u/UnfairDifficulty4420

We have been messing around with ai for sales over the past 4 months. I gotta admit it is doing the boring things pretty well. New reps are building quotes in 20 mins instead of 35, emails content is better and pricing mistakes have dropped.

But our win rate has barely moved.

One deal really stood out. Ai helped a new rep put together a clean enterprise quote in less than 20 mins. We all thoght that it was sweet and we can now close more opportunities. Instead the deal sat in procurement for almost 4 weeks bc there er changes needed by the legal team. also another stakeholder jumped in late. Are you seeing this in your ai sales processes or we are missing something?

some books start slow and others become weird along the way. at that point you feel like dropping them.which book was like that but you kept pushing to the end?

For the last few months it has been hectic trying to untangle our CPQ setup which had over 100 pricing rules and a good number of them came from a consultant who left long before I joined. Some changes have def helped. We merged 20+ product bundles, quote generation is quicker and moving approvals out of email into the system has made the whole process much easier to track.

The other side is that every fix is coming with another thing I have to maintain. Now I've got pricing docs to keep updated plus slack pings every time someone wants to change a pricing rule bc I'm the only person who knows how it all fits together. It feels like replacing old complexity with new admin work.

At this point i'm spending more time managing CPQ than I was before the cleanup started. Has anyone found a way to modernize their CPQ without becoming its full time caretaker?

We are finally thinking about CPQ migration and the more we research about it the harder it is getting. Talked to one RevOps team that said their product catalog was clean but undocumented Apex in pricing rules added 3 months to the project. For those who have been through a Salesforce CPQ migration, what part slowed you down?

Salesforce CPQ has been our plug but we have mixed feelings. It integrates well with salesforce, handles complex pricing and has a huge support ecosystem. However it is kinda complex and requires significant admin effort.

For anyone who has moved away from Salesforce CPQ or seriously evaluated alternatives what was your experience? I've been looking at alternatives like nue/dealhub/maxio but it's hard to separate marketing claims from real users experiences.

Our sales team wants to implement a CPQ solution and somehow it has landed on me to vet the technical side of things. I have no background in sales tools. What I care about is how it integrates with our existing stack, how painful the implementation will be, and whether we will be dependent on a consultant forever to make changes. What should I actually be asking vendors and what are the red flags to watch for?