Salesforce CPQ & Billing Erfahrungen

Salesforce CPQ for managing invoicing process

Kommentare: Absolutely delightful - I fully recommend it.

Vorteile:

Salesforce CPQ is absolutely fantastic software to manage the whole invoicing process. The time spent on the invoices management has gone down drastically when using Salesforce CPQ and it is very easy to use. It is used in order to automate Billing and Invoicing, Recurring Payments, Discounts and Order Management. I recommend it to anyone working at the company with complicated invoicing processes. Also the documentation and courses in Trailhead are great!

Nachteile:

The configuration might be quite hard at times, but it is rather because of the fact that the businesses processes are very complex and they are hard to model.

Better for Simpler Pricing Modules

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

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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.

CPQ requires a lot of clicks and is far from intuitive

Kommentare: It streamlines approvals somewhat, and makes for a more standardized quoting system, so I understand the business reasons for switching to it, but from an end user perspective, it has been a huge pain to use.

Vorteile:

The thing I like the most about CPQ is that it allows me to keep multiple quotes attached to one opportunity a lot easier. There are also some great ways to add multiple products and makes that aspect of quoting easier.

Nachteile:

CPQ was recently introduced at my org and it is so cumbersome to work through. It requires a lot of clicks and updating price/making price changes is very difficult. Creating a quote used to take me about 5 minutes and now it takes about 20 depending on the complexity. Maybe I'll get used to it and more familiarized, but it definitely isn't intuitive or efficient.

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

Kommentare: 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.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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."

Incredible quoting tool cover all our exception cases.

Kommentare: Our product array is huge and our discounts system is complicated, we needed a tool which can handle most of our exception cases. CPQ can leverage most of our requirement.

Vorteile:

It is very easy and user friendly, even if you're new you can grasp easily. We have so many different SKUs, pricing from different product families, various discounts etc all are been taken and we are happy. Multiyear quoting, contracted pricing and others are very simple using CPQ

Nachteile:

Contracted pricing isn't flowing from partner to customer account. Incremental quote for Multi year deals should be made available with CPQ rather with CPQ plus.

A Scalable Quoting Platform

Kommentare: Create internal/operational efficiencies
Improve business process agility
Improve business process outcomes

Vorteile:

The application provides rich functionality in product catalogs, commerce and report generation and is scalable to support future organizational growth. The user on boarding is easy due to cloud based solution. Support of solution to run on Mobile platform and channels drives high adoption

Nachteile:

Lack of maturity of pre-built integration APIs or adapters with other products / applications which can be improved further.

Its Awesome! Make your complex business process very user friendly

Kommentare: Its Awesome! Make your complex business process very user friendly

Vorteile:

Its Awesome! Make your complex business process very user friendly

Nachteile:

Need highly experts in CPQ for all development and deployment procedure

Bit of a learning curve

Kommentare: Consistency across quotes, pricing integrity, speed of producing quote docs, order forms.

Vorteile:

When things (namely quotes) have become complicated, and you're selling multiple lines of business, lots of options, multiple years, with lots of variance this (CPQ) is a must have. SF CPQ is attractive to Salesforce users because there is that layer of familiarity and notion that it's part of the ecosystem.

Nachteile:

For a Salesforce's owned product inside salesforce...the CPQ line formerly Steelbrick still isn't up to a level of performance where I feel it's seriously saving (rep's) time. The UI is distinctively Salesforce (lightning not classic) but the speed makes me question whether it's yet native to Salesforce. This is far from building a personal shopping cart on Amazon, adding and subtracting items with agility.

Does what it says on the box

Vorteile:

If you're a salesforce user then having Salesforce's CPQ is a no brainer. it takes a lot of the mental load off your shoulders building quotes, calculating ramp deals and forecasting properly and setting approval mechanisms

Nachteile:

it's not that easy to configure if you're not so used to Salesforce and I'd love to see more functionalities and the support to be better.

Salesforce CPQ is Great!

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

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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

Huge feature set with multi-level deployment options - takes some getting use too

Kommentare: Large scale tracking of employee, customer and device information to include maintenance and tasking necessities. Generates an integrated DB option that allows for global tracking, management and metric options with a broad reporting feature.

Vorteile:

The broad scope capabilities of Salesforce allow for a multi-departmental integration and deployment functionality with multi-scope database options. Integration with third-party systems is phenomenal, and the allowance of homegrown development is almost limitless when designing to the needs of your organization. Speed of deployment and development is only mitigated by internal knowledge but a large knowledge base and user set globally assist in speed of change.

Nachteile:

Despite the large scale integration options with salesforce there can be a slowed user capability due to functional UI. This can of course be customized to meet the needs of your internal customers, but still requires considerable training to the tools available. Ensuring internal department integration and assistance will speed an organization to use.

Steelbrick is Promising

Kommentare: We looked at a few CPQ tools to help us automate a few obstacles in our (complicated) SaaS model. Steelbrick was the best solution out there for your buck. Pros:
We were in a situation where our current (custom) CPQ solution did not allow the flexibility to add new products, adjust order forms, support local currencies (without an expensive developer resource) and it really empowered out business to address new opportunities by being able to do these things.
There are a lot of objects and we needed to use them all to make our multi-year product model work and it seemed daunting, but really, I was able to pick up how everything fit together after a few days of diving in and playing around.
The support and customer service team are absolutely amazing. Special shoutout to my CSM (Kelly Wilson) who responds day and night to emails and is always willing to find time to get on a call. Our primary support agent (ChrisL) is also really smart and easy to work with.
No implementation of CPQ goes perfect, but we had great implementation engineer (ChrisT) and implementation consultant (ChrisH) who really PARTNERED with us to make sure the tool was what we needed to accomplish our goals.
You can trust the product management team. We have already seen features that they have promised to us (contract amendments, for example). Cons:
- We did not realize this until after implementation (and product management has promised us that it is a high priority), but the CPQ tool will only work in full data replica sandboxes. Partial and dev sandboxes do not bring over the 20+ object records that come with Steelbrick. You will need to make sure you also consider some data migration solution between environments. You can do this yourself. I did it once successfully and it took 4 hours. :(
- CPU timeout errors. If you have complicated pricing on multi-year products and you make changes to those quotes (for example changing a 5 year deal to a 3 year deal), we often get a "CPU timeout" error. We can't ever get beyond this. We need to build a new quote. :( Again, Steelbrick product management has assured us that this will be addressed in future releases with more precise code.

Executive Director

Kommentare: Ultimately we received no benefit

Vorteile:

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

Nachteile:

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.

SALESFORCE CPQ FOR YOU

Kommentare: Salesforce CPQ has helped the vendors to sell the products and services very fast with no help of the technical support team because they can see the catalog updated all the time. And if the client like they can generate the proposal very fast.

Vorteile:

- All the products and services live in the same place. - You can generate proposals - Can Integrate many tools in CPQ like DocuSign and Xauthor -You can update or upload information very fast by using Data Loader

Nachteile:

- We need more support team to solve our doubts or problems - More guides or videos for the application (Translated in Spanish )

One of the best CRMs

Kommentare: Overall, Saleforce.com helped me drive my sales into a better direction giving me a clear view of my performance and serving as a guide to what was needed to keep my sales in check.

Vorteile:

I used Salesforce for the past 6 years as a Sales Director in a fashion firm. We used it on a daily basis to keep us informed of our performance, give us a complete view of our clients and monitor our work with numerous reminders and reports.

Nachteile:

The reports are customizable but it can require a bit of a learning curve. The alerts, unless managed can become a bit of a pain.

A great alternative to get fast proposals.

Kommentare: It's has been a very good experience for the business units that are using it right now inside the company, we are taking efforts to make it useful for all the company.

Vorteile:

I liked the Salesforce integration, we were looking for an alternative to get more detail in cost, price and quotas for our customers inside the same Salesforce platform.

Nachteile:

At the beginning you have to make clear your business objetives to map all the fields you will use in this platform. To define the right catalogs is crucial to make this tool work.

Salesforce CPQ User review

Vorteile:

Bundling of sub products and accessories with specific price points was an important consideration for us while selecting Steelbricks CPQ. They have most of the business scenarios covered out of the box.

Nachteile:

CPQ has a steep learning curve. However, once you spend the initial hours in the training , you get better at it. It took us time to train the inside sales to configure products themselves for standard bundles.

Great Standardization Tool - Big Learning Curve

Kommentare: 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.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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.

Robust CPQ solution for Salesforce users

Kommentare: This tool makes life so much easier for your sales team and eliminates a lot of risk that is inherent to having your quoting process be done via excel, etc.

Vorteile:

It is a powerful and fairly robust CPQ solution that makes the lives of your Sales team that much easier. For growing businesses, it makes it that much easier to scale your business with a structured quoting process.

Nachteile:

Because the tool is so robust and the quoting process is often complex, it is imperative to have a strong implementation firm with CPQ specific expertise. This can be expensive.

Well integrated Quoting tool

Kommentare: This product has Increased our revenue, increased productivity and decreased time spent on excel sheets.

Vorteile:

Very well integrated with all salesforce applications all my contacts, clients, emails, quotes. Calendar and call back all in one place with reminders. Help things organized and make it easy to meet your sales goals. The ability to have multiple rate quote packages that can be updated anytime easily.

Nachteile:

Costly for medium sized enterprises. calculation times can be sometimes slow

Increase sales user adoption with CPQ

Kommentare: We have seen an increase in user adoption overall since implementing this tool

Vorteile:

We have been using CPQ for a few months now and have a better overall pipeline for products. The quote templates that CPQ can generate are much cleaner than the traditional salesforce quote tool.

Nachteile:

Support agents are slower to respond but it’s ideal to have a developer to assist with custom configuration when building out CPQ

Quote and Track

Vorteile:

We have recently switched to salesforce and loving everything about it and managing our quotations was never this good.

Nachteile:

it takes some time to do digging about things we wana do but after that it has been smooth sail.

lots of room for improvement. but not much competition

Kommentare: It works, well 95% of the time. It does have scaling limitations though, so big opportunities chug. Still, it is the best thing we have found right now

Vorteile:

it works well for the most part, and it is pretty intiuitive

Nachteile:

scaling. large opportunities just don't work very well yet

Great product for quotes and renewals

Kommentare: I have been using Steelbrick CPQ for over a year and I love this product, it allows me to create orders and renewals for my customers all at a click of a button.

Vorteile:

Being able to easily create quote and send to my customers

Nachteile:

doesn't always work the way i want

A necessary piece, but a struggle

Kommentare: Accurate and updated quoting to make sure numbers are accurate between finance and sales.

Vorteile:

Salesforce CPQ allows for out sales reps to build out quotes and communicate the dollar amounts to finance within Salesforce

Nachteile:

It seems like the CPQ functionality is constantly breaking when one attempts to edit a quote once it is created.