CloudSense CPQ is a configure, price, quote (CPQ) solution that works well for B2B industries like telecommunications, media, utilities, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). It streamlines sales by automating complex product/service configuration, price calculations, and quote generation. These core features reduce errors in the quoting process and accelerate the sales cycle, so sales and operations teams can operate more efficiently.
A key differentiator for CloudSense CPQ is its seamless integration with Salesforce. For Salesforce users, using CloudSense means having a unified CRM and sales operations platform. Additional features, such as dynamic product and pricing management, order management and fulfillment, end-to-end contract lifecycle management, and specialized features for subscription businesses, further enable users to manage their operations in the face of market changes and evolving customer demands.
Why this product is good
Positives for CloudSense CPQ Software
Product Details
What is CloudSense CPQ?
CloudSense CPQ software provides a holistic sales experience, incorporating quoting with contracts, invoicing, and subscription and order management. It is the perfect solution for businesses with complex products, multi-channel sales strategies, and a high volume of quotes.
Features include:
- Unified product catalog
- Dynamic deal scoring
- Guided selling
- “Quick” quoting
- Compatibility Rules Service
- Native Salesforce integration
- Order management and fulfillment
Unified product catalog: CloudSense CPQ features a centralized product catalog where you can manage all your offerings, services, pricing, and business rules from a single platform. You can quickly create and launch new commercial offerings whenever you need to and instantly deploy them across all your sales channels.
Dynamic deal scoring: CloudSense’s algorithms analyze customer data, historical data in CPQ, inputs, and configuration requirements to estimate every deal’s profitability and likelihood of conversion. Sales teams can use those insights to prioritize deals and increase conversions. Over time, they can target more prospects who fit those characteristics and boost the return on their sales efforts.
Guided selling: One of the main features that make CPQ software so effective— CloudSense’s guided selling capabilities provide dynamic messaging and recommendations throughout the sales process, facilitating cross-sells and up-sells. This way, sales teams can offer tailored solutions that meet every customer’s unique needs, and they see upsell and cross-sell opportunities that help them add more value.
“Quick” quoting: The QuickQuote functionality enables sales teams to generate indicative quotes for budgeting or forecasting purposes. Reps’ ability to quickly provide customers with preliminary pricing information significantly speeds up the sales cycle and helps them build rapport with their prospects.
Compatibility Rules Service: This service verifies that all items quoted in a solution are compatible with each other and that all contingencies are met.
Native Salesforce integration: As a Salesforce-native platform, CloudSense seamlessly integrates with Salesforce CRM, providing an end-to-end sales process and a personalized customer experience. This integration leverages Salesforce’s product upgrades and innovations in artificial intelligence.
Order management and fulfillment: CloudSense CPQ orchestrates every step of the order management process, from quote to cash. You can even combine orders from different channels, so customers can buy more than one product from more than one place in a single transaction. And for subscription offers, it automatically sends renewal emails promoting personalized offers.
What are the advantages of using CPQ?
CloudSense CPQ’s Benefits
CloudSense CPQ is a powerful solution that sales professionals use to accurately configure and quote complex products and services with speed and efficiency.
Benefits of CloudSense CPQ include:
- Shorter sales cycles through automated product configuration and a streamlined quoting process
- Fewer errors in quotes and orders, thanks to its advanced rules engine and product catalog management features
- Higher sales productivity in the time your team actually spends selling (CPQ increases quoting productivity by 33%)
- Increased win rates and deal sizes with guided selling and dynamic deal scoring features that help sales teams identify and prioritize profitable opportunities
- An overall better customer experience by delivering accurate, personalized, and timely quotes
- Operational efficiency through the integration of CPQ with order management and fulfillment
- Faster time to market with a unified catalog that makes it easy to launch new products and services
What industries are CPQ solutions best suited for?
CloudSense CPQ for Industries
CloudSense CPQ is specifically designed to address the challenges of telecom, communication, and subscription-based businesses in the B2B space. It also offers a range of features to support digital ad sales.
B2B Telecom and MSPs
High-performance multi-site quoting: CloudSense enables rapid configuration and pricing of complex enterprise solutions across thousands of sites within a single quote. This capability allows B2B telcos to efficiently manage large-scale proposals, such as MPLS IPVPN solutions and managed services, significantly reducing the time required to generate comprehensive quotes.
Advanced deal profitability analysis: The platform provides dynamic deal scoring, contract value assessment, and profit and loss reporting, empowering sales teams to evaluate the profitability and viability of deals in real-time. This feature ensures that telecommunications companies can prioritize and pursue the most advantageous opportunities.
Seamless integration with B2B marketplaces: Through strategic partnerships, CloudSense integrates directly with platforms like CloudBlue Connect, enabling telecommunications providers to efficiently expand their B2B solution portfolios. This integration streamlines the procurement and bundling of traditional ICT services into a wide range of innovative B2B XaaS solutions, facilitating quicker time-to-market and a broader service offering.
B2B SaaS
Advanced usage-based billing: Designed to handle complex recurring billing processes, CloudSense CPQ accurately calculates and automates billing based on customers’ actual product usage. This ensures precise invoicing and aligns with the flexible pricing models often employed by SaaS companies.
Omnichannel selling: CloudSense CPQ enables SaaS businesses to increase sales across various channels, including self-service platforms, direct sales, and partner networks. With a unified engine and agile product catalog, it supports consistent and efficient sales processes across all customer touchpoints.
Dynamic deal scoring: Leveraging customer data and historical insights, CloudSense CPQ provides dynamic deal scoring to help sales teams prioritize opportunities based on profitability and likelihood of conversion. This feature enhances decision-making and focuses efforts on the most promising deals.
Digital Ad Sales
Billing and Revenue Schedule Management: CloudSense automatically handles revenue recognition and billing reconciliation rules for companies in the advertising space, which leads to a 50% reduction in invoicing-related errors. There’s no manual data entry between sales, provisioning, and billing systems, and changes are automatically synced with finance systems.
Comprehensive Campaign and Order Management: The platform unifies sales, AdOps, and finance teams by providing a single system to manage, book, sell, and deliver cross-media campaigns. This integration streamlines workflows, enhances collaboration, and improves the efficiency of campaign execution.
Seamless Ad Server Integration: CloudSense integrates with various ad servers, billing systems, ERP, and fulfillment systems, ensuring real-time data synchronization and efficient campaign monitoring. This connectivity allows for automated updates and optimizations, enhancing the effectiveness of ad delivery and performance tracking.
Prices
CloudSense CPQ Pricing
CloudSense does not publicly disclose specific pricing information for its CPQ platform. To tailor its solutions to each business’s unique needs and scale, pricing is available only upon request by contacting the company directly for a personalized quote.
Is there anyone else out there?
Competitors and Alternatives for CloudSense CPQ
There are Cloudsense CPQ alternatives, each with its strengths and weaknesses. At the enterprise level, businesses need features like advanced pricing and configuration abilities, scalability, and team collaboration. Other important factors to consider include price, ease of use, and customer support.
Top CloudSense CPQ Alternatives
DealHub CPQ
DealHub CPQ also integrates natively with Salesforce, so you can work deals within the Salesforce UI. However, its product suite integrates billing (including subscription billing), a digital sales room (DealRoom), and contract lifecycle management. It operates in a no-code environment, so you can customize and tailor the solution to your business needs without IT resources. And if you use Gong, integrating DealHub gives you more granular insights into deal activity, buyer engagement, and likelihood of deal closure compared to CloudSense. These features come together to make it the better solution for B2B SaaS vendors.
Nue CPQ
Nue CPQ is an excellent Salesforce-native alternative to CloudSense, designed to streamline RevOps for SaaS companies and high-growth startups. With tools like Quote Builder and Price Builder, Nue empowers sales teams to create dynamic, tailored quotes and configure pricing directly within Salesforce, eliminating the need for complex formulas. Its drag-and-drop interface and real-time quote visibility make the quoting process efficient and user-friendly. Meanwhile, Price Builder allows RevOps teams to test and adapt pricing models like bundles and tiers, ensuring businesses can quickly respond to market changes. Nue’s seamless Salesforce integration and customer lifecycle management capabilities make it a powerful, flexible solution for modern sales teams.
Oracle
Oracle CPQ makes it easy to configure new products by allowing users to drag and drop product options into a “cart.” It also offers the ability to quickly generate quotes and contracts. Oracle CPQ also improves compliance and risk management initiatives by tracking customer interactions and providing a complete audit trail. Its fully automated contract management capabilities make it easy to keep track of all contract changes and approvals. Its cloud-based system also allows users to access the software from anywhere. While it’s feature-rich and works perfectly with Oracle’s other products (like ERP and CRM), it comes with a greater IT burden to achieve a seamless end-to-end revenue process, making it better suited to large enterprises running on Oracle.
ConnectWise
ConnectWise CPQ offers a robust quote and proposal automation solution tailored to IT solution providers like MSPs, MSSPs, and VARs. It simplifies quoting with customizable templates, automated workflows, and seamless PSA integration, while real-time vendor connections ensure accurate pricing and availability data. With centralized product catalog management and advanced sales analytics powered by pre-built reports and Microsoft Power BI, ConnectWise CPQ empowers IT providers to streamline operations, gain actionable insights, and close more deals effectively.
SAP CPQ
SAP CPQ is a trusted alternative to CloudSense, offering a user-friendly interface, reliable performance, and robust support. It excels in key areas like product configuration, contract generation, and cost control, ensuring high user satisfaction. Designed for complex sales scenarios, SAP CPQ provides advanced configurability for telecoms and MSPs, handles intricate service bundles, and ensures accurate quotes. Its automated contract generation streamlines workflows, while real-time margin visibility empowers profitable decision-making. Seamlessly integrating with existing CRM, ERP, and billing systems, SAP CPQ eliminates data silos, enhances accuracy, and delivers a superior user experience to drive sales efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Valuable Insight From Real Customers
Gartner Peer Insights
Out of 43 reviews, CloudSense has a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars on Gartner Peer Insights. In their reviews, users note the software’s flexibility and seamless integration with Salesforce. However, some users mention that adapting to upgrades by Salesforce and Cloudsense can create challenges with the CPQ.
The reviewers and customer demographics are as follows:
Reviewer’s Company Size
- Less than $50M: 5%
- $50B-$1B: 49%
- $1B-$10B: 26%
- $10B+: 21%
Reviewer’s Industry
- Telecommunications: 42%
- Media: 21%
- IT Services: 16%
- Energy and Utilities: 7%
- Other: 14%
Reviewer’s Deployment Region
- Europe, Middle East and Africa: 37%
- North America: 37%
- Asia/Pacific: 26%
Gartner Peer Insights affirms that CloudSense provides a good omnichannel experience as cited by the featured review on their site.
FAQs
Common Questions and Answers
CloudSense CPQ is a Salesforce-native platform that focuses on helping businesses streamline their quote-to-cash processes. The CPQ tools are designed to simplify complex quoting and ordering processes, ensuring accuracy, efficiency, and consistency in pricing and product configuration. By leveraging CloudSense CPQ within the Salesforce environment, businesses can enhance their sales processes, improve quote accuracy, and provide a more streamlined experience for both sales teams and customers.
Salesforce CPQ and CloudSense are both solutions designed to streamline the quote-to-cash process within the Salesforce ecosystem, with some distinctions. Salesforce CPQ is a Salesforce product, while CloudSense is a separate company providing CPQ solutions that integrate with Salesforce. Salesforce CPQ caters to a broad range of industries and business sizes, offering a high level of flexibility and customization through the Salesforce platform.
Salesforce CPQ caters to a broad range of industries and business sizes. On the other hand, CloudSense focuses more on industries such as telecommunications, media, and utilities, making it a preferred choice for businesses dealing with complex product structures.
On the other hand, CloudSense has a more specific focus on industries such as telecommunications, media, and utilities, making it a preferred choice for businesses dealing with complex product structures. Additionally, CloudSense is known for its strength in handling renewals and subscriptions, making it particularly suitable for organizations with subscription-based models.
Rhonda Bavaro excels in boosting SaaS companies’ growth through innovative content marketing, thriving in the dynamic sales tech industry amidst evolving technologies that drive revenue acceleration.