Best Salesforce CPQ Implementation Practices to Follow

Understanding what the customer needs, keeping an account of all their custom preferences, and pricing is a huge task in itself.

Sales teams begin with reporting and accounting for this huge data on Excel sheets. All of this together sounds like dodging a bullet. But the slightest error here or there - BOOM! There can be a loss of revenue or, in the worst case, the customer is gone.

If you find this relatable and if your sales team is spending time on repetitive and manual work, this blog is for you.

To all these glitchy situations - CPQ is the solution.

Configure. Price and Quote.

CPQ is the Salesforce package that can enhance your sales department’s productivity. It automates common quoting tasks and can be directly used by the sales team, resellers, and partners. Or it can be simply integrated into your E-Commerce Portal. So, let's learn about how it works.

How Does CPQ Work?

1. Configure

The first step of the quoting procedure is configuration. It mainly involves putting different elements to create a final product.

For example, a laptop manufacturing company can configure various options like a specific type of display, storage, graphic card, RAM, and much more. That’s a suitable example for the B2C use case.

But for B2B, the configuration process involves a catalogue with products in different configurations. For B2B quoting processes, CPQ helps the sales team to place various configuration options which align with your client's needs.

2. Price

This step consists of major decisions making for pricing and can be a task full of headaches. Usually, most organizations have list prices for their products along with pricing curves that have guidelines.

Despite this, the sales team relies on the sales persons to provide the final discount to the customer. But how can they figure out the product price on their own?

If the price is too high, there can be a loss of the business deal. And if the price is too low, it will involve several rounds of approvals and margin losses.

In this case, CPQ can solve this problem by providing the salespersons with the exact guidance they needed to know how to price the products. CPQ can leverage the sales process with AI pricing solutions to figure out the right price of the product for a particular customer at that time.

Don't forget to check out: Learn All About Salesforce CPQ Discount Schedule

3. Quote

For getting the configuration and pricing information to the customer, the sales team uses manual tools like Excel.

With CPQ, the salesperson can go a step ahead by creating their proposals while avoiding the time-consuming way of cutting and pasting the information. The CPQ solution can solve challenges with one click.

All a salesperson has to do is include all the products and all the prices in a PDF or a word document and send it ahead to the customer.

How Do Organizations Benefit from Using Salesforce CPQ?

Salesforce CPQ initiates sales automation, thus improving the overall accuracy and reducing errors. Your sales team can quote various offerings with increased confidence and conviction. This empowers the employees and indirectly strengthens the process flow of sales.

CPQ takes the sales processes to the highway of sales productivity instead of taking the never-ending approval lane.

Moreover, Salesforce CPQ also shortens your approval cycles and payment cycles. This helps to reduce a lot of cost and time spent on sales and customers. Resulting in faster ROI of the technology taken.  These Salesforce CPQ benefits make more and more B2B organizations adopt CPQ.

Best Salesforce CPQ Implementation Practices

• Practices for Salesforce CPQ Installation

With the installation for All Users, every CPQ user will have access to the resources made available when a license is granted to a specific user group. You can update the Sandboxes from Production org whenever you have the opportunity to begin a new development project.

Also, you can authorize a new computation service from the configuration settings after the installation is finished. Run-Post-Install Scripts if the status is "Failed." You can contact a Salesforce consultant or resource for assistance in case the issue is still not resolved.

• Practices for General Development

General Development is required to provide clear data accepted on the product catalogue. Having received more recent attention, most of the resolution is built on a solid product load that includes,

• Product Codes
• Product Families
• Sub-Families
• Additional Descriptions
• Categorization Data

After uploading and defining the products, bundles and configuration must be enforced.

When the prices are set and the products, configuration, and prices are clearly defined. You can concurrently carry out,

• Guided Selling
• Approvals
• Estimated Models
• Renewals
• Revisions

Last but not least, it is important to check Salesforce CPQ functionality first-that involves,

• Auto-mapping
• Price Rules
• Product Rules
• Summary Variables

and much more.

• Practices for a Better Product Catalog

A product's extract should be included in the product catalogue with as much information as possible.

Understanding the characteristics required to define and locate a product in the catalogue is also crucial.

You must check whether goods with the same name but different quantities or term lengths can be eliminated using block pricing or discount schedules.

• Practices for Configuration / Product Setup and Pricing

To associate Product Rules with bundles, you must configure Configuration Rules. This will reduce the number of searches connected to a price rule when utilizing lookup queries.

• Practices for Faster Approvals (Advanced)

You might need different information for different approvals. You can set separate email templates with specific approval rules to make it easier.

• Practices for Quote Templates

Usually exposing a dynamic term requires a summary variable or many conditions, in this case, you must use quote terms.

When pasting HTML code into the WYSIWYG editor, you must keep in mind that there may be "breaks" in the code. It is also necessary to review the source before pasting it into the editor.

So, you should verify that the HTML tags are formed correctly and no merging fields are interrupted by HTML inserts.

Check out another amazing blog by Bolt Today here: How to Choose the Best Salesforce Consulting Services for your Business?

• Practices for Deployment

Licenses are a must in production organizations, even though they are not critical in sandboxes. After deploying in production, you must confirm that each user has a license for a Salesforce CPQ privilege configured.

But you must also remember that the managed components cannot be added to a Change Set.

• Practices Based on the Process

The key to making good advancement is having a solid understanding of the sales procedure. It is possible if you follow these subsequent practices,

• Produce ACV opportunity value, calculate MCV/ACV and synchronize to opportunity products using twin fields and workflows.
• Build a better and more flexible renewal pricing technique, and combine the List Renewal Method with price rules. The same or uplift.
• Expand product choice, and use virtual packages.
• Offer a form of record locking for SBAA, use record types.
• Evade confusion, and distinguish between items structured as assets, subscriptions, and one-time subscriptions.
• Gain an unprorated subscription, and use price rules.
• Ensure that the product and pricing automation works with all the currencies, and enable multi-currency.
• In your line editor package settings, select Enable Item Upgrades to replace one asset with another.

For every customer-driven organization, the final goal is to improve the customer experience. Salesforce CPQ not only enhances the user experience but also helps you accelerate your deal velocity. The standardized sales process enforced by CPQ makes your sales processes faster and more organized.

If your sales team is spending more time on manual and repetitive reporting and documentation, you must try out the Salesforce CPQ and also adopt these implementation practices!