Table of Contents:
What is Conga CPQ?
Conga CPQ enables/empowers sellers to achieve better deal margins and faster sales cycles. Relying on its AI and ML capabilities sales professionals can manage unlimited product complexity with a centralized view of sales quotes and orders. The result? Up-to-date pricing across all channels, the ability to cross-sell and upsell, bigger deals and, ultimately, increased revenue.
Sales is a tough field. A lot of decision-makers believe that salespeople are generally unprepared. On top of that, sales often get delayed because of complicated catalogs, quoting errors and various manual processes. This results in revenue leakage and inconsistent pricing, which, combined with rogue discounting, can impact margins negatively.
To combat this and enable their sales teams to sell more effectively in less time, companies use CPQ software. CPQ stands for Configure, Price, Quote. It is a technology solution that is an extension of your CRM and works together with ERP systems. It improves sales processes by automating approvals, controlling discounting, increasing quote accuracy and customer relations.
Are Apttus and Conga the same?
No, but also, yes.
Apttus, the leader in quote-to-cash (QTC) software, acquired Conga, the leader in Digital Document Transformation, back in 2020. The goal was to modernize revenue generation for both small and large enterprises. The newly created company operates under the Conga brand. Its end-to-end solution allows for streamlined workflows resulting in better buying experiences that match customers’ needs.
Pros of Conga CPQ
1. Creating accurate quotes faster
Selling a product with different configurations often slows down processing times and creates delays in the delivery of quotes to customers. What this means is that often sales representatives waste time they could spend working on actual deals. Conga CPQ speeds up even the most complex quotes leading to faster sales cycles. Customers expect to get offers instantly and delivering quotes within seconds significantly impacts the outcome of a deal.
2. Integration with Salesforce
Conga CPQ is built and runs within Salesforce – it is native to the Platform and not a standalone application. There are no data synchronization or connection issues. Updates are made in one place and are available instantly. Your data is in the Salesforce database which means you can access it faster and generate reports more easily. It also means its security is guaranteed.
3. Ease of use and configuration
Conga CPQ’s developer guide is well structured and contains in-depth explanations that are simple to follow. The design is user-friendly and sellers can access quoting information in various ways through the home page. You can either use the standard Salesforce UI or choose the CPQ Admin console to create a product. You can then associate it with categories, price lists and price items on a single page.
4. Drafting quotes for different scenarios
Conga CPQ maintains a separate price list for each customer and has the business logic built in to meet different scenarios for different clients. Sellers can insert data and customize processes from multiple models to deliver a unique quoting and purchasing experience and use CPQ to create their working catalog page. Conga CPQ is designed to create accurate price quotes with any product configuration scenario.
5. Highly scalable solution
Conga CPQ is the most secure and scalable CPQ solution available for enterprises today. Sellers using the platform can create repeatable quoting and contracting processes that could increase profits and support annual revenue growth. Conga CPQ makes their processes faster and more scalable by rebuilding their pricing engine from scratch on their own infrastructure that is not artificially limited.
6. Managing unlimited product complexity
Conga CPQ allows for the creation of either standalone or bundles of products, including such with attributes and options. The deal management process is straightforward thanks to two important features: Product Rules and Collaboration Requests. The first one means product rules exist inside the catalog as well as for compatibility, replacements, recommendations, etc. The second allows sellers, managers and other stakeholders to collaborate on quote creation.
Cons of Conga CPQ
1. Implementation requires business and tech expertise
CPQ projects are often thought of as mostly technical but business understanding is also critical here. In reality, teams working on implementation and customization need both technical and business domain knowledge and skills to set up processes effectively.
2. Support with customization is suboptimal
While support engineers deliver great customer experience, if you use Conga CPQ’s out-of-the-box functionalities, they are not always helpful enough if you have made heavy customizations. CPQ projects often do require some degree of customization which means agents might not have a full grasp on the issues you could be facing.
3. Pricing conditions are not very clear
Conga CPQ has a licensed-based pricing model and is available in Salesforce AppExchange. Although customers are asked to request a quote specific for their case, initial research is confusing and the process makes it hard to estimate a provisional budget.
Conga CPQ at Scalefocus
When it comes to working with Conga CPQ (formerly Apttus CPQ), our consultants have comprehensive technical experience combined with excellent industry know-how. We put this expertise to practice by implementing the solution for a Dutch medical equipment manufacturer and enabled them to create error free quotes.
The client wanted to combine the sales processes for products and services and speed up quoting times. They also needed to centralize fragmented internal procedures across business departments and improve catalog management by automating manual interactions.
Our team performed an end-to-end implementation of Conga Configure, Price, Quote and data migration. We improved the product record and catalog structure through in-depth analysis and continuous collaboration with various business units.
The results:
Process standardization and automation of manual tasks
Improved response times from an average of 30–60 days to several hours for quoting
Evolved revenue operations with real-time product and pricing configuration
Full auditing trail and visibility with granular permissions configuration
Automated approval, simplifying business processes
Conclusion
Conga CPQ (formerly Apttus CPQ) is not without its flaws. Some users have pointed out that its implementation requires advanced tech and business skills. Also, customer support is not impeccable when handling customization issues and its pricing terms are sometimes hard to figure out.
However, it’s by far the most robust CPQ solution out there. It enables a seamless experience for sales teams by allowing them to create accurate quotes for different scenarios faster and is fully integrated with Salesforce.com. On top of that, it’s intuitive and exceptionally scalable. If your company is looking to achieve significantly better business results, adopting Conga CPQ is definitely the thing to do.
Scalefocus is the type of technology partner who not only provides excellent Conga CPQ implementation services but brings additional value to your organization thanks to our industry knowledge. Our team will help you sell faster and more efficiently while eliminating revenue leakage. In the end, adopting Conga CPQ with the guided assistance of Scalefocus will result in more closed deals, improved customer success and, ultimately, higher revenue.
Get in touch today so we can begin mapping out the transformation of your company’s entire sales cycle and get you where you need to be – ahead of the competition.
Velina Derilova
Senior Content Writer