Conga Advantage CPQ vs. Salestools.io (discontinued) vs. SMARTe Data Platform

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

Incentivized

Salestools.io works perfectly for companies using a CRM or whatever other CRM software involving customer data. Also, Salestools.io is perfect to deal with the creation of an outreach campaign in an automatic way. You won't need to do follow-up yourself. However, it needs some training to work with it perfectly. In general is a great outbound sales tool.

Incentivized

1. SMARTe was purchased to serve three purposes. To to act as a secondary source of enrichment to another product. Our lead qualification processes rely on accurate data being populated and enriched. SMARTe boosts our enrichment rate by 20% in some areas vs our other supplier. We performed this analysis during renewal which confirmed their complimentary functionality in this area. From this point of view it runs silently in the background without maintenance making it perfect for our needs.
2. The ability to correctly classify free Text job titles into segmentable values. Most enrichment platforms will provide values with a job title they provide which is ok, but SMARTe will categorise any title we send regardless of if they match the contact. This has a large impact to how we can successfully make use of our data from segmentation to Lead Scoring.
3. New contacts - we have two options here, download straight from their humungous dataset using the filters provided (including being able to upload accounts to match). Or, use their bespoke service which ranges from desk based research to GDPR compliant phone qualifies contacts. One area that could improve is the integration with HubSpot. A robust API means we have managed to integrate, but Native integration would be preferred.

• 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

• Generating new opportunities
• Automating our Sales process
• Accurate and up to date data!

• Unlocking Phone Number from a contact
• Unlocking Email from a contact
• Tracking the relevant role within the company
• Understanding companies organization

Incentivized

• 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

• You can't have custom fields, so forget about having customized emails other than the basic Name, Title, Company.
• Salestools is plenty of super cool features, all (at least all the ones we used) are buggy and unusable in the end.
• Can't have blacklisted addresses and domains.
• Support will take days to respond, especially if you report a bug (it seems they will work extra hard to fix the bug, and then tell you that it didn't exist in the first place)
• Virtually every other feature has bugs.

• UI could be better.
• Automate the product buying experience.

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

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.

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.

We have been trying KLENTY mainly, however, the Prospector of Salestools.io is quite superior. For both cases, the preparation of campaigns are not as easy as it sounds, but as soon as you do the first, it will be easier for your business. Salestools.io has a better and easier interface and the webpage is superb. If you are looking just for follow-up, PLENTLY with doing, but if you need to find a prospect, Salestools.io is the service you need.

Incentivized

We use them to compliment each other, there are areas that Clearbit provides matches that SMARTe does not and visa versa. This applies at both a contact and an account level. Where SMARTe really stands out (for me) is the ability to classify any provided Job Title. This really has dramatic impact to our processes. Clearbit does have a native integration that offers data refresh.

• 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.

• ROI has been very high!
• Time saved
• Predictable pipeline, meaning i know what we can achieve next month!

• More contacts available
• Increased response rate thanks to more way to reach out
• Increased conversion rate

Incentivized