Conga CPQ improvements
I manage a team who supports Conga CPQ for clients, it is used by our client for adding products to the cart and driving overall CPQ …
Starting at $35 per month per user
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What is Conga CPQ?
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…
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Popular Features
- Configuration options (32)8.686%
- Pricing rules (31)7.777%
- Product configuration (32)7.171%
- Price adjustment (31)6.969%
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Entry-level set up fee?
- Setup fee optional
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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Starting price (does not include set up fee)
- $35 per month per user
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What is Conga CPQ?
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 capabilities that can be embedded into any eCommerce, Direct Sales, and Partner Portal, the software helps to streamline configuration and pricing across the revenue lifecycle, and provide the flexibility to add CPQ capabilities to existing revenue operations at a pace that supports business needs.
Conga CPQ Features
CPQ Features
- Supported: Quote sharing/sending
- Supported: Credit approvals
- Supported: E-signature
- Supported: Product configuration
- Supported: Configuration options
- Supported: Pricing rules
- Supported: Price adjustment
- Supported: Purchase history and open contracts
- Supported: Guided selling/Sales portal
- Supported: Self-service CPQ
- Supported: CPQ reporting & analytics
- Supported: Proposals
- Supported: Excel integration
- Supported: CPQ-CRM integration
- Supported: Attachments to quotes
- Supported: Renewal management
- Supported: Order capturing
Additional Features
- Supported: Unlimited Attribute-based configuration
- Supported: Discounting and deal scoring
- Supported: Subscription and renewal opportunity management
- Supported: Multi-channel selling
- Supported: Quote collaboration and versioning
Conga CPQ Screenshots
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Conga CPQ Integrations
Conga CPQ Competitors
Conga CPQ Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android |
| Supported Countries | Global |
| Supported Languages | German, English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese (Simplified) |
Frequently Asked Questions
Conga CPQ starts at $35.
Reviewers rate Attachments to quotes highest, with a score of 9.3.
The most common users of Conga CPQ are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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(84)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-5 of 5)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
January 09, 2020
Apttus CPQ - When you need Complex Rules Modeled Easily
The Apttus Configure Price Quote (CPQ) tool is being used by our Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory sales organization. This includes a variety of different sales teams with different sales processes and pricing models. The spectrum ranges from SaaS implementations with 12-18 month sales cycles, negotiation of annual renewals of existing contracts for access to online content (3-6 months prior to renewal date), to transactional book sales occurring same day.
The CPQ tool helps sales reps to:
- Assemble the appropriate product variations and combinations for qualifying opportunities
- Conduct needs assessment exercises
- Identify the appropriate product combinations for customers
- Ensure that they arrive at suitable price for specific product mixes or bundles
- Ensure that the details concerning initial estimates and final quotes are represented accurately
The CPQ tool also:
- Substantially reduced cycle times to create complex quotes, proposals and orders
- Reduced quoting errors and rework caused by errors
- Ensured discounts and pricing are accurate based on standard pricing rules
- Ensured discounts and pricing were approved, prior to providing the quote to the customer
- In conjunction with our adoption of eSignature, reduced returns due to speculative ordering
- Apttus CPQ handles complex pricing rules with ease. We have tiered pricing, user based pricing, and quantity pricing discounts. Apttus CPQ allows us to easily provide correct pricing based on attributes of the sales rep, the customer and the product.
- Apttus CPQ administration is easy compared to similar products. As a product available on the Force.com platform, we were able to cross train our Salesforce administrators and take on the additional administrative overhead without significantly increasing our sales operations team size.
- Apttus CPQ is flexible. We are able to rapidly test and deploy new pricing models and offers using the Apttus model.
- Apttus has not completely transitioned from a product suite to a product platform vendor. Upgrades of certain products can have interoperability issues with other products in the Apttus stack. Our pain point here was attempting to use Apttus Xauthor for Excel to get around product line limitations in the Apttus CPQ shopping cart. The ultimate resolution was for us to upgrade and leverage the latest version of CPQ, where pricing callback limitations were addressed by client side processing, rather than the hybrid Xauthor process we tried to use.
- Upgrades in general require significant testing to ensure no unanticipated issues occur. We have a complete Salesforce sandbox dedicated to providing an environment for testing any modifications or upgrades.
- Apttus support model almost requires you to purchase premium support. Given the CPQ system is complex, the level of skilled support available through basic support require you to escalate several times before getting to a resource that can address your issue.
100%
10.0
- We purchased Apttus CPQ as an infrastructure requirement. As such we did not calculate an ROI value.
- Positive impact 1: Improved quote accuracy and quote approval process, thus reducing sales rep time to finalize a quote.
- Positive impact 2: Improved compliance with required disclosures of appropriate terms for subscriptions from 50% to 98%, thus reducing rework to change contract terms.
- Positive impact 3: Requiring eSignature for every quote resulted in an unanticipated reduction in speculative ordering. The reduction in overall orders was offset by a reduction in returns - resulting in a net increase of 2% to recognized revenue.
- Positive impact 4: Shifted ratio of auto renewing subscriptions from 40/60 (auto renew vs annual invitation to subscribe) to 60/40.
We evaluated Configure Price Quote in 2015. At that time we evaluated Steel Brick & determined it could not easily handle our complex pricing rules. We also evaluated Big Machines and determined it was too much of a tool kit, requiring significantly more ongoing administrative support.
Apttus CPQ provide a clean solution with capabilities to address our complex pricing rules with the ability to leverage our existing Salesforce administrator resources to support it.
Apttus CPQ provide a clean solution with capabilities to address our complex pricing rules with the ability to leverage our existing Salesforce administrator resources to support it.
165
Sales Representatives and Sales Managers: inside and outside sales teams, both hunters and account managers.
4
2 Certified Apttus CPQ Administrators/Salesforce Advanced Administrators + 2 Salesforce Administrators.
Apttus CPQ on the force.com platform can be supported by cross-training existing Salesforce Administrators. Effectively, this cost us 0.5 additional FTE in our support organization, which was much lower than comparable solutions like Big Machines, that required 1.0 to 1.5 additional FTE.
Apttus CPQ on the force.com platform can be supported by cross-training existing Salesforce Administrators. Effectively, this cost us 0.5 additional FTE in our support organization, which was much lower than comparable solutions like Big Machines, that required 1.0 to 1.5 additional FTE.
- Complex product pricing rules - dependent on attributes of the user (sales rep), customer, sale type, and product. Apttus provides the ability to have multiple pricing rules separated by different price lists, and assign those price lists based on attributes of the user, customer and sale type.
- Ability to adjust line level pricing or section pricing based on differing rules: surcharge or discount amount or percentage, application of promotion code.
- Strong native integration to eSignature solutions such as DocuSign or Adobe.
- Ability to manage basic quote terms & conditions using Xauthor for Word: we have 21 separate types of standard terms, depending on the market segment (academic, federal government, corporate, etcetera), and type of sale (various flavors of subscription, standing order, one off sale, service sale, etcetera). These are all managed through a single template which auto generates the correct terms based on system information.
- We are leveraging Apptus Machine Intelligence and Apttus CPQ to provide product family sale recommendations to our sales representatives. The Salesforce Account page has a button which appears when recommendations are available for a specific sales rep. This references the Asset Lines of the Apttus CPQ, and selection of products results in automatic creation of an Opportunity and Quote (with appropriate pricing) in the CPQ solution.
- We are extending Apttus CPQ and Apttus Machine Intelligence to integrate with Salesforce Analytics to produce a whitespace analysis tool which allows the reps to create target Opportunities as part of overall account and territory planning.
- We are utilizing Apttus Max for intelligent Agent/process automation. We intend to integrate Max within Apttus CPQ to streamline the quote creation and order creation process.
August 24, 2018
Don't Buy Apttus, The ROI is negative.
Apttus was brought in to use globally for all of Sales in generating quotes and contracts (the two are different in this case) to be sent and signed by customers. It is being used across Sales globally. The business problem it was supposed to address is to help our sales teams produce quotes faster, in the correct format, and be able to send them on the fly through Apttus/Salesforce to the customer to be reviewed.
- 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 configuration of this product in terms of setting it up for users, requires a developer. The sales process tells you that it is built on the Force.com platform and an admin can configure it, however, this is not true. It required Visual Force and APEX configuration to make it work for the users.
- Upgrading to the next version of the product also requires developers involved. It is not a simply managed package to be downloaded and updated, it requires post-upgrade development to return it to users for testing.
- The Contract management module is not very robust. It is essentially a separate object that just houses the physical document and you can put "Send Email" buttons and apply an approval process to it, however it is not a contract management tool in the sense of managing document versioning and redlining. Negotiations just occur in word like they normally do.
- Misleading Template builder "included." To get templates, and contracts you need to buy the add-in to those modules which you've already purchased called "X-Author." The plug-in allows you to edit templates and manage some redlines, but it's cost prohibitive as it costs as much as a user license to the product itself.
- Expensive. When we compared a license of this product vs the license to Salesforce itself, Apttus, with standard modules, costs double the price of a normal Salesforce seat license.
14%
1.4
- It cost the company almost $1million in 3 years of licensing. It then cost us the business to implement it in 2.5 years over $5 million dollars internally with resourcing involved to roll out globally. There was no ROI, that was just to implement it as the business continues to not adopt the product.
- The adoption level of the product is ~25% of the business actually using the product.
- Business areas ended up hiring and spending something near $150k/year in human resources to use the system for the sales team because of the low adoption.
- Salesforce CPQ (formerly SteelBrick) and Oracle CPQ Cloud (BigMachines)
Oracle CPQ Cloud is similar in setup needs (heavy development) to Apttus. However, they come at you with that upfront and attempt to put your business in the fast lane on how to get using their product with guidance.
Salesforce CPQ is by far the superior product to the two, as it is now essentially native to Salesforce and is configurable by an admin.
Salesforce CPQ is by far the superior product to the two, as it is now essentially native to Salesforce and is configurable by an admin.
September 14, 2016
Apttus is a solid CPQ platform that will grow with its customers
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Apttus is being used to generate customer proposals for our direct customers in North America. We anticipate having Apttus CPQ rolled out to EMEA and APAC by the end of 2016. The solution is fully integrated with our SFDC sales processes. Our customer proposals include the customization of our product, pricing that may be freely negotiated or based on a contract, up to 4 levels of approval and the presentation of the quote to the end customer.
- Fully integrated with Salesforce.com. Allows for the seamless update of all objects on the SFDC platform. As primary quotes are updated, so to are the opportunities.
- Supports the quoting of product that requires customization that results in a dynamic cost, MSRP and customer price.
- Significant amount of R&D is being invested in to the platform. Many of the items on our wish list have already been incorporated as a standard feature or on the near term roadmap.
- As a SAAS solution with a large amount of R&D being invested, there is functionality that is becoming standard in the platform that previously would have required some customer customization. The incorporation of the standard functionality will require regression testing and migration off of custom code. In the long term this is a positive, but in the short term does create some overhead with testing.
80%
8.0
- Apttus has reduced the cycle time between the presentation of the quote to a customer and receiving acceptance of that quote from the customer.
- Apttus allows us to fully integrate accepted orders with our backend ERP resulting in the reduction of labor associated with the rekeying of accepted orders
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Apttus CPQ is being used by our customer and engineering organization to configure custom products. The CPQ accelerates the time to generate the bill of material. It is an engineering process that used to take days or even weeks, but with CPQ, it takes only minutes.
- Ability to manage large quantities of validation rules necessary for complex product builds.
- No product addresses a company's requirement right out of the box, but Apttus CPQ is built on the Salesforce.com platform which is a distinct advantage for us. It allows us to build functional extensions, and customize the application to our specific usage.
- Service and support is the key for any product, and Apttus has always made efforts to support their products with continual improvements.
- The GUI design of Apttus is configurable but prescriptive. If you want a very specific look and feel, it will take some effort to do so. There have been some modern design updates recently using AngularJS. Check it out to see if it works for you.
92%
9.2
- 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.
At the time of selection, we assessed other configuration tools to include Selectica and Big Machine. We decided on Apttus because of it configuration flexibility and the fact that it was built on the Salesforce.com platform. That allowed us to configure and customize for our specific use case. It also gave us other capabilities such as integration to the CRM and ability to generate reports and dashboards.
December 29, 2015
Apttus CPQ - force.com native and complex (pro and con)
Our North American and UK based sales teams use Apttus for all quotes (new business, add-on sales, renewals). We use it to manage pricing, quoting, and assets. We use X-Author for Word for our quote/order form. We have about 30,000 active price points, 400K active assets, and a few hundred inclusion rules.
- Force.com native is very important to us - for reporting, administration, integration, and uptime.
- 70% of our business is back to base, so having customer owned assets fall under the same inclusion rules as items in the cart is critical.
- Variable bundles allow us to build fewer bundles.
- Change management: Pricing changes are difficult to deploy, no regression testing for existing configurations.
- Administrator usability: Very easy to create problems with price list items firing unintentionally which leads to price list item sprawl. No holistic testing tools to make sure you've set up pricing / rules the way you intended.
- X-Author has limited capabilities to include related objects - our Quote header object has several hundred fields that serve no purpose but to make form generation more stable / faster.
81%
8.1
- Positive: all opportunity values / forecast values come from actual quotes, improving accuracy.
- Positive: automated approval and e-signature drive much faster time to close (hours vs. days).
- Negative: Complex pricing without adequate testing leads to errors, usability issues, and incorrect quotes.
- CallidusCloud CPQ and BigMachines
Apttus had the best SFDC integration (force.com native) which was by far the biggest point. It also had key showcase customers and ample rules / pricing features for our use cases. Asset - based inclusion rules was a big positive. We were concerned with the business models of the competitors (this was pre-Oracle acquisition of BM).
Sell-side contracts
450
Apttus is our full quote-to-order system for new sales, cross- and up-sells, and renewals. It is the database of record for our pricing and our customer purchased assets. We built our renewal process in SFDC, automating the creation of renewal opportunities from the Apptus assets. Finance teams use the asset and quote data to provision.
2
IT support includes support for sales ops and pricing managers. Finance support includes pricing setup, inclusion rule setup, and quoting support. Sales Operations supports the sales team directly and owns reporting / forecasting.
- Quoting: the core value prop of Apttus is the ability to manage and automate the quoting process from within SFDC. Our quotes are now faster, more accurate, and visible -- and actively drive the forecast process.
- X-Author for Word: Our quote/order forms are somewhat complex and varied, X Author enables us to give our reps the ability to create customer-ready forms.
- Renewals automation: by customizing the Apttus assets we can drive a fully automated renewals process with full 180 day pipeline visibility
- Selling based on installed products: both recommendation engines and inclusion rules can fire based not just on the cart but also on what the customer has already purchased
- Vendor implemented
- Implemented in-house
Yes
We took a subset of our products and customer base as an initial 'phase I'. About a year later we went live with most of the rest of our products and customers. This was very key, as the first implementation was extremely rocky.
Change management was a major issue with the implementation
Apttus was badly unprepared to take us through this process. Expect to manage change on your own. It is a big step for most sales organizations to move from spreadsheets to a relatively complex and rigid UI, which can't be over-managed. We also had major problems converting existing active quotes, we would have been better off finding ways to create a cleaner go-forward catalog and using that in the old CRM to enable a clean cut-over to a new catalog. Again, Apttus was very unprepared to help us through this process.
- Immature PS team: We went through a couple analysts before we decided to implement it by ourselves and bring our SI up to speed. They didn't document our configs, they were confused about how to use their own product to achieve our desired results, and they made very poor design decisions that took us months to un-do
- No support or vision for Agile: We strongly believe that using an iterative approach (take a couple scenarios all the way through the process) would have saved us thousands of hours and resulted in a better product
- Very poor testing and deployment planning: There is no vision or tool for regression testing or overall health checks. It is impossible to know if you are creating a problem. Most error codes are vague. Many configs were firing without leaving any log file or trace that they had affected the price. Migrating Apttus configurations from sandbox to production is very difficult.
- Very poor release management by Apttus: We had to release on an earlier major release than we were demo'ed because the demo UI wasn't in GA 6 months later when we needed to go live. Many patches failed, broke existing configs, or had insufficient test coverage.