Apttus Tutorial for Beginners

In this article, we will be going through the details about Apttus and at the same time, we will explore the internals of the tool altogether. This is how we have organized the whole article to provide the best about Apttus.

In this Apttus Tutorial, I will be discussing the following topics:

What is Apttus? Why Apttus? What is Apttus CPQ? What is Salesforce CPQ? What is the role of Apttus in Salesforce? Overview of Apttus CPQ and Salesforce CPQ Apttus CPQ Vs. Salesforce CPQ What is CPQ Software? Understanding Apttus Custom Settings Constraint Rules X-Author for template

What is Apttus?

Apttus, in simple words, is a quote-to-cash software provider that drives important business processes between a potential buyer’s purchase and the revenue realization. It is also the Organization dealing with leading Configure Price Quote (CPQ) software, E-commerce, and Contract Management software.

Why Apttus?

Apttus is the leader with an award-winning Quote-to-Cash software, and it makes its presence being known in this line of business. If the very first quote presented to the customer has the capability and possibility of sealing the deal, then there can’t be anything else that a Sales team can ask for.

Having said that, the following are the reasons that one can accredit for Apttus being the market leader:

• It provides very strong product offerings to its customers
• It is the leader in the Quote-to-Cash line of business
• Provides a very rich Configure Price Quote (CPQ) functionality
• It has a very great market presence because of its successful product line
• It is committed to innovation that leads the market in its future

What is Apttus CPQ?

Apttus CPQ (Configure Price Quote) is the sales tool from the Apttus line of product offerings which are designed to serve the sole purpose of providing reliable and accurate quotes in real-time. This not only helps the companies to gain this information but also enables Sales teams with cross-sells.

With the Apttus CPQ tool, organizations gain better leads into their newer sales, and cross-sells and sale cycles are quadrupled as well.

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What is Salesforce CPQ?

Salesforce CPQ is an offering from the Salesforce end, which is for organizations to provide the most accurate and reliable price quotes, given the required information, such as the product configuration.

These applications take into consideration many factors like discounts, features, quantities, customization, etc., and then provide quote prices precisely quick, ly and accurate. As Salesforce has its own Cloud offering, the tool can be used on-premise or on the cloud (just as the need demands).

What is the role of Apttus in Salesforce?

Apttus Omni is built atop of Salesforce, which is one of the most scalable and most secure platform clouds. It means that Apttus Quote-to-Cash (QTC) tool already inherits most of the amazing features that Salesforce has to provide for its customer base, such as the ability to run businesses with multiple languages and currencies, mobile access, and last but not the least, analytics.

Overview of Apttus CPQ and Salesforce CPQ:

Apttus CPQ, as discussed earlier, is an innovative CPQ offering from the Apttus line of offerings, which is powered by undying artificial intelligence. Salesforce CPQ, on the other hand, is fully native and built on all features of Salesforce which not only automates quote generation but also the order and contract processes.

Apttus CPQ Vs. Salesforce CPQ

In this section, we will see how the major factors of these CPQ solutions fare with respect to each of these tools. Both of these tools are the market trendsetters in the same line of business, but when in comparison, Salesforce leads the way with its wonderful offerings. With no further delay, we shall take a look into these factors for each of these tools:

Feature	Apttus CPQ	Salesforce CPQ
Free Trial	There is no free trial available with the Apttus CPQ tool	There is a free trial available with the Salesforce CPQ tool
Ease of Use, Setup, Support	Ease of use, Ease of setup, and Quality Support is poor when compared to that of Salesforce CPQ	Ease of use, Ease of setup, and Quality Support is better when compared to Apttus CPQ
Configuration (Product Catalog)	Has a wider variety on its Product catalog	Has a wider variety on its Product catalog
Pricing	Has a flexible pricing strategy with Apttus CPQ. It provides more discounts than that of Salesforce CPQ.	The pricing strategy is not better than that of Apttus CPA. It doesn’t provide as many discounts as that of Apttus CPQ. Renewals are better handled as there is the backing of Salesforce’s commitment to this feature.commitment
Price Model	Quote-based price model	Annual subscription-based price model
Cost	Cost is available to the customer by quote	Cost is made available to customers as $75
Available features	Provides a guided quote creation Quote scoring Provides necessary approval workflow Cross-sell and upsell recommendations Change price Discount recommendations Commission calculation	Price, Quote Proposal generator Order, Renewal Manages Contracts Product Configurator Subscription billing Guided Selling Revenue recognition
Customer Support	Support over Phone Live Support Training	Support over Phone Tickets
Integrations that are supported	Apttus Intelligent CPQ tool integrates pretty well with the other available Apttus solutions like Apttus Accelerate, Apttus Intelligent Contract Management, X-Author	Salesforce CPQ tool integrates well with an application named Kenandy Cloud ERP

What is CPQ Software?

Configure Price Quote (CPQ) is the term that gets used pretty much in the Business to Business (B2B) industry which in turn describes tools that help sellers quote configurable products that are complex in nature.

As discussed earlier, either the Apttus CPQ or the Salesforce CPQ software tools help companies to precisely define good prices across a plethora of changing variables. It could be understood as a tool that helps determine the price of the whole product based on what gets selected finally for the actual product configuration.

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Checkout Our  Frequently Asked Apttus Interview Questions

Understanding Apttus Custom Settings:

Custom Settings will be required to be updated, especially the “Instance URL” when all the required packages are installed successfully. Then, these additional configurations would be saved as part of the Custom Settings. This would be available for you to access, update from the tool itself as all of these are post-installation configurations.

To set the “Instance URL”, you will have to go through the Custom Settings tab on the tool.

Constraint Rules:

A business rule is considered to be a Constraint rule in the world of the Apttus CPQ software tool. These are nothing but rules that let you exclude, include, recommend, validate, and replace products based on certain business logic. These are header-level objects that have a certain condition linked with a certain action.

These can be better understood as the control statements in any of the programming languages that we come across. These have three parts, and they are mentioned below.

• Rule Header - It is the one that has a brief summary of the rule itself
• Rule Condition - This is more like the “if” part of your business rule, and lets you define it.
• Rule Action - This is the action that needs to be implemented if the above rule condition is met successfully.

X-Author for template:

Apttus’ X-Author for CPQ is a tool that is Excel-based to provide the quote applications for the Apttus CPQ tool as such. Users can have the luxury of being within an excel and complete the whole quote lifecycle, and at the same time interact with Apttus CPQ products, approvals, and pricing.

The quotes are always maintained within the CRM solution. The whole quote process is available as a menu in Excel and more options are made available based on the processing stage. This makes it very much simple for the users to understand where is the actual quote process in its whole life cycle.

Some of its key capabilities are as follows:

• Browse through the available CRM opportunities
• Data retrieval from your CRM system into Excel along with the appropriate pricing
• Initiation of the quote approval cycle once a quote is submitted for approval
• Ability to send these quotes to the Customers from Excel itself.
• Quote generation using artifacts that are already stored in your CRM applications.
• Has the ability to store both structured and unstructured data inside a CRM application.

Conclusion:

In this article, we have seen what a CPQ tool is all about and also understood the internals of the Apttus CPQ tool. We have also seen how it fares when in comparison with the Salesforce CPQ tool.

Though it is not a real negative as against Salesforce CPQ, it is a good competitor to Salesforce CPQ - finding its usage in top organizations. We have also seen many more details on this CPQ offering from Apttus explaining in great detail about these processes and the like.

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