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…
$35
per month per user
D&B Hoovers
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
D&B Hoovers delivers sales intelligence data for millions of companies globally.
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
Prospecting corporate accounts near a hotel location. Our sales manager wants to generate a list of companies within a 5 mile radius that may need regular lodging for employees or contractors. D&B Hoovers will allow her to filer by geography, industry, company size and employee count. Then she can view detailed company profiles and contact decision-makers.
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.
The D&B Hoovers platform enables our team to customize, giving us the ability to fine-tune our searches
D&B Hoovers integrates very well Salesforce, our CRM system, streamlining the workflows of sales teams and ensuring the verified transfer of data between platforms
D&B Hoovers provides highly accurate and reliable business data
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In my opinion, the configuration methods of Conga CPQ are outdated and error-prone.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 think maybe if they vetted the contacts that they're providing for those companies, it would be beneficial because I do use other avenues to vet the contacts because a lot of times I found that it is outdated information in D&B Hoovers, so that would be beneficial to us.
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
I use D&B Hoovers very frequently and could not do my job as efficiently without it. I think there is room for improvement, but it is effective enough that I feel as though I will continue renewing by subscription. I highly recommend D&B Hoovers and find it very accurate and easy to use.
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.
Whenever I had to use D&B hoovers, I never had a hard time with getting what I need. Additionally, when I show the tool to others, they tend to understand the platform quite quickly. The tool itself is very good and straightforward when I use it to help me put analyses together.
The platform is generally reliable and accessible when needed, with minimal application errors or unplanned outages. There may be occasional maintenance or minor disruptions, but these are usually communicated in advance and handled efficiently. Overall, it offers a high level of availability, ensuring that you can count on it for your daily operations.
While the platform generally functions well, with pages loading in a reasonable time and reports completing within a satisfactory timeframe, there is room for improvement. Performance can sometimes lag with more complex queries or during peak usage times. Additionally, when integrated with other software or systems, there can be occasional slowdowns. Overall, while it performs adequately, optimizing speed and integration efficiency could enhance the user experience.
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.
I think it could be better, easier and faster. Whenever I chat with someone it takes so long to get to an actual agent, and then when I finally get to one, they oftentimes don't have the answers for me or do not understand what I am asking, which is very frustrating.
The training sessions were well-structured and covered the key functionalities of the platform, making it easy to get up to speed. The trainers were knowledgeable and responsive to questions, which added value to the learning experience. However, a bit more in-depth coverage of advanced features and use cases would have made the training even more beneficial.
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
for our use case, the implementation was minimal and we did not need a lot of help. The D&B Hoovers platform is pretty intuitive and our account manager was ready for any questions that came up when we use the D&B Hoovers platform
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.
Finance Analytics provides a more thorough company credit report and is more in-depth than Hoovers. However, I use Hoovers for instances where I do not need that information because it allows unlimited queries, whereas you pay for a limited number of reports from Finance Analytics. Hoovers provides a better link between corporate family trees and finance analytics.
The pricing model is generally clear and competitive, but there could be more flexibility in terms of unit pricing or billing frequency to better accommodate varying needs. While the contract terms are straightforward, exploring more options or customizable plans might enhance the overall value.
D&B Hoovers is quite effective at adapting to the needs of different departments and locations, allowing for flexible deployment and integration across various parts of an organization. While it scales well and supports a broad range of users and functions, there might be some limitations depending on the size and complexity of the organization’s requirements. Overall, it provides a robust solution that can grow with your needs.4o mini
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.
D&B Hoovers allows me to make the most of my time when searching for companies within specific industries. Once I find a company and examine their profile, I can then generate a list of employees in the purchasing and engineering departments. The profiles for each listed employee contain cell phone, Email address and LinkedIn profile. This information helps me to bypass the companies front desk and get directly to the people I need to speak with.
By knowing the specific job title for the people that I am contacting and then being able to click on their LinkedIn link to learn a little about them before I make the call, I come across as a sales professional instead of an impersonal cold-caller.
In cases where I do need to go through a front desk receptionist whose primary mission is to screen out sales people, I find that three out of four times the receptionist will connect me to the specific employee because I know their name, department, and job title. The Intel provided by D&B Hoovers makes it possible for me to get to the people I need to speak with.
