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Awesome tool, but overkill for us.
October 15, 2012

Awesome tool, but overkill for us.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review

Overall Satisfaction

  • 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.
The business is not seeing the value and we are not ready to use the features.

We will likely switch back to native Salesforce.com and customize it to meet our needs or find a smaller vendor.
We are having some internal adoption issues. The complaints are less about software, and more about process.

Product Usage

75 - About to upgrade to 100 – sales, inside and SEs
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.

Evaluation and Selection

Native functionality in Salesforce.com.

Implementation

They gave us links to download into a sandbox, we had to fill in excel spreadsheets that you have to import, and we were guided by them as to what each object meant.

In the beginning, our implementation contact needed to be replaced, but ultimately the implementation team who helped us was very responsive and nice.

Key lessons – ask more questions up front before purchase about administration and get more detailed steps on what it really was going to take. Allow them to do as much of the heavy lifting as possible – I offered myself up more than necessary.
  • Implemented in-house

Training

  • Online training
We attended 5 hours worth of webinars early on.

We had to understand how objects worked to figure out how to structure our data.

I would have liked more in-depth training but it would have been an additional cost.

Configuration

We haven’t changed the software as much as the workflow triggers that push data.

We have created own fields.

Support

Tier1/tier 2 support can only handle native functionality. Customizations have to be escalated to developers which aren’t included in the support program.

I go ahead and copy the people I directly worked with on implementation for assistance. I would rate them an 8 for support assistance.

Usability

From a user perspective, though it depends on how it's implemented.

Reliability

As a native Salesforce.com app, it's up as long as Salesforce.com is running.

Integration

  • Salesforce.com.
Native integration.
  • Nothing planned.

Vendor Relationship

As expressed earlier, what we were demo’d was different from how the product actually works. We were demonstrated a smooth easy workflow. In order to do this takes a lot of implementation and customization.
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.