Dealhub CPQ Review

Disclaimer - I am not affiliated with Dealhub, and I was not paid or compensated by them in any way for this article.

We launched Dealhub at my current job about a year ago. If you're not familiar with it, Dealhub is a CPQ tool that's a direct competitor to Salesforce CPQ. Having helped with two different Salesforce CPQ implementations in my career I can confidently say that implementing it is about as much fun as chewing through some stale beef jerky with a pair of gelatin dentures. One of Dealhub's primary selling points is that they're much easier to get off the ground and running.

I'm going to go over how well Dealhub handles each component of CPQ, as well as some general thoughts on managing it as an Admin. Also, we've integrated Dealhub with Salesforce here. I don't think it functions too differently with a different CRM like Hubspot, but keep that in mind.

One quick note first - if you're not familiar with what "CPQ" entails this review might lack some context for you. It wouldn't be a bad idea to go through something like this Trailhead module on it first just to get the basics. Though if you want to skip that and read on anyways go ahead. I admire that questionable optimism of yours.

C - Configure

Dealhub does this part pretty well. They have this thing they call a "playbook" you set up that creates the guided selling experience your sales reps will go through to select products and create a quote. Setting up the playbook is intuitive, and it's really customizable. You can do things like have reps answer questions about the type of deal this is, have that conditionally surface other questions to ask, then have the answers to those questions determine the products that will be on the quote. It's easy to make sure your reps are only answering what they need to. You can also sync the answers to these questions back to the opportunity, quote, or quote lines back in Salesforce.

This is one of Dealhub's strongest features by far. My users took to it quickly and without complaint, which is about the best thing I can say about a tool like this.

P - Price

Now we start to run into some challenges. If you have a relatively simple product and pricing model, you'll be fine. If you have really complex bundling needs with a variety of prices that need to apply conditionally to those bundles based on things like presence of other products/bundles or whether or not it's a prime number day on the calendar you're probably not going to be successful.

One of our CSMs straight up told me in one meeting, "Don't use the bundle functionality, it's not worth it." This isn't to say you can't do some bundling-like configuration, but anything you do will probably be done manually via the playbook and it could get messy fast.

Their pricing approvals functionality is fine. You can set up tiered approvals based on things like certain product discounts or entire deal discounts. I have no real complaints here, it does the job.

Regarding subscriptions - managing subscriptions is something Dealhub can do. It requires some extra configuration/integration with Salesforce, but it's possible. It requires you install an additional managed package that creates a subscription custom object. The way it works is you query subscription records from Dealhub, display that data in the playbook/guided selling, and then the reps can make changes to the subscription data from there. The way that data gets back to Salesforce is kind of messy though, as you have to route all data through the quote/quote line objects. Changes are not applied directly to the subscription records which means you have to automate that yourself.

Q - Quote

How Dealhub manages quoting is a mixed bag. You use raw text or tagged word docs as sub-templates that you combine into a primary template your reps generate. You can do things like have some sections only show up if certain products are present or if playbook questions are answered a certain way. Pretty straightforward. However the tool for this has some really counterintuitive aspects to it and it took us multiple attempts to get things to work properly. Doc-Gen glitches and issues have been by far the most time consuming problem for me with Dealhub.

For example, we had one fun day where I deployed a new custom quote template for one of the reps. What I didn't know is that whatever template is on top of the list (you can sort the templates via drag and drop) becomes the default template for everyone, including for deals in progress. My reps were understandably annoyed with me after some of their clients asked why the contract they had received was for a different company.

On a more positive note, a really powerful and unique feature they have is this thing called the "Dealroom". It's a generated web page you can design and configure that your reps publish to your clients in order to share information and facilitate getting signatures. It's a bit like making a custom Docusign page for your clients. My reps love the dealroom. One of the sneaky things about it is that it doesn't go out of its way to make it easy to see what you're signing. If you're a buyer you can still review the docs and everything, it's just that Dealhub makes it very easy to breeze past doing so. As a result we had around an 80% reduction in redlines (as reported by both the company lawyer and my reps) and we get docs signed significantly faster. Make of that what you will.

Regarding redlines. They do have the ability to facilitate redlines via the Dealroom. Our lawyer is very insistent on doing things in Word only and we haven't used it, so I can't say much about it beyond that it exists.

There is a Docusign integration. It's awful. Don't get Dealhub if a good integration with Docusign is a must-have for you.

Managing Dealhub as an Admin

It's not my favorite. Everything in Dealhub is managed via these monolithic "versions". You need to make a change? You make a new draft version, make your change, then deploy the new version. If you're the only one managing your instance it's fine enough. However if people are working in the same version at the same time, even if it's in completely different sections, they'll be overriding each other constantly without anyone realizing.

You can't branch/merge versions either. If you make multiple copies of a version, someone will need to manually re-do their changes in whatever version you decide to use later. We've had to implement a strict "one person at a time" policy, and if that person gets a project that ends up taking a week to finish it means that Sales might have to wait that long to get a different random 5 minute change put in. It's a pain.

Dealhub's integration with Salesforce works fine enough, but it's an enormous headache to get working correctly. Dealhub spreads its configuration settings around multiple different menus, and very few things are labelled clearly enough. For example, if you have some custom quote/quote line fields you want to have Dealhub populate in Salesforce they're in two different sections, and neither of those sections do much to tell you that's what they're for. Oh and by the way neither of those sections are in the "Salesforce Settings" menu.

Ultimately we've gotten everything to work the way we needed, but it took a lot of reverse engineering and back and forth with our CSM. Their online documentation is very hit or miss with this stuff, though it's gotten a lot better in the time since we launched.

One final observation - we've had Dealhub go down during the last week of the month multiple times. It's been supremely frustrating to my reps for obvious reasons. I'm optimistic we'll have less of this going forward, but if you end up getting Dealhub make sure you have a contingency plan in case things go down at a bad time.

TLDR

Dealhub is an excellent CPQ tool that is a great fit for customers who don't have the time, money, or patience for dealing with Salesforce CPQ. It definitely is a lot easier to get off the ground, and once you've learned to deal with some of its more obnoxious quirks it can deliver heaps of value as long as your product model isn't too crazy. At the same time, building and maintaining Dealhub as an admin can be incredibly frustrating. That shouldn't stop you from getting it, but expect there to be ample growing pains while you learn the platform.

Thanks for reading. If you have any feedback or notes, feel free to send that my way at nick@nickbryner.com or hit me up on LinkedIn. If you enjoyed this, consider subscribing to my newsletter. I promise I won't spam you.