Apttus Enhances CPQ, CLM Solutions

Apttus has updated its Configure-Price-Quote and Contract Lifecycle Management solutions with advanced artificial intelligence-based capabilities that help companies automate and optimize their revenue generation and management of commercial relationships.

The highlight of Apttus' latest CPQ release involves SmartCart, which provides greater quoting flexibility for sales reps, allowing them to accelerate quote generation. Other elements include the following:

• Location-based Quotes, providing flexibility to map to how customers want to buy from companies;
• Intellisplit, to break down complex quotes in a manageable format; and
• SNAP Performance including scaling up to quotes of 10,000 line items.

"Our customers are looking for flexibility and agility in their solutions to gain advantage over their competitors," said Apttus Senior Vice President of Product Eric Carrasquilla in a statement. "SmartCart allows sales reps to address the way their customers want to buy, and they can do it at scale with incredible performance."

The updates to Contract Lifecycle Management are especially beneficial for legal teams that oversee countless agreements and wade through dense contract libraries to find information supporting revenue opportunities, reduce contract cycles, and manage risk. They include the following:

• Parallel Review, allowing users to update agreements concurrently while reconciling redlines, updates, and other changes from multiple reviewers;
• In-Document View, which lets users work in an actual document instead of having to toggle back and forth between an agreement and the application; and
• Progress Dashboards, which show a real-time view into the progress of different streams, allowing teams to identify areas needing faster execution or support.

"Extended time to execute and lack of visibility are the top challenges our customers raise to us when we first meet," Carrasquilla said. "Apttus CLM eliminates the need for contract owners to chaperone the redlining process by turning a time-consuming serial review into a collaborative one. We are putting the power of contract discovery and lifecycle management into the hands of our customers so they can support their business operations at the pace required in today's service-based, SLA-driven digital economy."

Apttus is also adding conversational sophistication to MAX, its artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant that helps sales and legal teams execute important tasks with Apttus CPQ and CLM. The upgrades include the following:

• Natural Language Understanding (NLU), to pull out what users actually imply beyond what they literally say;
• Out-of-the-Box Conversation Libraries, a prebuilt collection of common conversations for sales and legal users; and
• Integratiobn with collaboration tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Salesforce1 Mobile.