Conga CPQ vs. Qvidian RFP & Proposal Automation

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

Functionality and support are my two main areas. I want to be able to speak to someone when I have an issue. To Quvidian's defense, my company didn't see the value in sending someone to NH for the training. I'd used an RFP machine before so they thought that was sufficient. It was a poor decision on the company's part because although it was similar, it was not the same.

• 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.

• The search function ranks information based upon usage and is adaptive, learning/improving rankings with every search. This makes finding the right piece of information quick and easy.
• The tool offers flexibility to build various types of sales documents (proposals, presentations, case studies). This drastically reduces the time it takes to put together a client-facing document.
• The content management functionality allows for various content formats and related content can be connected. This simplifies tracking content updates by knowing which other pieces of information may also need review and update when a change is made outside the normal update cycle.

• 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.

• This is a weird one but when adding content to the 'Q' the tab in word sometimes disappears. Not sure why that happens and we haven't really tried to trouble shoot yet. My solution at the moment is just closing it and re-opening it. Sometimes it works and sometimes I have to do it a few times.
• While being a great place to keep content for our team to access, there is always the thought of whether the information is still accurate. Especially when comes to statistics and facts. We at times get so used to just using what is in our boilerplate that we forget to question whether information is accurate or not. This is more of an observation for users rather than an issue with 'Q' however the information is only as good as it's accuracy.

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

We've already renewed our contract with Qvidian and plan on using it for the foreseeable future. Apart from the fact that Qvidian has all the features we need to respond to RFPs and maintain a large informational database, the time that would need to be spent researching and testing out a different piece of software just wouldn't be worth it. All of our users are well learned in Qvidian, and it's easy to teach to new users. Having to learn a brand new application when the current one works great is pointless. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" applies here.

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

The shift they made in architecting documents from content to outline, is now reversed allowing outline creation first, then content which is more natural. But, due to the fact that we went through a migration of content to get to the new version, it feels less optimized than if we would have re-implemented.

End users having to configure settings more often than desired

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

Qvidian system maintenance is performed on weekends, usually at odd hours, and advanced notice is given so that teams can plan accordingly.

Remote or VPN employees seem to have somewhat slower access time. Server maintenance has improved performance.

Finding occasional recurring prompts to update settings in Microsoft (Explorer, Word, Excel, Powerpoint)

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

They are very much in support of great customer service. They respond quickly with emails and in some cases phone calls to resolve any issues and often times user questions in the past when I could not figure something out.

Incentivized

Live instructor training is expensive, though we have had instructors come to our offices for a ‘refresher’ before. The refresher was more of a “let us fix that for you” than a training on how to do it ourselves.

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

Online training is limited in my opinion.

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 works great. UPgrades are handled automatically. I was not involved in setup but I know they are there when we need them

Incentivized

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

Of the competitive vendor demos I have reviewed over the years, each may have its own strength. Some may be set up to drive compelling differentiators or solutions (E.g., propLIBRARY.com). Some may be built on existing CRMs (E.g., Qorus). Some may have tablet-friendly interfaces (E.g., SAVO). Others focus on collaboration (E.g., XaitPorter). There is nothing wrong with any of these models. You will just have to perform your own gap analysis and see what best addresses your needs. For Blackboard Inc., none of the aforementioned competition offered a holistic and robust replacement for our current PA tool. We have senior writers to craft compelling differentiators. We use SFDC, not SharePoint as our EA CRM. While our strategic writing and architectural needs outweigh having the slickest tablet-friendly user interface, we still have an interface and user experience that is geared toward usability and performance while being cognizant of adoption. New collaborative tools are a big draw, especially when responding to private sector proposals with a 10-to-20 day turnaround. However, not only has this not been a pain point for us (we currently have a versioning process in place) but the conversion and adoption hurdles just for one feature where there is already a workaround in place does not justify the migration.

• 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

• Our experience has been largely positive. It's allowed our RFP team to quickly and efficiently produce very professional documents. This has lead to more time being able to speak to the clients needs specifically. We've received lots of positive feedback from clients saying that the RFP looked tailored to them, and not just some content dumped in a binder. That was our goal.