PandaDoc headquartered in San Francisco offers their eponymous electronic signature platform for sales teams, containing sales proposal automation and CPQ (configure, price, quote) features, and integration with CRMs.
$35
per month per seat
PROS Smart CPQ
Score 8.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
PROS Smart CPQ automates and simplifies the configuration, pricing and quoting process for a sales team, empowering them to instantly create accurate, personalized solutions for each customer. The vendor says what makes Smart CPQ different is the unique combination of dynamic pricing science with configuration and quoting capabilities. This solution enables sales teams to instantly provide tailored solutions with winning prices to deliver an exceptional buying experience for each…
$60
per month per user
Pricing
PandaDoc
PROS Smart CPQ
Editions & Modules
Starter
$35
per month per seat
Business
$65
per month per seat
Enterprise
Contact Sales
Essentials
$60
per month per user
Advantage
$75
per month per user
Ultimate
Contact Sales
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
PandaDoc
PROS Smart CPQ
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
Required
Additional Details
PandaDoc offers a free eSign plan and 3 paid packages for eSigning and document automation. All plans include unlimited documents and eSignatures. Evaluations start with a free 14-day trial. Up to a 46% discount for annual pricing.
Best suited for after demonstrations when requested by the prospect when they are looking for pricing with T&C. The data room is also great that acts like a drop box for opportunities and their contacts. Helps share pertinent information with others in the organization.
Is my IT team ready to handle the challenges with data integration ? Are all the features offered by my current quoting tool being offered by Cameleon? Do I need a SaaS based quoting tool? Would it be easy and intuitive for my sales team (who,quite frankly, worship MS Excel) to use Cameleon ? Do I need a real-time/near-real-time quoting tool or would delays in data refreshes be acceptable
Sometimes the fillable fields don't automatically map properly and you have to manually adjust.
Plan tiers and pricing recently changed, so now we get less value and less features (limited templates, no more pricing tables or invoicing/connected payment) for the same price, which is pricy for a small business.
Easier, integrated invoicing as an included feature (so we don't have to use a different software for invoicing/payment collection) would be ideal. You have to upgrade to the Business Plan for this.
Integration with other onsite systems such as Oracle databases require the expertise of knowledgeable developers. Manual upload of flat files are always an option , but not necessarily the cleanest.
Better Cameleon CPQ Designer UI would go a long way. Currently UI is a stark contrast to the intuitive UI of SalesForce.com or similar SaaS based tools. Not too much to ask for , considering the fact that we work in the era of Facebook and Twitter.
Real time data availability is a long way to go for Cameleon CPQ. Updates to data pushed over as batches to Cameleon are reflected at Salesforce.com only after a 'versioning' process is launched. Current recommended frequency for this process is once a day (an upgrade to make it twice a day is in the works).
The reason I gave it a rating of 7 is because it's probable, but not for sure. This is because there are a few little things we don't love about pandadoc. Mostly that there is not conditional logic such as: they must either fill this field out OR this one. Also it's a little pricey. But we'll probably stay because it's good enough and a pain to switch to something new
There are a few features that we expected from the tool but Cameleon's CPQ has fallen short on these. Possible enhancements and product fixes should be made as soon as possible to change the perspective. Unexpected bugs in the tool have come up during the roll-out that has caught the implementation team off-guard
Once you get the hang of it, it's very easy to use. There can be a slightly steep learning curve to get fully in on the system. The new editor v2 has really improved usability and allows us to collaborate on documents simultaneously. Once the templates and library items are set up, a new document, whether it be a sales or HR document, takes very little time to complete.
The documents load quickly for the most part but sometimes if there are larger documents with a high number of variables it could take a bit longer to get the document to show up. Most of the time the document comes on the screen relatively quickly allowing for quick access to documents to be edited and sent out.
Recently I could not upload a pdf to a contract - support was very responsive and easy to work with. They got back to me the next day with an apparent fix - however when I opened the document nothing had changed. I then could not respond to the rep who was helping me because it was a "no-reply address", the problem still has not been solved and we had to make alternate arrangements to get this to the client. Never had it happen before and was only with this one contract.
We used Dropbox back when it was still HelloSign. At the time, new templates were very hard to create. We had to upload a PDF and then add the fields from there. With PandaDoc, we are able to drag and drop the text, images, logos, and fields we need easily. This has saved our team an immense amount of time.
A salesforce.com -esque approach to CRM has a whole gamut of advantages. Cameleon CPQ complements this approach.
Expect down times , feature problems or general disagreement about Cameleon's capabilities initially. This is true for adopting any new tool or technology. Hold on and it will tide over.
As a person who has used Cameleon purely as a developer standpoint , I do not have anything more to add-on.
