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
Ignition
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Ignition is a platform for professional services that automates and optimizes proposals, client agreements, billing and payment collection to put an end to late payments, unbilled work and mundane repetitive admin.
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
Ignition (initially called Practice Ignition) performs quite well at proposal building, contract development, tracking and invoicing, payment and collections. The only issues where I see Ignition not being a good fit is in smaller firms that require a more feature rich plan. A perfect example is a solo firm has a limited number of proposals they can activate, and would have to spend extra for additional features like multiple e-signatures.
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In my opinion, the configuration methods of Conga CPQ are outdated and error-prone.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.
The charge back process is messy and not transparent enough. When there is a charge back, PI deducts the amount from other payments settling on the same day, and does not provide a break down of the amounts. This makes it impossible to track without getting help from support.
PI should send email alerts monthly (or at some interval determined by user) for expiring engagements.
PI should allow the client to make service selections -- we should be able to offer 2 or 3 options under a service offering, and the client chooses and sees the impact on monthly/annual pricing.
PI should allow for more than 2 templates (Business and Individual).
PI should integrate with Jet Pack Workflow to automate the creation of new jobs once a proposal is approved.
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
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.
The Ignition product is quite usable for the average user. The app has preloaded templates that can get even new-hires to navigate the software and set up proposals. The only area where I see the Ignition product lacking is the additional fees smaller firms may have to pay to get the full feature advantages of the product.
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
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.
