Don't Buy Apttus, The ROI is negative.
August 24, 2018
Don't Buy Apttus, The ROI is negative.
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Apttus Configure Price Quote
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.
- 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.