“A lot of people have this perception that CPQ is an enterprise tool just for larger companies,” said Leo Choi, head of business operations at ToutApp, a 50-person, high-growth B2B technology startup. “But even for smaller companies, like us, and with simple processes, there’s a lot that CPQ can do to help you grow your business.”

ToutApp has used SteelBrick CPQ (configure, price, and quote) software for two years. Before they rolled it out, Leo had the same impression that CPQ was just for big businesses. Even though ToutApp didn’t have complex processes, they soon saw the value it could bring to their small startup. Leo says they, like other small- and medium-size businesses, weren’t even considering a CPQ system.

“We saw, historically, that CPQ systems were six-figure purchases, even up to seven figures,” Leo explained. “But when we saw SteelBrick, they built a solution that was affordable. It changed our minds. And since we were already using Salesforce, the native integration made SteelBrick even more attractive.”

Most companies, regardless of size, tend to look to CPQ after a big “oops” moment. Maybe they lost a deal because of a slow or error-riddled quote. Or maybe they left a large amount of revenue on the table after missing an up-sell opportunity, giving too large a discount, or using out-of-date pricing. For ToutApp, however, it was viewed more as a platform for growth rather than a mitigation of risk.

“We didn’t have a huge lesson-learned moment that drove our desire for CPQ,” Leo said. “We were getting feedback from prospects that our quotes needed some work, especially as we went after bigger customers. That was the first trigger. Then, as we started to grow, we started feeling the need for a tighter quoting process. That was another trigger. Those two issues combined--reworking quotes to satisfy prospects and seeing that our process had a lot of slack in it--pointed out that time spent creating a quote is time spent not selling. If we could fix both of those, there’s real ROI there.”

Leo explained their previous quoting process, where sales reps would ping other reps for a quote template that was close to their current deal. Then they would ping others to answer questions, and even others for approvals, but responses could take a day or more. After a few days of cobbling together a new quote and submitting it to a prospect, reps would get it pushed back for revisions.

“The time to create a quote and the resulting inaccuracy of that quote were our two biggest pains on the sales side,” Leo recalled.

As ToutApp started looking into a software solution to their pain, they quickly recognized what CPQ could do to mitigate the growing pains on the operations and finance sides of their business.

“When you’re small, a tight sales process is less important,” Leo added. “But as we grew, we started hitting obstacles in other parts of our business. Finance was seeing quoting errors that impacted revenue recognition. Operations was seeing errors that impacted customer roll-outs. Everyone had to jump through hoops and we could see it was becoming a drag on resources.”

With SteelBrick, which only took about two weeks to implement, ToutApp not only found a native Salesforce app that was easy to implement, they found a way to begin standardizing and improving their quoting processes. They also quickly realized other benefits, like allowing them to utilize existing Salesforce dashboards, workflows, and report, more visibility into opportunities, and automated approvals.

“When we first rolled SteelBrick out, the impression from sales reps was, ‘This is awesome,” said Leo. “And that was when we were just using the basics. When sales operations realized they could phase in other processes and other modules, the value really started to increase. The sales managers liked it even more, because they had more visibility into what was going on. Everything we could see was pretty powerful.”

Best of all, Leo said, the time to create a quote was reduced from “a day or two down to 90 seconds.” With many tools, especially those that are sales-focused, getting your teams to use them is sometimes the most difficult part. With SteelBrick, reps instantly saw the speed and efficiency provided and jumped on board.

Now after two years, ToutApp is still growing and still finding new uses for SteelBrick CPQ to support that continued growth.

“SteelBrick is definitely more strategic than just a quoting tool,” Leo said. “We keep finding new features, and the benefits to sales and operations and finance help drive other strategic conversations that we couldn’t have had without the insights from using SteelBrick. Given the right processes that SteelBrick helped us set, we get the right intelligence, the right reporting, and the ability to run our business better.”

It’s also been a great partnership, Leo added.

“In my role, I get to work with different tools, lots of different vendors. SteelBrick was one of the best I’ve ever worked with in terms of attentiveness, customer service, really taking our feedback, making us feel like our voice is heard and that the product gets better based on what feedback we give. The product is one thing, but their customer support is what sets them apart.”

To hear stories from ToutApp and other SteelBrick customers, check out our customer videos. Or, learn more about SteelBrick CPQ.