Salesforce CPQ is Great! - With a Few Recommendations for Improvement...
December 05, 2017
Salesforce CPQ is Great! - With a Few Recommendations for Improvement...
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce CPQ (formerly SteelBrick)
Salesforce CPQ is being used as the primary configurator and quote engine for the entire enterprise. We minimally use the pricing functionality. We switched over from Oracle Configurator a little under two years ago. We needed a tool that allowed us to build relatively complex bundle configurations without having to go through our PLM system for Sales BOM structure and have a system that can process a quote and push that data through all downstream documentation to fulfillment.
- Salesforce CPQ is great for being able to quickly and easily build product bundles in an intuitive and visually appealing way.
- The product catalog and ability to easily add fields to product records makes setting up products really simple and adds a lot of value to reporting within Salesforce.
- Basic product and configuration rules are very easy to understand and set up.
- More complex product and configuration rules seem overly complex. If any math is required in a rule, even simple quantity rules can very complicated.
- Quote templates while easy to customize are very simple in their layout. We'd like to be able to have more dynamic and visually appealing quote templates.
- Guided selling is lacking in very basic ways. You can't create questions with dependencies for "if this, then that" or an intuitive questionnaire or guided selling wizard.
- Salesforce CPQ has helped a lot with overall visibility to the quote to order process. Reps have more insight into the business and the business has more insight into Sales Rep interactions. This makes troubleshooting issues much easier.
- Our reporting capabilities have improved immensely. The ability to easily create fields allows you to capture new data points very easily.
- Communication in Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce, in general, is a big improvement for our business. The ability to have a chatter feed on any object is very helpful. This can also be used for feed tracking to give some basic change management controls/history.
- Oracle Siebel CRM, Oracle Configurator and Apptus eSales
Salesforce CPQ is definitely more robust and visually appealing than previously using Oracle Configurator and Siebel. For the most part, I very much prefer Salesforce CPQ. I love the ease of being able to create simple bundles on the fly and release a new promotional bundle for our sales and marketing teams. I was really excited by Big Machine's guided selling ability and significantly disappointed in Salesforce's approach. They advertise a robust guided selling tool and they're not quite there yet. Rule building is largely simplified, most rules take just a few clicks to build but there is some functionality in the much older Oracle Configurator that was much easier in Oracle that it is in Salesforce CPQ.