Salesforce CPQ Implementation Guide: Tips and Challenges

Salesforce has been one of the reputed CRMs offering valuable data and assisting companies in handling their business better. Salesforce is now focusing more on making the sales process more organized and faster than it has ever been. If you ask heads of sales of any organization, you will come to know that shorter sales cycle, and sales productivity boosts are their dreams. We can say that innovation along with automation helps companies to create better results.

Turns out, the Salesforce CPQ tool is the answer to everything. With CPQ at their service, sales reps can control the discounts to sell their products with the help of the right automation system. Study suggests that CPQ platform enables faster quote generation and much fewer errors. And most importantly, it helps in increasing up-selling.

Basically, it is an enlargement of the CRM platform where organized sales is the key factor. The reasons why all Salesforce CPQ implementation partners consider it a crucial aspect of their organization is because-

Offers help with faster closing of deals
Companies control products sold
Organizations are at ease while launching new revenue resources.

In this blog, we present you with a comprehensive guide for implementing CPQ services and also discuss the challenges that are of major concern. But first, we need to understand what Salesforce CPQ is and why it is the need of the hour?

What is Salesforce CPQ?

Salesforce CPQ is software that is specially designed to allow companies to provide accurate pricing for product configurations. It also allows sales reps to generate quotes in a more quick and accurate manner.

Salesforce CPQ stands for Configure, Price, and Quote. CPQ is like a blessing for sales reps as it has made their pricing process much faster and easier. It delivers automated sales quoting abilities such as guided selling and pricing and discount schedules.

Salesforce CPQ services offer customizations, discounts, quantities, and several other optional features for the products. Above all, CPQ is a cloud-based platform offering you direct access to your CRM for better decision-making.

Let’s break down CPQ for better understanding-

Configuration Features

Allows real-time configuration of bundles through adding product’s components.
Setting up of min and max limits
Supports for exclusion and inclusion rules

Pricing Features

Contract pricing
Support for accounts pricing
Real-time pricing

Quote Features

Generation of quote document
Provision of e-signatures tools
Customization of quote templates

Why is Salesforce CPQ the Need for Every Organization?

Sales teams struggle hard with increased dependencies on spreadsheets. They are always in a dire need of a solution that can save their time in getting the contract approved and managing the price of the products. Salesforce CPQ is a powerful tool and meets all the requirements of the business.

Ever since it came into existence, Salesforce CPQ has been instrumental in sales processes. But, the latest advancements have given a boost to optimization tools. The biggest advantage of CPQ is that it works together with CRM, ERP, and other technologies for better-integrated data.

CPQ platform generates quotes that are automated per predefined rules and protocols for accurate pricing that includes multiple revenue types, discounts, incompatibilities, account quantities, and more.

Ksolves’ Salesforce CPQ implementation services acts as a catalyst in your CPQ implementation process. And that is why we have come up with this implementation guide to help you cover everything for your CPQ data migration and seamless integration. Moreover, it will also allow the sales team to scale-up their performance to the next level.

Don't forget to check out: Guided Selling with Salesforce CPQ

Step-by-step Salesforce CPQ implementation guide

The product and pricing combos can be an extremely complex and tiresome process for many organizations. CPQ, if implemented effectively, helps in delivering customized quotes to the customer featuring the right product at the right price, without any delays and errors.

To ensure that your CPQ is rolled out efficiently, we present to you this Salesforce CPQ implementation guide. Here, we will look at the importance of establishing goals, optimizing and documenting the CPQ features, and initiating system integration to make this process effective and smooth.

Check out this implementation guide straight out of our Salesforce CPQ managed services’s box-

Establish goals

For better implementation, you first need to understand your Sales process requirements, and only then you can set achievable goals for your Salesforce CPQ. This lets you evaluate if the CPQ is delivering accurate ROI. Some of the points to consider are:

Selling time reduces
Quotation turnaround times are less
Order value boosts
Accurate quote generation
Win rates and renewal rates increases and churn reduces

Start with selecting the most important goals and then begin charting out the CPQ process. Once you achieve these goals you can look forward to setting new goals that constantly refine the workflow.

Optimize quote-to-cash process

As you know that every business is different and so are their sales processes. And, that is what determines the user experience. Salesforce CPQ services implementation is good enough a reason to reflect internally, and identify and fix existing QTC process challenges.

Depending on your business’s unique needs, define, optimize and document the quote generation process. You need to put more focus on designing the overall CPQ workflow, before you even begin the implementation.

Once you have set workflows to take stock of everything to understand the existing portfolio of products. Then collaborate with the sales team to better understand the customer’s behavior and set the pricing rules accordingly. Customized rules ensure that sales reps are shown the best deals to offer to the clients.

Prioritize supercritical CPQ features

Well, to be honest, Salesforce CPQ is a very complex tool having multiple features that are quite difficult to use all at once. So, it would help a lot if you prioritize your sales goals based on how essential they are to your business. Such as most critical, critical, not critical, and of lowest concern.

Start off by selecting “out-of-the-box” features from Salesforce CPQ that can meet critical business needs. Some of these features are basic functionalities such as product catalog, price book, guided selling, product bundles, order management etc.

Once you have implemented and adopted these ‘super-critical features efficiently, you can always add more capabilities from the CPQ & Billing Growth whenever necessary.

Focus on data management

The goal to implement CPQ was to make the sales team more productive with the right set of data. Once you have set product catalog and pricing models, focus on data management. As CPQ runs on data sourced from different systems, you need to consider:

Identify the data and the source it should come from
Clean up the entire data before implementing
Ensure the data is up-to-date and real-time
Assign owners of master data

Ensures that your CPQ services integrate well with other ERPs. You will also be required to test the CPQ in a sandbox environment.

Change management plan

You may have a world-class CPQ, but you won’t get the maximum benefits if your users struggle with executing tasks on it. Even your team can push back on change. This is why you need a well-designed change management plan. The main reason why a CPQ fails is that it ignores the need of product management, engineering, IT and finance.

Ksolves’ being a Salesforce CPQ implementation partner suggests you build a team management team. Here are some steps which you can follow:

Bring a change management team to lead the project
Cater change management for several functional teams
Create awareness about user benefits and tool features
Use Digital Adoption Platform (DAP)
Build accountability

Measure and optimize progress

If you want to ensure continued commitment, You need to track the impact of CPQ implementation. You can go for user satisfaction surveys that collect information about tool’s ease of use, user onboarding time frame, and response time. You can always keep redefining these metrics or add new ones.

Ksolves’ Salesforce CPQ managed services, will help you track the engagement of users. We will help you better understand the Salesforce CPQ capabilities have been adopted and what features are user’s struggling with.

Post-production Support

Now when you have done CPQ data migration, it’s extremely important to have a discussion with your Salesforce CPQ implementation partner about the issues and challenges that can arise in the coming weeks and months. The more smooth the configuration is, the more error-free it will be.

Check out an amazing Salesforce infographic here: Take a look at the future of CPQ with this infographic!

Mistakes Most Organizations Do While Implementing Salesforce CPQ

Getting a few tips to enhance effectiveness is not the answer to every question. You need to identify potential difficulties and solutions to overcome them for mitigating the rate of risks. Here are some mistakes that organizations do that need to be addressed:

Lack of collaboration

The biggest challenge in implementing the CPQ tool is to get access to the support of all departments. It will be a difficult task for CPQ to collect all crucial information and that results in complex functioning. The active involvement of all departments is the best solution to avoid failure.

Use of irrelevant data

Another challenge is to correctly use the relevant data that makes successful implementation of CPQ. Often, it's hard to get access to precise, updated, and highly maintained data. Thus, the data becomes less reliable from the company’s perspective.

Misconception about products

If you think that a good CPQ consists of its pricing and a detailed description of the product, you are living in a dream world. A good CPQ includes a payment plan, product delivery, and services post-sales. You need to focus on delivering the value, or else, you will be at a high risk of losing the trust of your customers.

Summing Up

Now you know why CPQ is important for any business when it comes to scaling up in terms of sales growth. However, proper implementation is always the key to success. Well, don't worry you have the key now. With Ksolves’ Salesforce CPQ implementation services, you can dramatically improve your sales cycles. The above-mentioned tips can help you in establishing a proper implementation path for true success. Ksolves will help you in drafting an implementation strategy based on the above-stated point to maximize your ROI. Ksolves Salesforce CPQ managed services come with customization as per the needs of the customers. If you are looking for more information, Contact us today.