Conga CPQ

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:

1. Substantially reduced cycle times to create complex quotes, proposals and orders
2. Reduced quoting errors and rework caused by errors
3. Ensured discounts and pricing are accurate based on standard pricing rules
4. Ensured discounts and pricing were approved, prior to providing the quote to the customer
5. In conjunction with our adoption of eSignature, reduced returns due to speculative ordering

• Speed. At some points (especially quarter end) when a huge number of reps were using the tool, we would suffer a heavy lag that would time-out operations most of the times.
• Mobile app. If there's one, we never used it. Not sure if it's our own company policy in regards to apps, or if there's none actually. If there's none, it would be good to have one.

EverString is a SaaS platform that helps B2B organizations identify and engage with their ideal customers by providing Predictive Demand Generation, Insights, Scoring and Segmentation. We have some typical SaaS characteristics—subscription sales model, a small number of products at first glance but a tiered structure, meaning selling is a lot more complicated than it seems, and a business that is growing and evolving fast. We had common problems in our quoting process - a disconnect between our CRM data and what was put in front of our customers. [They were] simple errors that should never happen. Additionally, as we grew we needed to relieve the burden to Finance and Legal.

We went with Apttus for two simple reasons: they were fantastic to work with and they could solve our problems. The sales process was incredibly smooth—just a great team overall. The CPQ does exactly what we wanted by creating consistency in our sales process, something we needed to scale. CPQ forces you to look critically at your sales process, but their team of experts helped us achieve that in a thoughtful way. You don’t want to just automate what you already do… you have to think about doing it better, the Apttus team really helped us with that. Great experience overall, would definitely recommend them.

EverString is a predictive marketing platform and we’ve been growing fast in the last few years. Sales, sales team, and our solution suite have all grown rapidly. We needed repeatability and consistency in our sales process—like any business growing rapidly and needing to scale. We wanted to get a CPQ in early in our growth to solve for these problems and help us scale easier. We choose Apttus because they could give us exactly what we needed and have been great partners to our business.

The system has been easy to use and the sales team adopted it quickly. We wanted to think through as many scenarios as possible in terms of what our future state and needs might be. Apttus helped us through this process—that’s critical. Apttus has been a partner, not a vendor, which is what you need for CPQ. Our goal was to future proof our organization, and we can see the success there in our growth.

Before Apttus, we used a manual process to configure products and calculate pricing while providing quotes to customers. This process was not consistent, it was very cumbersome, complex, high-maintenance, and error prone. We also did not have the ability to systematically track the progression of the quote through negotiations with the customer and analyze the impact of negotiations on the final outcome.

With Apttus CPQ, we were able streamline and optimize the product configuration, pricing and proposal creation and management process. We also seamlessly integrated this with our existing sales and contract generation processes. Our sales team now has the ability to configure product offers in a consistent manner with improved efficiency, and are able to track and improve related sales metrics.