What are the alternatives to Salesforce CPQ?
The Salesforce CPQ Journey Series
Considering all the options available can be worthwhile.
After an initial look at CPQ, many people realize the investment is larger than anticipated. The recurring cost of licensing, the upfront cost in setup, and the ongoing effort to manage the platform are all significant.
Logically, this leads to questions about the alternative options available. Our goal in this blog post is to give you a sense of the range of alternatives that exist on the Salesforce platform as well as some of the strengths and weaknesses of each.
Broadly speaking, you can either build your own solution expanding upon the standard features available in Sales Cloud or buy an alternative solution. Both options have a continuum from simple to complex.
Option One: Building Your Own Solution
Extending Sales Cloud Functionality
When looking at building out your own quote solution, the simplest starting point is to explore extending the standard Sales Cloud offering. Out of the box, Sales Cloud provides the ability to create quotes with product lines and generate simple quote documents with limited formatting.
The benefits of this option are:
There is no additional license cost associated with the build-out of the solution.
The build-out involves core Salesforce skills and doesn’t require learning a new package or tool.
The limitations of this option are:
The standard Sales Cloud has no robust packaging capabilities. This is also called “bundling” in CPQ terms.
There is no built-in capacity for price rules that can be managed by admins.
The out-of-box quote generation capabilities are extremely limited.
A complete solution might imply writing custom code to manage pricing, adding a third-party document management solution, and/or developing a custom interface to help manage product packaging.
Depending on which of these elements are key to your business this may be a viable option, or it may lead to even greater upfront cost with much higher levels of long term support.
Creating Your Own Custom CPQ Solution
The second option is to create a full-fledged custom CPQ solution. This option has become less popular as commercial CPQ solutions have grown in sophistication, but it’s still a viable option for organizations with large Salesforce platform teams and strong in-house software development capabilities that support unique pricing models.
This option would imply a much larger effort upfront to design and build out pricing, packaging, and document generation.
It will likely only be sustainable for organizations where:
Pricing does not fit the features available in Salesforce CPQ.
Tight coupling is required with custom back-office solutions.
Option Two: Buying an Alternative Solution
Buying from the Salesforce AppExchange
One of a Salesforce owner’s favorite tools is the AppExchange and CPQ is no different from other business problems in that there are a range of options available on it.
In fact, there are more than a dozen lightweight solutions ranging from industry-specific to “basic” quoting bolt-ons that can be explored on the AppExchange. The benefit of these options is that they provide a quicker implementation that goes beyond the out-of-the-box Sales Cloud but still at a price point lower than the full CPQ product.
As a word of caution, there are a few questions that are imperative to keep in mind as you begin exploring this option:
Am I confident that the creators of the app will be able to provide long term support for my needs? A good way to measure this is by looking at the overall adoption/usage of the app. If it’s widely used, it most likely won’t go away any time soon.
Is there a vibrant enough community that I can be confident the features will continue to grow?
Will I be able to engage other users and support to best explore how to modify the solution for my needs?
Will implementing this solution solve my quoting challenges in a robust enough way? Or will I have to find a new solution in a year?
The AppExchange is a wonderful place to find great add-ons that drive productivity, but when you’re looking for a solution that will impact something as dynamic and pervasive as pricing, it’s critical to have confidence in the vendor and solution.
Buying from a Competing Vendor
The other option when buying a solution is to explore a competing software as a service provider. Many organizations explore Apttus and Salesforce CPQ. Apttus has a deep history on the Salesforce platform, and with the recent acquisition of Conga, they provide a broad and deep pricing and contracting platform.
The benefit is that you can logically go to one place to manage the full pricing and contracting lifecycle.
The caution, and it’s one that’s worth exploring closely, is that the scale of the combined product (objects, logic, etc) is an order of magnitude more complex than Salesforce CPQ. This implies being very clear upfront on both the implementation costs and long-term management required to effectively leverage the platform.
No matter how you proceed, picking the right solution is no small matter.
Pricing and contracting are probably the two most complex elements of sales automation. It’s not surprising that there is a range of options for how you can solve them utilizing the Salesforce platform. The range is incredibly broad and the right solution is always unique to the context of your business. No matter what option you pursue, it should fit your specific needs.
If you’re still unsure what the right option is for your business, we’d be happy to schedule time for you with one of our CPQ experts to explore the options in detail. Contact us here to start the conversation.
Jeff is the Chief Strategy Officer at Cloud Giants and has worked with over 100 organizations on customer experience projects including CRM projects. He has led teams through enterprise roll-outs, and engaged in due diligence and integration for M&A activities.
Jeff has worked with Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, App Cloud, Community Cloud, CPQ, Salesforce Billing and numerous integrations with NetSuite, Intacct, and SAP. He is 8x Salesforce Certified.