Conga CPQ vs. PROS Smart CPQ

Conga CPQ is flexible in the price setup. We achieve a lot of customized pricing setups using CPQ. Usage flowing into billing works well also. The Conga cart is a huge painpoint for us. We bill each route and trip we run individually so we have a very large amount of manual, complex cart configuration.

Incentivized

Is my IT team ready to handle the challenges with data integration ? Are all the features offered by my current quoting tool being offered by Cameleon? Do I need a SaaS based quoting tool? Would it be easy and intuitive for my sales team (who,quite frankly, worship MS Excel) to use Cameleon ? Do I need a real-time/near-real-time quoting tool or would delays in data refreshes be acceptable

• Fully integrated with Salesforce.com. Allows for the seamless update of all objects on the SFDC platform. As primary quotes are updated, so to are the opportunities.
• Supports integration with Avalara for Sales Tax and Docusign for E-Signature.
• Supports the quoting of product that requires customization that results in a dynamic cost, MSRP and customer price.
• Significant amount of R&D is being invested in to the platform. Many of the items on our wish list have already been incorporated as a standard feature or on the near term roadmap.

• Salesforce.com integration via a plugin that lets end users access Cameleon CPQ systems.
• Quoting made easier with complex business rules.
• Good support from the Cameleon team with fixes and enhancements.

• The GUI design of Apttus is configurable but prescriptive. If you want a very specific look and feel, it will take some effort to do so. There have been some modern design updates recently using AngularJS. Check it out to see if it works for you.

• Integration with other onsite systems such as Oracle databases require the expertise of knowledgeable developers. Manual upload of flat files are always an option , but not necessarily the cleanest.
• Better Cameleon CPQ Designer UI would go a long way. Currently UI is a stark contrast to the intuitive UI of SalesForce.com or similar SaaS based tools. Not too much to ask for , considering the fact that we work in the era of Facebook and Twitter.
• Real time data availability is a long way to go for Cameleon CPQ. Updates to data pushed over as batches to Cameleon are reflected at Salesforce.com only after a 'versioning' process is launched. Current recommended frequency for this process is once a day (an upgrade to make it twice a day is in the works).

It is a stable repository management tool but needs to upgrade its search engine to make it more efficient and user friendly. There can be an advanced search option which allows me to find agreements based on Contract numbers, Company name and Agreement Type as well as by affiliates

There are a few features that we expected from the tool but Cameleon's CPQ has fallen short on these. Possible enhancements and product fixes should be made as soon as possible to change the perspective. Unexpected bugs in the tool have come up during the roll-out that has caught the implementation team off-guard

Conga CPQ is a great tool but lacks good support and [a] very limited knowledge base which doesn't include day to day errors which users face, thus leading us to support and take more time in turn. Also cart performance can be improved drastically which will enhance the user experience as the user doesn't have to wait for the pricing.

Incentivized

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

We had to use an outside vendor to implement the software and we paid them for a while during the initial choppy months. I was learning as I went along and then we could occasionally reach out to Salesforce if we really needed to. I think the support is there, but you obviously have to pay for it if the admin team doesn't have enough experience.

Incentivized

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

You need to have IT involved. The implementation partner downplayed the role that IT would have to play. We needed data migration, user set-up, customizations within Apttus for legacy migrations. Luckily we had a developer on our staff for Salesforce.com.

It has been too long for me to remember all the various CPQ products we evaluated. But our short list came down to Salesforce CPQ and and Conga CPQ. At the time, we considered them both pretty close to equivalent solutions for meeting our needs, so negotiation mainly came down to price of the solution, and estimates to implement. Now that we are migrating to Lightning, the balance has tipped very strongly in Salesforce CPQ's favour.

Incentivized

SaaS based tool. Better quoting rules.

• 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.

Incentivized

• A salesforce.com -esque approach to CRM has a whole gamut of advantages. Cameleon CPQ complements this approach.
• Expect down times , feature problems or general disagreement about Cameleon's capabilities initially. This is true for adopting any new tool or technology. Hold on and it will tide over.
• As a person who has used Cameleon purely as a developer standpoint , I do not have anything more to add-on.