Apollo is an all-in-one sales intelligence platform with tools to help users prospect, engage, and drive more revenue. Sellers and marketers use Apollo to discover more customers in market, connect with contacts, and establish a modern go-to-market strategy.
Apollo's B2B Database includes over 220M contacts and 30M companies. Teams leverage Apollo’s Engagement Suite to scale outbound activity and sequences effectively. Finally, Apollo's Intelligence Engine supports the user's go…
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Salesforce CPQ
Score 8.2 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Salesforce CPQ (formerly SteelBrick) is built and delivered on the Salesforce Platform and Salesforce1 Mobile App which enables users to create accurate sales quotes quickly and submit error-free orders on the fly from any device.
It was not my choice to move to Salesforce CPQ. Our organization chose to move to this platform because Octiv gave the reps too much flexibility. They wanted to tighten the reins. Everyone hates Salesforce CPQ and the guy who implemented it isn't even at the company anymore.
Best suited for contact discovery on LinkedIn or for that matter any website, but it works best on LinkedIn. It saves tons of work, you can simply select the complete list of people you want to contact and put them directly into an email sequence. It is a little difficult to find contact info on other websites.
What I like best is the ease of use to be able to track all opportunities and quotes in my daily sales tracker I also like the fact that you can reorganize the view for your opportunities. For instance, it is very similar to a spreadsheet where you can filter them by date, dollar amount, name, and several other ways. I found this to be less appropriate when we have to do multiple roles while assigning one task to multiple users. Column resizing within the Quote Line Editor is not supported in the Salesforce mobile app.
Salesforce CPQ easily maps to standard and custom fields within the opportunity in SFDC, allowing you to avoid time spent duplicating effort or copying and pasting deal criteria.
Salesforce CPQ connects directly to pre-determined price book, making it very easy to provide a proposal based on standard cost and/or add discounts to standard cost and reflect those reductions on the order form as appropriate.
Salesforce CPQ provides the ability for administrators to configure workflows for approval based on certain discount %'s on the standard cost, offering a quick and easy way to route automatically through the organization for approval.
Their customer service is just terrible. You get an assigned account manager but 9/10 times they wouldn't know what you wanted and/or how the product works or how to fix it. Vast majority of the time it was a canned response that made you question if they read the message, or if they read it and did not understand a word.
The software was relatively buggy and lacked features that were promised upon signup. They seem to have some large corporate clients and if you aren't one none of your bug submissions, feature requests, or concerns will be addressed.
Their growing quickly so they seem to be very understaffed which I believe caused many of the issues above.
The data, while good, can quickly run out if you're looking for specific types of leads. If you're looking for something generic like Managers at companies between 10-5000 people, you can pull leads all day every day. However if you're looking for a specific industry, specific title, and specific location - don't count on having an endless supply of leads (or even really enough to use month after month).
More complex product and configuration rules seem overly complex. If any math is required in a rule, even simple quantity rules can very complicated.
Quote templates while easy to customize are very simple in their layout. We'd like to be able to have more dynamic and visually appealing quote templates.
Guided selling is lacking in very basic ways. You can't create questions with dependencies for "if this, then that" or an intuitive questionnaire or guided selling wizard.
I received excellent support at any time I opened up a ticket. But I would add to it that the tool was very self-explanatory, so there wasn't much need for support. With Outreach, we have a closer relationship with our CSM because of the intricacy in things like SFDC task mapping.
There have been some issues with multi-year pricing of certain products and services which we have been assured will be resolved but I guess are still underway, the support team apart from this has not been needed much and in the rare scenarios, it has been needed the resolutions of conflicts has been prompt and quick, so the overall support would have my high regards for being so helpful and customer-oriented so as to assure good performance of their toolset and customer satisfaction.
I have also looked into and tried Hunter.io and Lusha, and to be honest, I shouldn't compare them with Apollo. I have found Apollo to be so easy to integrate and use with all of my prospecting that I haven't really even tried out the other two. I bet I could find some useful things by using Hunter.io or Lusha as well, but there is honestly no need since I can do everything I want and more with Apollo. I would just be wasting time trying to figure out another platform when I can be focused on growing my own business with Apollo.
There is no comparison to a fully functional instance of CPQ. Nothing comes close due to the amount of customization and ease of use that CPQ offers once it's fully built out. Other solutions may be easier to build or administer, but for the users and business needs, CPQ is the best solution possible.
The use of Steelbrick has created significant positive productivity for Mitsubish Electric sales. An online price book and quote input function, along with the ability to clone a quote to efficiently start a new quote has improved sales process and inventory planning. This elevated our sales teams from monthly spreadsheet submissions to real time opportunity and inventory planning.
Use of SteelBrick also improved customer service. When a customer places an order today, the sales order processing team has ready access to approved proposals and pricing, instead of looking for the appropriate spreadsheet file containing a customer proposal.
