by Doug Gardner 
If you’re not familiar with Salesforce CPQ, it can seem complicated and confusing so I wanted to provide you with a five-minute overview of what it is and what it can do.
CPQ stands for Configure Price Quote and below are the three steps that it takes you through.
Make no mistake, it is a very powerful tool that will give great ROI in the right business case.
Configure
Configure your Products so that your Users (or partners in a Partner Community) select the correct products. This includes the following:
- Bundling products together and controlling their quantities from the main bundle quantity where applicable
- Ensuring that only the correct products can be selected. For instance only UK keyboards if the company is in the UK
- Asking dynamic questions via a ‘Guided Selling’ pop-up, resulting in suggested products being added to the quote
Price
Price your products correctly. For example:
- Automatic and User led discounting on a product/quote/account level
- Providing price models such as block/slab pricing or cost-plus pricing
- Advanced approvals
- Automatic creation of forecastable subscriptions and contracts
Quotes
Deliver a massive improvement on Standard Quotes. Enhanced features include:
- Easily present the correct information controlled from the linked Objects such as Quote, Opportunity, Primary Contact or Account
- Dynamically numbered and controlled Terms and Conditions to control which conditions are shown dependent on the products purchased
- Dynamically controlled product columns giving the flexibility to only show the discount column if you have given a discount (Don’t give them any ideas!)
- Integrate E-Signatory such as Docusign directly into the document and control it from Salesforce
That covers the basic abilities, but there is a lot more that Salesforce CPQ can do. The following tools are also handy!
Price Rules
These enable you to update a value in a field, for instance ensure that the number of paper packs sold is double that of the printers purchased.
Custom actions
With these you can automatically select pre-filtered lists of products. For instance enabling you to see all products which work for a set industry or all hardware products.
Configured Code Pattern
They enable you to create dynamic SKU’s for bundles depending on the products selected within it.
Multi Dimensional Quotes
They allow you to control how prices change throughout chronological points in your contract.
Retrospective alterations
Retrospective alterations to Contracts and Quotes which update the automatically created future Opportunities and Quotes.
So all of that looks good and magical but would it make sense for you? Possibly. If you answer yes to any of the following questions then it is definitely worth investigating.
- Do you have a large product library?
- Do your sales people sometimes select the wrong product causing you to upset a new customer or creating work for your finance team?
- Would you like to have better constructed Quotes documentation?
- If you could see all upcoming renewals and retrospectively control what is sold or to be sold would your financial reporting and forecasting work better?
- Would you like sales reports you can be more confident in?
- If you could save your sales team 10% of their time in Salesforce would they be able to close more business?
I have been involved in many CPQ projects and have come to see that more and more companies are finding ways in which CPQ can give them a competitive advantage in their industry. Because of this companies are releasing large ROI’s on the product. It is a big tool and can get complicated in its set up, but it is definitely worth finding out if it would work for you.
If you would like to discuss CPQ in more detail, do not hesitate to contact us.