Conga CPQ vs. Chili Piper

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.

Incentivized

Chili Piper is GREAT for sales development teams booking for sales people. This is especially true when there is a "round robin" system that needs to be abided by. I've experienced a lot of bad round robin systems and Chili Piper's is fantastic. This is also a great tool to schedule with people across multiple time zones, which I don't want to have to focus on while speaking. It enables sales reps to focus on the prospect, not the time change. Chili piper would not be a good fit for underperforming sales teams that don't book any meetings (:

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Chili Piper integrates with Salesforce very well which I haven't seen other calendar apps do yet.
• Meeting Buffer functionality assures that AEs won't be booked back-to back.
• I can send the link to each of my meeting templates for different prospects

• 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.

Incentivized

• They are continually improving their offering and we've seen great leaps over the past 2 years.
• Would be nice to be able to modify the email reminders for every single contact and event versus have set templates
• Faster load times, but we can’t complain too much!

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I have not heard of any issue

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.

• Support was very responsive during our integration phase, and after that too.
• They have the whole infrastructure built to notify customers about bug/outages, which is excellent. Entire System outage only happened once, but being updated on fix progress helped a lot to keep our team calm.

Incentivized

We attended 5 hours worth of webinars early on.

We had to understand how objects worked to figure out how to structure our data.

I would have liked more in-depth training but it would have been an additional cost

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

Incentivized

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.

Calendly was being used at the company by some other departments and still is to some extent. However adding Chili Piper fore the marketing and sales departments was a no brainer once we saw the demo. It's Calendly on steroids and the company is just getting started using it. I'm sure we will see even more benefits as the years go on.

Incentivized

• 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.

• More demos held by simplifying the scheduling process. More demos = more opportunities
• Initial set up was frustrating and created a lot of mix up which allowed some leads to slip through the cracks early
• Integration with Salesforce.com saved our reps time because they didn't have to log activities manually

Incentivized