ourselves on taking an objective approach to technology recommendations, so we wanted to share our point of view on what these new product announcements from HubSpot really mean.
HubSpot’s Journey with CPQ Capabilities
HubSpot began its journey as an SMB-focused marketing automation platform and then expanded into CRM, customer service, commerce, and more. HubSpot is making a big effort to move up-market into the enterprise, but the vast majority of HubSpot customers are still very small companies.
One barrier to breaking into the enterprise has been HubSpot’s weakness at the bottom of the funnel. HubSpot has technically had CPQ functionality for a while, but has been unable to handle more complicated use cases. For example, setting complex discounting rules was not possible, and the platform lacked a built-in approvals flow for deal governance.
Understanding the CPQ Market
Before jumping into the HubSpot announcements, I want to give a brief overview of the CPQ market for context. The dominant player in the enterprise space has, for a long time, been Salesforce. Since they acquired Steelbrick and renamed it, Salesforce CPQ has been an enterprise-ready, fully customizable CPQ platform that was integrated easily with Salesforce CRM.
However, because it was a bolt-on acquisition, Salesforce CPQ worked differently from core Salesforce under the hood. Since it wasn’t natively built on Salesforce, it created occasional headaches because automation worked differently, the data integration wasn’t always seamless, and it required, effectively, a separate skillset to operate.
Fast forward to earlier this year, when Salesforce announced the release of Salesforce Revenue Cloud and the end of sale for Salesforce CPQ. Going through every detail of that announcement is an article in its own right, but here is the quick version: Salesforce is sunsetting Salesforce CPQ and has built a new, fully native product that does everything Salesforce CPQ does, plus additional features such as billing, contracts, order management, and billing & invoicing.
From now on, you can’t just buy CPQ by itself from Salesforce - you have to buy a larger, more expensive package including all the above. There is a good value proposition for firms that aren’t happy with how billing, invoicing, and orders are working in their ERP, and want to migrate that out of ERP into their CRM.
However, for everyone who just wants a CPQ system, Salesforce suddenly isn’t a no-brainer.
Breaking Down HubSpot’s CPQ Announcement
This month at Inbound HubSpot announced significant improvements to their embedded CPQ solution:
AI-Generated Quotes: Quotes can now be initiated using AI, pulling in the deal context and parameters, eliminating the need to build everything manually.
Closing Agent: Embedded chat agent, which allows buyers to interact with quotes by asking questions about pricing, products, attached documents, etc, with real-time responses.
Approvals Workflow(s): New, more flexible approval flows allow quotes over configured thresholds or with specified criteria to now be routed appropriately.
Flexible Pricing Logic: Enhanced configuration options for bundling, support for tiered pricing, flat-rate pricing, and additional dynamic pricing options are a major improvement.
Quote Editor/Branding: Elevated and more polished appearance in the delivery of quotes, including the ability to link a library of templates, cover letters, all with approved branding, provides a better customer experience.
Integrating Billing and Payments: HubSpot clients may now leverage the ability to operationalize billing and payment flows directly inside HubSpot Commerce Hub, eliminating the need for additional disconnected tools and handoffs.
The Bottom Line on CPQ Capabilities of HubSpot and Salesforce
It will be very interesting to see how the competitive dynamics play out in the coming months. Here at Hyperscayle, we’re just excited to have another viable ecosystem for enterprise quote to cash. We’ll continue to do a lot of Salesforce Revenue Cloud implementations - it’s a great platform - but we also expect that for the first time, we’ll be recommending HubSpot to some enterprises that just want CPQ.
