by Alex Reeves 
What is the Salesforce CPQ Price Waterfall?
The CPQ Pricing Waterfall is a multi-step process/sequence that utilises different prices and discounts to get us to the Net Price (this is the price field for the total of the Quote Line/Quote).
It is described as a waterfall as it works its way from top to bottom through the different prices and discounts/adjustments. There are multiple types of discounts that can be applied such as Partner Discounts and Distributor Discounts, however, not all of these may apply to your business process and therefore will have no impact on calculating your Net Price.
As standard, the Pricing Waterfall will follow a particular order, however, this can be manipulated by features such as Special Fields which can alter the order in which discounts are applied.
For example, by creating the ApplyAdditionalDiscountLast special field on the Quote object, Additional Discount will be applied at the end of the waterfall after all other discounts, rather than before the Partner and Distributor Discount. This means that our Customer Price is now our final total price rather than our Net Price.
There are also other Special Fields that can be utilised to adjust the Pricing Waterfall – check out my other blog here to learn more about Special Fields!
Below is a visual representation with descriptions of how the Pricing Waterfall flows within Salesforce CPQ:
How does it work?
Next, we’ll take a look at an example of how a product’s price can flow through the waterfall to get us to the Net Price.
For this example, we will use a starting original price of £120 and then assume a user has added a manual discount of £30 and an automated Partner Discount has been applied of 20% via a Price Rule.
Now, we’ll take a look at the same example to see how it translates to Salesforce CPQ via the Quote Line Editor screen:
To display how the pricing flows down the waterfall, the pricing & discount fields have been added to the Line Editor field set so that they are included as columns within the Quote Line Editor.
From the screenshot, we can see that the pricing matches the initial offline example as the pricing flows down the Pricing Waterfall once the manual Additional Discount and automated Partner Discount have been applied to give us a Net Price of £72.
Alex ReevesSenior Functional Consultant
Looking for help with CPQ?
Alex Reeves
Senior Functional Consultant
Looking for help with CPQ?
When to move to CPQ?
Salesforce CPQ is a powerful tool that helps you structure your product catalogue and reduce time spent on Quotes and Pricing products.
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Unsure as to whether you need to move from standard products and Quotes to CPQ? Check out this video, and get in touch with our team today.