Nteli vs. traditional CPQ.
Two different regimes, honestly stated
Traditional CPQ — Salesforce CPQ/Revenue Cloud, and in manufacturing, platforms like Tacton or Configure One — assumes a particular shape of company: sellers configure inside the pipeline, pricing and approvals route through sales ops, and someone owns rule authoring and administration as a job. When that's you, it works, and the payoff is a quoting motion embedded in the system your revenue already runs through. That's not a concession — it's half of our business. We implement it.
The Agent Pricing Engine assumes a different shape: a $20M–$500M manufacturer where quotes start as an emailed RFQ, the estimator is the bottleneck, and nobody is going to staff a rule-authoring team. The intake is inverted — paste the RFQ, the spec, or the email, and the AI runs the conversation while a deterministic engine sizes, checks and prices from cited rules: every number and every refusal shows its source, the code section or the catalog page. It's delivered as an MCP server, so it runs inside Claude rather than inside your CRM.
The comparison, straight
| Traditional CPQ | Nteli Agent Pricing Engine | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Sales teams quoting in the CRM | Estimators and application engineers at the RFQ desk |
| Intake | Seller clicks through a configurator | Paste the RFQ, spec or email; the AI asks what's missing |
| Rules | Authored and maintained by your admin team | Vertical starter packs; your team overrides, governed and audited |
| Where it runs | Inside the CRM | Inside the AI assistant (Claude, over MCP) and the web app |
| Program shape | Implementation project, then administration | Self-serve start; fixed-fee onboarding if we build your pack |
| Transparency | Varies by platform and configuration | Deterministic, every answer cited; identical facts → identical quote |
| Best fit | Enterprise sales orgs; configured commercial products | Mid-market configure-to-order and engineered systems |
Two honest caveats the table can't hold: first, traditional CPQ platforms are mature in ways a young product isn't — breadth of billing integrations, ecosystem, marketplace apps. Second, if your sellers — not estimators — are the ones quoting, the CRM-embedded motion is a feature, not a limitation.
The question isn't which tool is better. It's where your quote actually starts: a seller's pipeline, or an estimator's inbox.
Using both
Some companies should run both: the engine quotes engineered products at the estimating desk, and the won order flows into the CRM/ERP quote-to-cash motion — contracts, billing, revenue recognition — which is exactly the integration work our practice does. They're two halves of the same Quote-to-Comply pipeline, and we're unusual in building for both.
Test it against your regime.
Send a real RFQ, names removed — see what the engine does with it. Or if your quoting genuinely lives in the CRM, talk to the practice side about CPQ done right.