Conga CPQ empowers sales, partners, and customers to efficiently configure complex products and services offerings, and provide personalized prices and quotes, utilizing codified product and pricing information - to drive higher win rates and a more pleasurable buying experience. Conga CPQ also helps to maintain a single price book, discounting structure, and quoting structure across all channels. With an API-first approach, configuration, pricing, or quoting capabilities that can…
$35
per month per user
Gatekeeper
Score 8.5 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Gatekeeper is a Contract and Vendor Management Solution that brings visibility and transparency to contract and vendor sets, used to create a single source of truth with a central data repository, and to develop robust, scalable processes using automation.
I think the case when I would recommend Conga CPQ is in a legacy org. In that case, the older style and configuration might be more useful, and you are less likely to find yourself forced to upgrade to lightning. If you are already using lightning, or migrating to lightning, then I would only recommend Conga CPQ if the alternative does not support the features you need.
One of the things I appreciate about Gatekeeper, is that all of the documents are housed in one place. I no longer have to chase department people down for contracts. Having all the terms of the contracts entered into the system helps with keeping track of each of the contracts, and having the ability to monitor them in one place. Coming from a place where there was no system in place, it was a given that auto-renewals would happen regularly. Our Accounting Dept. has also benefited greatly using Gatekeeper. Before, they would have to rely on other departments to get the contracts and terms, which would create a backlog for them, especially if they didn't get it in time before the invoices from the vendors started to come in. Gatekeeper isn't a tool that is specific to one team/department, Gatekeeper can assist everyone that needs to access contract terms/information
The perceived power strength is that it is supposed to contain CPQ, Contract Management, Document generation and template manipulation, and cash/invoice process all in one wrapped package.
It was developed on the Force.com platform.
They provide multiple releases of their product per year.
Customer service/support, they're always responsive and eager to jump on calls whenever we need their support. They've never once treated us as "paid invoice" and moved on. They build relationships there at Gatekeeper.
They're innovative, improving on their product, when it is already a fantastic resource tool.
They have the ability to customize features to fit your needs, that was one feature important to us.
Apttus has not completely transitioned from a product suite to a product platform vendor. Upgrades of certain products can have interoperability issues with other products in the Apttus stack. Our pain point here was attempting to use Apttus Xauthor for Excel to get around product line limitations in the Apttus CPQ shopping cart. The ultimate resolution was for us to upgrade and leverage the latest version of CPQ, where pricing callback limitations were addressed by client side processing, rather than the hybrid Xauthor process we tried to use.
Upgrades in general require significant testing to ensure no unanticipated issues occur. We have a complete Salesforce sandbox dedicated to providing an environment for testing any modifications or upgrades.
Apttus support model almost requires you to purchase premium support. Given the CPQ system is complex, the level of skilled support available through basic support require you to escalate several times before getting to a resource that can address your issue.
This might be more of a personal thing to me, rather than an issue for anyone else, but when I'm working on a specific vendor, with multiple contracts, I have to click the back arrow to get back out to the other contracts within that vendor. It would be helpful to have a feature that you could click on to take you back to that vendor where the other contracts are kept.
It is critical to our sales process. We are not satisfied with all aspects of the product and have gone through many tough experiences with their PS, support, and PD teams -- but we're not unhappy enough to re-build what we're already built
Conga CPQ is a great tool but lacks good support and [a] very limited knowledge base which doesn't include day to day errors which users face, thus leading us to support and take more time in turn. Also cart performance can be improved drastically which will enhance the user experience as the user doesn't have to wait for the pricing.
Tier1/tier 2 support can only handle native functionality. Customizations have to be escalated to developers which aren’t included in the support program.
I go ahead and copy the people I directly worked with on implementation for assistance. I would rate them an 8 for support assistance.
Whenever I've reached out to Gatekeepers customer service and/or support team, they've always been prompt in getting back to me, whether it's via an email, text or setting up a zoom call, Gatekeeper's support is impeccable.
Be iterative. Take the opportunity to build a catalog based on how Apttus works well. Learn the tool yourself or use an SI. Take the time to build a configuration / pricing migration tool with X-Author for Excel or roll your own. Stick with OOTB Apttus as any customization will cost you every time a new version is released
We selected Apttus CPQ over SteelBrick due to the simplicity of SteelBrick's out of the box pricing and ability to customize quoted products. As a global organization with selling a highly configurable products, we felt the ability of Apttus to handle our requirements as standard functionalty rather than a customization was a material difference between the platforms.
The ability to generate engineered configurations that is right by construction has reduced the cycle time of the customer engagement. The fact that we are able to guide the process and end up with a validated bill of material reduces the iterations with the customers.
As long as the validations rules are correct the generated bill of material is accurate. We are now looking at using Apttus to perform quality checks in our product rules since the tool is able to test different configurations quickly and efficiently.
Configuration that use to take weeks and consumed valuable engineering resources has been transformed to become a customer facing application that is simple enough for customer to self-service.
Since using Gatekeeper we have a better understanding of what contracts we have, and with the customized Workflow they created for us, the contracts flow through the Pipeline based on our DOA. It's a smooth process from the start of redlining and finalizing to finishing it up with Gatekeepers digital e-signature feature.
Contracts are not flying all over the place with no structure.
