Salesforce CPQ is Great!

My experience has been great - I am a frequent user of quotes and this system makes it easy and efficient for creating professional quotes.

Pros

Salesforce CPQ allows me to easily go in and create quotes with different formats without allowing users to adjust things they shouldn't. You can add the quotes to things like simple quotes clients can sign to SOW's and more.

Cons

I know it was quite difficult to implement for my team. It took a few months to have it completely built out.

Better for Simpler Pricing Modules

Overall its easy to maintain and allows for native SF features which makes it a great add on for customers already using Sales Cloud.

Pros

Since this is obviously an SF platform- the ease of implementation is great as well as the fact that there is not a huge learning curve- it operates just as other SF objects.

Cons

It can be very complicated to implement a pricing structure if you do not have a "simple" pricing module. We have tried 3 separate times (& used certified experts and contractors) to try and implement our pricing module and it did not work- I will say our pricing structure is much more complicated than it should be but its still been a huge issue.

Executive Director

Ultimately we received no benefit

Pros

Lots of customization options and flexibility. Native to the SalesForce environment. Pricing on a per user basis.

Cons

We spent over 9 months planning and working with a Systems Integration Partner (SIP) recommended by SalesForce. The project involved an Executive sponsor, various team members from different departments, a Project Leader, and our SalesForce Admin. We carefully planned the design of the system and each step of the way worked closely with the SIP but we couldn't get it to work. To many options, rules, settings, etc. We were promised that it wouldn't be hard. WRONG!!!! WE WASTED VALUABLE STAFF RESOURCES FOR NOTHING! We advised SalesForce of this and they still won't let us out of our 3 year contract even after paying for 1 year of development that netting bupkis. This Software is lots of promises with no ROI.

Great Standardization Tool - Big Learning Curve

Overall it's fantastic to have a tool that allows for consistent and professional quoting -- but it took probably 2 months of regular working sessions (1-2 times a week) with our entire team to get everybody up to speed on it.

Pros

Once you get it figured out, it's easy to modify, add, and make it work for whatever we need it to do for us on the Quoting side of things. The customizability is nice and adaptable for our rates that change with trends and easy to add new items into our model as we add more languages to our business.

Cons

Much of our pricing is based around a "per word" model, and discounting our "per word" rate by $.01-$.02 was really difficult for our teams to figure out for several months.

Not as easy to integrate as it is made out to be

I need to put this disclaimer in front of what I'm about to write, because it will sound critical. I left the company using CPQ about seven months after we started to integrate it into our SalesForce platform. So, it may have ended up being a success. At the time I left, it was not a success. Not a failure either. Maybe the payback was still coming. It was sold to us as being a quick, seamless integration that would be easy to get up and running and customized to our business model. It was not that. It is a potentially elegant solution that we wanted to use so we could scale up our selling process and hopefully reduce the sales cycle. There was no evidence that it succeeded in doing that for us.

Pros

I love the concept of starting the quoting process and having that all captured in the CRM database. Also, that it looks and feels like SalesForce so the sales people are not scared off by it immediately.

Cons

The spin-up was very difficult. It did not work as seamlessly as advertised. Ultimately, it required us to rely on a consulting agency that did not show the same level of quality and customer service that one would expect if dealing directly with SalseForce. It turned out to be much more costly than expected to implement this "plug-in."