Salesforce CPQ & Billing

Absolutely delightful - I fully recommend it.

Overall its easy to maintain and allows for native SF features which makes it a great add on for customers already using Sales Cloud.

It streamlines approvals somewhat, and makes for a more standardized quoting system, so I understand the business reasons for switching to it, but from an end user perspective, it has been a huge pain to use.

Large scale tracking of employee, customer and device information to include maintenance and tasking necessities. Generates an integrated DB option that allows for global tracking, management and metric options with a broad reporting feature.

We looked at a few CPQ tools to help us automate a few obstacles in our (complicated) SaaS model. Steelbrick was the best solution out there for your buck.

Pros:
We were in a situation where our current (custom) CPQ solution did not allow the flexibility to add new products, adjust order forms, support local currencies (without an expensive developer resource) and it really empowered out business to address new opportunities by being able to do these things.
There are a lot of objects and we needed to use them all to make our multi-year product model work and it seemed daunting, but really, I was able to pick up how everything fit together after a few days of diving in and playing around.
The support and customer service team are absolutely amazing. Special shoutout to my CSM (Kelly Wilson) who responds day and night to emails and is always willing to find time to get on a call. Our primary support agent (ChrisL) is also really smart and easy to work with.
No implementation of CPQ goes perfect, but we had great implementation engineer (ChrisT) and implementation consultant (ChrisH) who really PARTNERED with us to make sure the tool was what we needed to accomplish our goals.
You can trust the product management team. We have already seen features that they have promised to us (contract amendments, for example).

Cons:
- We did not realize this until after implementation (and product management has promised us that it is a high priority), but the CPQ tool will only work in full data replica sandboxes. Partial and dev sandboxes do not bring over the 20+ object records that come with Steelbrick. You will need to make sure you also consider some data migration solution between environments. You can do this yourself. I did it once successfully and it took 4 hours. :(
- CPU timeout errors. If you have complicated pricing on multi-year products and you make changes to those quotes (for example changing a 5 year deal to a 3 year deal), we often get a "CPU timeout" error. We can't ever get beyond this. We need to build a new quote. :( Again, Steelbrick product management has assured us that this will be addressed in future releases with more precise code.