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%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Entry-level set up fee?
- Setup fee optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://conga.com/pricing?utm_campaign=…
Offerings
- 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 15, 2018
Apttus - Comprehensive Business Automation Solution
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We recently signed a contract with Apttus to leverage their Contract Lifecycle Management application to better automate the way we generate, approve, deliver and track our contracts within our Salesforce.com environment. The Apttus team got to know our business and understand our challenges and became a trusted partner to our business. Their solution will help us eliminate many of the manual steps required to process our contracts; reduce the number of manual quality checks; enable us to better search and track contracts by specific terms and ultimately increase the speed at which we are able to push our contracts through our process.
- Understand business challenges.
- Provide a full suite of solutions for a wide range of business challenges.
- Provide executive sponsorship to eliminate obstacles to success.
- Ease of Implementation.
92%
9.2
- Improved process speed.
- Increased contract quality.
- Ability to search contracts by term or clause.
- Template Generators
Apttus is a much more comprehensive solution that any other partner we reviewed.
20
Procurement
2
1 Business Admin & a IT person
- Procurement Contract Management
- Eventually, Quoting
- Eventually, Customer Contract Management
- Ensure accurate pricing
- Avoid rogue discounting
- Properly configure solutions
- MAX - automated attendant
No
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Vendor Reputation
- Existing Relationship with the Vendor
- Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
I have used Apttus at two previous companies and always had a positive experience with strong business outcomes.
I'd interview more reference customers about the implementation experience as it was difficult at first, but eventually resolved itself smoothly with satisfactory results.
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.
October 24, 2012
Struggled with implementation. Needs IT involvement.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Document management and workflow have been a success. This was the main benefit we were looking for.
- It is not a very complicated application
- If you are working with a specific account on a specific design, there is a tie between the NDA and design i.e., a CRM view.
- The # of IT tickets is modest now that it’s up and running.
- It was a struggle to get implemented. The reasons may be more organizational than system based however.
- We were told, just sign us on and you’re going but we learned that doesn’t work. You cannot just hand-off small apps that will be owned by the business.
- The rep from Apptus glossed over a lot of the facts about how implementation needed to work, specifically, the role of business, IT. We didn’t have someone from IT driving the project. At our company, it’s considered a User Managed Application, whereby the business is responsible for it. Since however it’s on the Salesforce.com platform, it is IT managed. The fact that it’s on Salesforce.com, drives the need for IT involvement – that along with the nature of the level of integration required.
- From an IT perspective, we have one less custom solution to manage. The guy that wrote the custom solution it replaced is no longer here.
- We have a business process standardized, and a manageable workflow.
24
Couple of people in legal who administer, then people who request and approve. Mostly people who approve – divisions, finance.
0
Implementation took 20% of Salesforce.com developer’s time for a 2 week implementation.
There is very little on-going support unless you want to change business process.
- Contract management - right now just using for NDAs.
Homemade contract management stuff in .Net, accessible via SharePoint.
- Vendor implemented
- Self-taught
We had to do some configuration to handle our account structure – customization of Apex classes
- Salesforce.com
Native integration.
October 15, 2012
Awesome tool, but overkill for us.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- What it can do in the end is great.
- It gives a very robust shopping cart experience.
- It’s good if you are going to track minute stages in a process - then it’s awesome.
- The administration burden is very high. There are a lot of objects included and they link to each other.
- If all you are looking for is quoting, then it’s I feel that it’s overkill today.
- In hindsight, I would have hired a developer to customize Salesforce.com. A step up from the basic Salesforce.com functionality is what we really need.
- There were a couple of solution options in between customizing Salesforce.com and Apttus, but they weren’t able to do configurable bundles and handle our pricing.
- Frankly, our needs have simplified from our original search.
- You have all irons in one system. Previously, we were fragmented - we were on paper contracts, some in our ERP, others in PDFs on someone’s desktop. The importance of having all data in Salesforce.com in a standardized fashion has become blatant.
- Avoiding more custom system maintenance burden. We try to use out of the box as much as possible. When considering what you do customize, make sure there’s a good business reason for it.
75
About to upgrade to 100 – sales, inside and SEs
0
We had a Salesforce.com administrator and developer involved during implementation. It took weeks of their time.
Afterwards it depends on how often you change processes and products. We are not spending a lot of time today. We are constantly updating our approval process.
- We use the CPQ (Configure Price Quote) module as a quoting tool. It also has interactive shopping cart configurator. We use it for bundled products and to set it up to price by usage and cost per click.
- There is a very good document generator. You click a couple of buttons and can produce a proposal template with robust mail merge capabilities. It’s like a Microsoft Word merge, but much more robust.
- The CPQ module links to the contract module which we also use. Any information on a proposal, carries over to service order, MSA, NDA etc. There is also a clause library. The legal team can use the module to track the status of contracts in review and to see a funnel.
Native functionality in Salesforce.com.
- Implemented in-house
- Online training
We haven’t changed the software as much as the workflow triggers that push data.
We have created own fields.
No
- Salesforce.com.
Native integration.
- Nothing planned.
We did not have any conflict with the standard terms.
The only term we negotiated per license fee. We asked for discount based upon the fact we already had the contract module.