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Conga named a Leader in the Gartner CPQ Magic Quadrant for 2020

4 min read
Kelli Blystone
Social and Blog Manager Conga
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Today we are proud to announce that Conga has been positioned a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for CPQ (configure-price-quote)* Applications for the fourth time running!  

Gartner Magic Quadrants evaluate vendors within a given market according to their ability to execute and the completeness of their vision, and we are one of 17 vendors positioned in the Leader Quadrant. It is our belief that we were named a Magic Quadrant Leader because our CPQ products offer a broad set of capabilities suited to most industries, and integrate easily with Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce Partner Communities.

We believe our focus on the customer, and creating a tool that is primarily designed to empower teams, came through in Gartner’s evaluation. When it comes to configuring complex products and services and delivering accurate quotes, sales teams need to be equipped with the tools to help them sell effectively and faster than the competition. Conga CPQ uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to actually make the sales organization smarter, empowering them to quote complex products and services faster and more accurately, ultimately leading to bigger closed deals at a higher win rate. 

Why does CPQ matter?

In 2019, the CPQ application market grew by 15.5%, to an estimated $1.42 billion, according to Gartner. That’s because, for industries with complex products, services, and channels, a CPQ solution can be the difference between winning and losing a deal. CPQ picks up where the CRM ends by making complex product, pricing, and business rules available to sales reps and partners in real-time. As a result, they always have the information, guidance, and tools they need to quickly and accurately configure, price, and quote a deal. CPQ also directs the behavior of reps and partners to achieve stronger business outcomes.

And while the market continues to grow, it remains highly competitive and fragmented, with no one vendor taking more than 17% market share. So for organizations who are in the market for a CPQ solution, choosing a vendor can be overwhelming. The Gartner Magic Quadrant identifies leaders in the space to help ease this process, outlining strengths and features that set vendors apart from the rest of the market.

We believe Conga was chosen as a leader due to the strengths identified in our solution selling, deployment, and implementation. Conga’s out-of-the-box pricing, promotions, and subscription ramps were among the most complete evaluated for this CPQ Magic Quadrant. With more than six deployments of 10,000 users or more, our CPQ solution is proven to work on an enterprise scale, and our wide range of implementation partners also contributes to our leader rank.

Where we’ll go from here

We’re proud of how we’ve performed in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CPQ Applications for 2020t, but we know there’s always room for improvement. The report analyzes a product’s strengths and also provides cautions for areas that are not as developed. After reviewing those caution areas reported on our CPQ solution, we’re looking to learn from the results and improve our offering, and we’ve already started this process.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant identified slow performance as an area for improvement in our CPQ solution, especially in cases with complex products and rules. As a CPQ provider, we know that companies who sell products with multiple configurations, thousands of SKUs, and complex pricing rules often experience delays in their quote deliveries due to slow data processing times. Because this is already a common challenge in this area, we want to ensure our product isn’t just another cog in this clunky wheel. So we’ve taken the first steps to improve our offerings to customers and we’ll continue to work to improve our customer experience. 

In our Summer 2020 product release, Conga announced the release of TurboEngines for our CPQ solution. TurboEngines is built on advanced microservices, and is designed to remove the hurdles that slow down data processing so organizations can work at the speed of their customers. This add-on solution takes the most complex data processing parts of CPQ—pricing and configuration—and processes the data in our own microservices, which are free from the limitations that exist within Salesforce. Once the data is processed, it returns to SFDC to be used in the Conga CPQ platform like normal. This entire process can improve data processing speeds by 10x**.

As we continue to develop the product roadmap for the all-new Conga, we will place a heavy focus on our CPQ solution and how we can improve to better serve our customers. Our four-year-streak as a Leader in this area only pushes us to continue to find ways to solve for our customers’ most critical needs, and to not only maintain our position as a leader, but to grow in our strongest areas and strengthen those areas where we need to improve.

We’re looking forward to next year’s report! 

View the full Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant for Configure Price Quote Applications here.

*Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Configure Price Quote Application Suites” by Mark Lewis, Dayna Ford. 28 September, 2020. Apttus merged with Conga in May 2020 and is known as Conga from then to date.

**Apttus Commercial Experience Report (ACE), a third party multinational study spotlighting the changing expectations, assumptions, and behavior of B2B buyers and sellers in the digital economy.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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