Likelihood to Recommend I think CPQ had worked so well for our company because of the widespread nature of our associates and tracking orders that were being placed in multiple time zones. My team specifically needed a way of analyzing these orders to track our progress in real time and sort out any supply orders before they became an issue. If you are in a centralized location with a smaller team then this may not yield much use to you.
Read full review What I like best is the ease of use to be able to track all opportunities and quotes in my daily sales tracker I also like the fact that you can reorganize the view for your opportunities. For instance, it is very similar to a spreadsheet where you can filter them by date, dollar amount, name, and several other ways. I found this to be less appropriate when we have to do multiple roles while assigning one task to multiple users. Column resizing within the Quote Line Editor is not supported in the
Salesforce mobile app.
Read full review Pros Leveraged automation to minimize headcount costs despite 10% year-over-year business growth, and enabled staff to focus on more strategic tasks. Established a flexible CPQ system that scales on demand to easily accommodate the company’s multiple global locations. Improved customer relations by reducing configuration time and allowing sales more time to meet with customers and close orders. Read full review Salesforce CPQ easily maps to standard and custom fields within the opportunity in SFDC, allowing you to avoid time spent duplicating effort or copying and pasting deal criteria. Salesforce CPQ connects directly to pre-determined price book, making it very easy to provide a proposal based on standard cost and/or add discounts to standard cost and reflect those reductions on the order form as appropriate. Salesforce CPQ provides the ability for administrators to configure workflows for approval based on certain discount %'s on the standard cost, offering a quick and easy way to route automatically through the organization for approval. Read full review Cons Significant setup time, cost, and maintenance. We have to use an implementation partner Does not always play well with other software, even Oracle software. While this is improved and being further improved, that it was a third party acquisition means things sometimes require a little extra care Additional setup documentation and first walkthroughs would be helpful, especially if it was all in one place Read full review Our Salesforce is very messy, which tells me it's not super easy to clean up. I always have a really hard time removing a contacts from an account - it seems like you can't simply remove the relationship so we have lots of people named DO NOT CONTACT or things of that nature. Sometimes when saving it doesn't seem like things actually save. Read full review Likelihood to Renew So far it is all good with BigMachines, looking for new features since Oracle acquisition has created a lot of expectations. We have outlined our limitations (out of box functionality) in our periodic customer successor advice meetings for a while, hope we get a resolution soon. Also, the BigMachines user license fee has increased a lot in the last three years.
Read full review The company is very easy to work with and is growing by leaps and bounds. We do not anticipate switching vendors anytime in the near future
Read full review Usability The software UI can be as complex or as simple as you need it to be (depending on the business). It does require training others on quote configuration and the order in which to build out order positions prior to configuring a quote. Once users are trained;however, it is fairly straight-forward. The UI is still more static than other new wizard/drag-and-drop models, but it get's the job done
Read full review After the initial set up, end users who are not the most tech savy are generally finding it easy to navigate
Read full review Reliability and Availability Other than one day two years ago and an hour or two a few times since then due to data center outages, it has been very reliable
Read full review Performance It depends upon the day however there are so many failure points with online services, including our internet service, that this is probably closer to 9 with the latest version
Read full review Support Rating Some specific support personal was good and fixed some problems fast using proper solutions. But when one of them went to sleep when we had critical issues and they do unreported commits to our production environment which caused issues and they were hiding it?? you can not give more than a two (maybe even that is too much). They also failed to add a feature for us which also bring the grade down.
Read full review There have been some issues with multi-year pricing of certain products and services which we have been assured will be resolved but I guess are still underway, the support team apart from this has not been needed much and in the rare scenarios, it has been needed the resolutions of conflicts has been prompt and quick, so the overall support would have my high regards for being so helpful and customer-oriented so as to assure good performance of their toolset and customer satisfaction.
Read full review In-Person Training They have pretty good training. Our business analysts have been able to go to entry and advanced level training. They have a train the trainer model. Our business analyst attended training, then trained the rest of our staff.
Read full review Implementation Rating It was a much more technical implementation than we thought. It involved much more code. Future releases have made and will make administering the tool easier. EDL consulting had one good developer, but when he was moved off, they were horrible to work with. The BMI sales team does a “BOA” or a “Business Operation Assessment” which is extremely valuable, not only for them to scope an implementation and get more reach within the organization, but it is also a documentation of business process that most organizations don’t have. It highlights inefficiencies and allows for correction during implementation. Having a dedicated team (in-house) for implementation is key
Read full review Alternatives Considered Oracle engagement is ahead. They are active in the development of the tool and provide great support after implementation. They also listen to their customers and offer opportunities to feedback and provide input through activities like the customer advisory board forum.
Read full review There is no comparison to a fully functional instance of CPQ. Nothing comes close due to the amount of customization and ease of use that CPQ offers once it's fully built out. Other solutions may be easier to build or administer, but for the users and business needs, CPQ is the best solution possible.
Read full review Return on Investment Increased Sales Rep efficiency. Being able to create multiple quotes ACCURATELY and quickly was a game changer. Large implementation time. It's a little difficult to fit BMI into a SCRUM style build, with multiple working models and prototypes of all 3 simultaneously. A larger fee for licensing and implementation cost. ROI wouldn't be realized in the first year. Read full review Salesforce CPQ has helped a lot with overall visibility to the quote to order process. Reps have more insight into the business and the business has more insight into Sales Rep interactions. This makes troubleshooting issues much easier. Our reporting capabilities have improved immensely. The ability to easily create fields allows you to capture new data points very easily. Communication in Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce, in general, is a big improvement for our business. The ability to have a chatter feed on any object is very helpful. This can also be used for feed tracking to give some basic change management controls/history. Read full review ScreenShots Salesforce CPQ Screenshots