CobbleStone Contract Insight® vs. Conga CPQ

We use Cobblestone for all of our contract types across the company. We had a phased roll-out which helped get us live fast and share experiences with other departments for their implementation. the fact that it can support the different department and contract type scenarios were the biggest selling point. We are confident that it will evolve with us as we grow and acquire.

Conga CPQ is flexible in the price setup. We achieve a lot of customized pricing setups using CPQ. Usage flowing into billing works well also. The Conga cart is a huge painpoint for us. We bill each route and trip we run individually so we have a very large amount of manual, complex cart configuration.

Incentivized

• The Cobblestone reps are great to work with.
• Cobblestone is easy to use and setup. Our users caught on quick.
• CobbleStone has a nice user-interface.
• CobbleStone's mobile app is a plus.
• Cobblestone integrates with a lot of other systems we use.

• 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

• They are great to work with.

• 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• In my opinion, the configuration methods of Conga CPQ are outdated and error-prone.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.

Incentivized

Cobblestone has been great for us. I expect that we will work with them for many years.

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

Incentivized

We were please to see the fast user adoption with Cobblestone. We used their training services and were pleased with the delivery. The system also includes helpful videos and step-by-step guide. Cobblestone has out of the box dashboards that we used and tweaked to meet role-specific needs. The user interface is easy to understand.

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

Cobblestone's support is responsive and reliable. We use their self-help content and their standard support.

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.

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

CobbleStone is the easiest contract management system to use. The setup took less time than expected and was under budget. The system flexibility was another selling point for us. The other systems seemed OK for one type of contract but didn't seem to support the variety of contracts that we have. It has been great for third-party contracts as well as authoring our contracts from templates and clause libraries.

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.

• Easier contract request process
• Faster legal reviews
• Simpler workflow and approval processes
• Improved contract compliance
• Easier contract authoring and negotiations
• Faster contract signatures
• More secure contract repository with user permissions
• Better contract analytics

• 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.