ConnectWise CPQ vs. Privia (discontinued)

ConnectWise Sell is great for Managed Service Providers and smaller IT shops who primarily do computer repairs and maintenance. The tool is generally good at everything it does, but I would not recommend using it for a company that sells IT equipment as its primary business. Quotes take a relatively large amount of time to build in order to get them looking good for the end user.

Incentivized

Privia is well-suited for project / proposal management in terms of working on a live proposal or massive document of sorts. However, it is not ideal from a business analytics standpoint. If you are looking for graphical representations and/or snapshots of your project / proposal at a glance, Privia is not for you.

• It provides our company with a standardized quoting process. Everyone works the same way, uses the same templates, and generates a professional quote. Nothing gets left out or missed.
• Portal provides your sales staff and management with a complete view of their efforts. They see in real time what opportunities are in the pipeline, and how successful their efforts are when these opportunities are won.
• Provides a collaborative platform for our sales team to work on customer quotes. We can now have 2 or 3 members working in the same quote whereas before we had to wait for someone to free up the document before others could access it.
• It allows us to provide much more information in our quotes by attaching documents to the quote. Things like manufacturer specifications or brochures can now be easily attached into the quotes making it a presentation instead of a bunch of line items with numbers.
• ConnectWise Sell is customizable to meet the needs of my company. This is so important to us because similar products only allow you to do what they design it for. Our business changes regularly and we need our software systems to be agile and adaptive to it.

Incentivized

• I liked the structure of breaking down the RFP.
• I liked the way it allows comment bubbles.
• I liked the security of locking it down so that certain portions were kept internal while others could be released externally.

• The first year we were using Quosal, they were consistently posting new 'How to' videos and live training sessions to help users become familiar with the software features and best practices. While those videos are still available, they are becoming less relevant with each software version patch. The help manual documentation should be updated with the software versions as well.

• Burn to CD directly from Privia
• Being able to do a "save as" from the web version to save on my desktop
• Search functionality
• Email directly from Privia if Outlook is not used

We are in our 4th year with Quosal and fully expect to renew again and again. With their development of additional features such as the Order Porter, Visual Quoting and others, we see the adoption rates continuing to rise while making our time to quoted shorter and shorter. Quosal and ConnecWise's vision of automated quoting is an exciting frontier that we are very happy to be a part of

Privia has proved, uniformly, to be an asset. I look forward to my next experience with it. While, as I stated, users can feel advance trepidation when using Privia, those problems evaporate immediately when Privia is activated.

Quosal is a very solid product with a LOT of functionality. Quosal has two main products that they offer, 'Quosal Sell' and 'Quosal Create.' If you are looking for an "out-of-the-box" or "ready to use" quoting software, I would recommend Quosal Sell. If you are interested exploring advanced functionality and integration or have a resource on staff willing to assume an "admin" role, I would highly recommend Quosal Create.

It is very intuitive and I found it very easy for my decidedly non-technical users to work with. Training was quite easy even for technophobes or complete newbies. I have a team of about 500 users on this system who are primarily writers and project managers, frequently not computer savvy at all.

We rarely, if ever, had unplanned outages when we were using Privia. When we did, our support staff were attentive and quick to resolve the problem no matter the hour.

I dont think we use this tool to potential

Incentivized

I have been in business for 30 years, we have about 30 vendors we have worked with or more. Connectwise is on the bottom, if you ask any MSP how you loose clients the fastest, it's all about response and support. Connectwise has not found that out yet.

Each company is assigned an account manager whom you can contact directly with any questions, comments, and/or concerns. You may contact them directly via email and they will submit a ticket via their system for you or you can submit a ticket through their system and they will contact you immediately. All issues are resolved in a highly timely manner, and the customer service is impeccable. All accounts folks are well-trained from a customer service and technical standpoint and will escalate the issue as necessary depending on their expertise - though, that is rarely a necessity. Should they be unavailable, you will be notified prior to their leave / departure and assigned a secondary contact in the meantime. Overall, I was beyond impressed with Privia's customer support services.

Great implementation, the Quosal team has a smart and well planned process to guide your team through the process. More importantly, they understand the challenges with change and user adoption.

Incentivized

It is critical to plan your implementation carefully and take the time to understand the product. You have to make sure you get the initial set up and design correct so that the tool supports your business practices. If you do this up front, you can have a very successful and easy implementation.

Both tools have a very common feature set. Sell is different primarily in the fact that it is online software-as-a-service based deployment, rather than a local server based deployment. That gives it a major leg up. I can use Sell from anywhere in the world easily.

Incentivized

Privia works quite well for developing workflows and processes within the Proposal Development process. It allows you to work offline with your documents without Web access. It allows security to be controlled on a very granular level. It allows you to quickly secure your workspaces and documents without having to work on an individual user basis.

Connectwise Sell is listening and building their software to fit the needs of their customers. Sell is consistently looking to us for feedback and making sure their product is working for us as partners/customers. We feel we are generally behind on getting to know their updates and software upgrades. They are a great vendor and wonderful corporation.

Incentivized

• Customer satisfaction improvement. It's an impressive and professional way to present information that our customers appreciate. They not only have a clear way of knowing exactly what is being proposed, but now have another method they can use to easily track and organize approved/ not-approved quotes.
• Improved brand consistency. We have a reputable, trusted image that projects across our client portfolio (not to mention within our community) and this system helps to promote and maintain our transparency and professional image.
• Following up and referencing past quotes is made easy and quickly, which has benefited us from a time-cost savings perspective.

Incentivized

• Significant employee and team efficiency
• Faster review process allowing more team members to participate
• Much improved customer service for our users, who are mostly non-technical writer and managers