ConnectWise CPQ vs. Oracle CPQ

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

I think CPQ had worked so well for our company because of the widespread nature of our associates and tracking orders that were being placed in multiple time zones. My team specifically needed a way of analyzing these orders to track our progress in real time and sort out any supply orders before they became an issue. If you are in a centralized location with a smaller team then this may not yield much use to you.

Incentivized

• 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

• Leveraged automation to minimize headcount costs despite 10% year-over-year business growth, and enabled staff to focus on more strategic tasks.
• Established a flexible CPQ system that scales on demand to easily accommodate the company’s multiple global locations.
• Improved customer relations by reducing configuration time and allowing sales more time to meet with customers and close orders.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Advanced coding for some areas in config and pricing engine are written in BML. This Java-like code may be a bit tricky for someone trying to write very advanced configuration rules or advanced pricing.
• The flagship system needs to have an easier way to enter in pricing. In the BMX version, pricing is handled through multiple matricies, but in the flagship it is compiled into one ugly rule.
• Customization. Other software comes with tools to help customize the "look and feel" quickly. To get a re-vamped look on the flagship product, you'll need a CSS expert.

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

So far it is all good with BigMachines, looking for new features since Oracle acquisition has created a lot of expectations. We have outlined our limitations (out of box functionality) in our periodic customer successor advice meetings for a while, hope we get a resolution soon. Also, the BigMachines user license fee has increased a lot in the last three years.

Incentivized

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.

While they have a decent administrator interface (relative to other apps), the part that is unintuitive is the printer friendly output. I view this is as the meat and potatoes. They are very constrained on these abilities. To make a font change is really cumbersome. There is no content management protocol to protocol. This kills us.

Other than one day two years ago and an hour or two a few times since then due to data center outages, it has been very reliable

I dont think we use this tool to potential

Incentivized

It depends upon the day however there are so many failure points with online services, including our internet service, that this is probably closer to 9 with the latest version

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.

Some specific support personal was good and fixed some problems fast using proper solutions. But when one of them went to sleep when we had critical issues and they do unreported commits to our production environment which caused issues and they were hiding it?? you can not give more than a two (maybe even that is too much). They also failed to add a feature for us which also bring the grade down.

They have pretty good training. Our business analysts have been able to go to entry and advanced level training. They have a train the trainer model. Our business analyst attended training, then trained the rest of our staff.

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

Like with any implementation go into it with a clear and realistic plan for getting the implementation completed and it will go much smoother. BigMachines has a clear process and an excellent staff fort getting an implementation completed we just needed to follow more of it instead of creating our own roadblocks

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

We debated a few different options, including a home-grown custom program, uCommerce, and just using only Oracle Commerce Cloud. Since we had already decided to use Oracle Commerce Cloud over uCommerce, the integrations available between OCC, Oracle's ERP system, and Oracle CPQ definitely seemed like the easiest option with the greatest benefits. However, the cost/benefit of Oracle CPQ was more apparent when we were ready to launch more complex configurations across all of our product groups.

Incentivized

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

• Sales Operations or IT would have a better understanding of the license user costs and ROI. I do know that Sales has experienced frustrations in the the lead gen-to-close process and have experienced delays with some deals. In other instances, the software has worked fine. I would love to see an analysis on how our lead-conversion rate, sales cycles, and proposal volume stacks up.

Incentivized