Clari is a predictive sales analytics and sales forecasting solution from the company of the same name headquartered in Sunnyvale.
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Conga Advantage CPQ
Score 8.9 out of 10
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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…
We use Clari as the primary way to manage our sales business, our opportunities, and our forecasting. Clari provides a very clean, digestible, and easy to manipulate format to view and manage all of the Salesforce information. The fact that Clari is able to provide an easily customizable set of columns and groups, coupled with the ability to write back to Salesforce is fantastic. Anyone in a mature sales organization will find Clari highly effective at helping manage their funnel of opportunities and their business.
It is well suited to providing quick pricing recommendations, allowing those who are quoting to get our agreements out efficiently. Where I find there may be some limitations is around the details that it uses to establish recommendations and the overrides. For example it would be nice to have a way to set overrides for those criteria like length of agreement, etc. and have it apply across the board
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.
Our number one complaint with Conga CPQ has been speed. In my experience, Conga CPQ is extremely slow, especially for large orders.
In my opinion, the configuration methods of Conga CPQ are outdated and error-prone. One literally puts configurations into string-based custom settings, including the API field names. This often leads to deployment issues and run-time configuration errors.
In my experience, Conga CPQ is everything but simple to develop. You need things like a 12-step pricing callback to support custom pricing.
In my experience, Conga CPQ support is not responsive.
When it comes time to lock in a renewal contract for Conga CPQ, in my experience, they delay engagement, so you are truly behind the 8 ball when it comes time to decide if you are going to continue with Conga CPQ.
I will renew my Clari Subscription for many reasons. 1. Streamlines Sales - Clari automates many manual tasks like note-taking and transcripts. This frees my sales team so they can focus on closing deals. 2. Increased customer retention - Clari helps me identify potential churn risks and take proactive measures. 3. AI-Driven Insights
The rating is based on several things: 1) Ongoing support requirements being able to be addressed by cross training existing Salesforce administrators 2) Apttus superior corporate vision for the quote to cash space 3) Apttus execution of the corporate vision with automated agents (Max), and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning offerings to leverage the investment in Configure Price Quote 4) Apttus corporate health and investment in the product line
Clari's UI does not resonate with new users. The backend query updating takes quite long time to update. Lots of fixes are needed without answers or solutions offered by the Clari team. If set up correctly with clear recommendations from the Clari team, all the previous issues may be resolved, however the usability is tied closely to set up.
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.
becasue end of year or around end of Q due to background changes my total number dissapear and make it hard in that week to see forecast numbers accurate
Clari is very willing to jump in and build out use cases. They will work to do anything for you. That said, their follow up is not great. We have had to reach out for follow up several times on a project, which is still not complete. I wish they taught us how to complete what we want, rather than doing it in house for us
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.
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
At the time of selection, Clari was a more mature product than Xactly Forecasting. We did not want to experience growing pains with Xactly. Pipeline Inspection from SFDC was just becoming available. We had already selected Clari before we learned about Pipeline Inspection.
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.
