Boston Scientific transforms quoting with Conga CPQ for Rebate Management

Challenge

European markets are becoming more complex and competitive every year, with group purchasing organizations, cross-border sales, and an elaborate system of discounts, rebates, and deals. At the time of evaluation, Boston Scientific was already a customer of Conga CPQ in North America and LATAM, but the EMEA team was just beginning a project to evaluate different CPQ solutions.  

Boston Scientific's EMEA's legacy tech stack—which included Salesforce as well as custom, home-grown solutions—had been in place for more than a decade. It was built with the intent of creating a seamless end-to-end platform to support revenue management, but the technology was no longer up to the task. 

Solution

Although BSCI was already using Conga CPQ in other regions, the EMEA team had the autonomy to choose a solution that best met their needs. They narrowed the list of solutions down to five finalists, including Conga CPQ.  

To help with the evaluation process, BSCI held a series of stakeholder workshops. End users from across the organization—including IT, finance, operations, sales, account managers, and more—had an opportunity to share their perspectives on business needs.  

This ensured that the selection team had a holistic view of how the chosen CPQ system would impact users’ day-to-day lives. It also gave them clear insight into the functionality each team would need to work efficiently. 

Ultimately, the BSCI EMEA team chose Conga for their CPQ needs, largely based on Conga’s willingness and commitment to solve a complex problem that BSCI was facing in EMEA.  

Rebates represent a significant percentage of BSCI’s revenue strategy in EMEA, so they needed robust functionality in their CPQ solution to manage complex rebate structures. However, at the time, Conga’s CPQ product did not include the rebate functionality they required.  

To address this shortcoming, Conga put the necessary rebate functionality on their product roadmap. The Boston Scientific team collaborated with Conga’s product engineers to bring the new features to life and deliver them in time for BSCI’s implementation.  

This was an unusual sales cycle, to say the least, and the process had its share of speed bumps. But in the end, BSCI got exactly the product they needed—and the experience was well worth the risk.