Better leverage your SFDC Investment with Salesforce CPQ
June 14, 2018
Better leverage your SFDC Investment with Salesforce CPQ
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce CPQ (formerly SteelBrick)
Salesforce CPQ is currently used @ Xactly Corporation to provide easy access to build quotes directly from within the opportunity object in SFDC. Sales, Sales Operations, and Customer Success are the departments utilizing the tool primarily. We use this tool to avoid manual order form creation processes in Excel.
- Salesforce CPQ easily maps to standard and custom fields within the opportunity in SFDC, allowing you to avoid time spent duplicating effort or copying and pasting deal criteria.
- Salesforce CPQ connects directly to pre-determined price book, making it very easy to provide a proposal based on standard cost and/or add discounts to standard cost and reflect those reductions on the order form as appropriate.
- Salesforce CPQ provides the ability for administrators to configure workflows for approval based on certain discount %'s on the standard cost, offering a quick and easy way to route automatically through the organization for approval.
- Calc and process time are slow, as is the case with many Salesforce native applications. If there are too many line items, you may see APEX errors.
- The order form process can get very lengthy if you have several line items or need to account for year over year increases in per subscriber cost with separate line items for each year in a multi-year agreement.
- If there are not multiple people eligible to approve a quote at a certain stage in the approval process, it can take a significant amount of time if that individual is away from their computer / mobile device.
- Easy access to reporting on closed-won, closed-lost, and open quotes.
- Accuracy in data referenced in a quote - it's typically accurate as it is pulled directly from opportunity, looking up to associated subscription start/end dates, etc..
- We lose valuable time in creating quotes ourselves. Quotes were requested and created through sales ops previously, sales did not have access to the excel templates used to generate quotes.
We looked into using BigMachines and FPX but decided to implement Apttus many years ago. The Apttus implementation never went live after several hiccups along the way and we shifted our focus to Salesforce CPQ which has had it's moments as well. Overall, Salesforce CPQ is the best fit for our needs.