Salesforce CPQ Tutorial – What Is CPQ In Salesforce

This Salesforce CPQ tutorial is a complete guide to Salesforce CRM and related topics like its features, pricing, and benefits: 

One of the primary reasons to use Salesforce, the world’s #1 CRM, is the faster closing of the deals. Salesforce CPQ (Configure, Price, and Quote) is a native app that helps the users in the closure of deals–even faster.

In this tutorial, we will deal with Salesforce CPQ and provide insights on how it works. We will also provide some standard features and the advanced features of CPQ and how that helps your business to reach the next level.

Finally, we will throw light on why your business needs to choose Salesforce CPQ and the benefits. First, let us define “What is Salesforce CPQ?”.

What Is Salesforce CPQ

Salesforce CPQ enables your sales team to create quotes quickly and with minimal errors and efforts. The process starts with creating an opportunity by your sales team and subsequently handing over the quote–within a short time. This way the process becomes faster and controlled with speedier closure of errors as well as with fewer errors. It also helps in more accurate data and more deals moving through the sales pipeline.

It transforms your business model with a unique quote-to-cash solution, and that helps to create revenue starting from single sales.

Here is an image on the Salesforce CPQ Dashboards:

[image source]

How Does Salesforce CPQ Work

Salesforce CPQ works in the following way:

1. Configure Complex Deals
2. Manage Recurring Revenue
3. Unify Sales and Revenue

#1) Configure Complex Deals

It helps to accelerate the channel partner sales with the help of a scalable process.

It is inclusive of:

• Use easy-to-navigate complex product catalogs for transforming reps and partners into advisors.
• Streamline the quoting approvals, ensuring compliance with product rules.
• Use pre-configured or customized bundles to create custom solutions.

Here is an image on Configuration of Products:

[image source]

#2) Manage Recurring Revenue

Enables you to align your quotes as per customer needs with subscriptions and the options of usage billing in the following ways:

• Automate contract amendments, usage pricing, and renewals for scalable growth.
• Offer centralized visibility of subscriptions and entitlements.
• Streamline the upselling and cross-selling with price upliftment.
• Create automated renewal opportunities for reducing the attrition.

Here is an image to explain the above:

#3) Unify Sales and Revenue

Breakdown the back-office siloes for streamlining the quote-to-cash process with;

• Streamline the acceptance of sales orders and pass over the quote details.
• Consolidate billable charges into a single invoice per customer.
• Spread the transactions related to revenue over the financial periods and facilitate the revenue.

Here is an image for unifying sales and revenue:

Let us now highlight some features of Salesforce CPQ.

Features Of Salesforce CPQ

Generate revenue faster by quickly closing the deals with the following features of CPQ:

1. Configure complex deals easily and faster
2. Grow and nurture the customer base
3. Reduce compliance burden and financial risks
4. Automate Customer life cycle
5. Provide insights

The above-enlisted features are explained in the following section.

#1) Configure complex deals easily and faster

• Use the step-by-step configuration wizard to enable the sales reps to select the right products and services.
• Create branded quotes accurately with a mere click for hiding and revealing quote lines and discounts.
• Streamline complex sales cycles with rules and pre-configured solutions.
• Use pre-defined pricing and discount guidance for different deal scenarios of complex quotes.

Here is a figure that explains the feature:

#2) Grow and nurture the customer base

• Get the price from an earlier quote or define negotiated prices by streamlining repeat business.
• Streamline the process for add-ons or upgrades for easier upselling and cross-selling.
• Offer complete visibility into the customer’s purchased assets and subscriptions in a single place for the empowerment of service agents.
• Generate renewal quotes proactively and thereby reduce churns by sending them to clients.

Here is a figure that explains the above:

#3) Reduce compliance burden and financial risks

• Ensure that the sales reps use automated guidelines and dependencies for reps to quote complete, compliant solutions.
• Add product and customer-centric terms to quote for reducing contract complexities.
• Create automated cross-functional approvals for alignment with policies, without slowing the sales cycle.
• Use a single unified pricing engine for ending the discrepancies of price related to orders, invoices, and quotes.

Here is a figure that explains the above:

#4) Automate Customer lifecycle

• Split quotes into multiple orders based on time/location for automated complex orders.
• Automate onetime invoicing, invoice consolidations, recurring or usage-based fees for on-time cash collections.
• Offer simplified ERP integrations with precise customer data and revenue schedules.
• Streamline electronic payments for reducing manual processing time.

Here is a figure that explains the above:

#5) Provide Insights

• Analyze discounting trends cutting across geographies, sales teams, and products with the help of AI.
• Use real-time KPIs of the likes of MRR, churn that manages the recurring growth of revenue.
• Bring about an accelerated sales cycle growth by eradicating the bottlenecks of your quoting process.

Here is a figure that explains the above:

Next, we delve into other significant features of Salesforce CPQ.

Advanced Features Of Salesforce CPQ

#1) Understand Product and Price Rules

Product Rules

The product rules make it possible for the sales rep to put together the products every time, improve your selling experience, and prepare accurate quotes with a combination of product rules.

Here is a diagram that explains the product rules:

[image source]    

Here is a diagram that explains the first step of creating a product rule:

It reduces your worries about the appropriateness of a specific SKU for your business size or use case, as well as the compatibility of products with use cases. It is about delivering high-level customer expectations for their buying experience.

Product rules allow you to comprehend the transformation of the way to go to market–starting right from the packaging of products and prices, putting together SKUs up to how the reps sell.

The product rules types, when used in combination, enhances the accuracy of quotes and increases the selling experience.

Here are the types of product rules:

• Validation Rules
• Selection Rules
• Filter Rules
• Alert Rules

>> Refer here to understand how to create product rules.

Price Rules

The price works in tandem with the product rules, helps in controlling quoting and also sales optimization. There are three popular product rules in CPQ–Validation, Alert, and Selection. It updates quote lines fields and helps in automation of price calculation.

Here is a diagram on price rules:

If you have changed business products that change for the products in your quotes then this becomes quite useful. You can activate the price rules by simply clicking on Save or Calculate while creating the quotes.

The Price rules help in the following:

• Put static value, field value, or summary variable in a quote line field or a quote.
• Target the configurator or the calculator on the quote line editor.

The Price Rules appear with price conditions, so that when the number of products sold increase, then it automatically increases the conditions say, for example, a product such as a printer comes with a ribbon then when the printer quantity increases from 2 to 3 then the number of ribbons increases accordingly.

Price Rules may appear in multi-dimensional quoting with multiple line-items with blocks of time.

Delivering Value to Customers

The productivity of your sales reps increases with rapid services, earning the appreciation of customers. It delivers accurate value with a dynamic product and pricing rules. It offers long-term solutions for critical problems. The clients must benefit in the long run with the right combination of tools and processes.

#2) Advanced Approvals and Order Management

Advanced Approvals

The majority of simpler business cases are understood by the standard approval functionality of Salesforce. But the Salesforce CRM comes with advanced approval functionality also for the approval workflows.

The advanced approval system takes a support approach. If a quote is approved by an approver or a group of approvers and gets rejected at a later stage, then the same person or group need not re-approve the same on resubmission, with the Salesforce CPQ remembering the sequence.

Moreover, the reps can assign someone else to take over, when someone is not present in the office. There is visibility into the type of approvals required by the reps.

If there is any need to replace a previous approver, then that is possible with just a click, eliminating the need to dive into any single approval process for the previous approver.

Customers always love to approve, while on the go and the CPQ offers anytime, anywhere approvals, and also allows the setting up of emails and notifications on mobile devices.

Here is a diagram that shows approvals and advanced order management:

Advanced Order Management (AOM)

You may require to deliver services at different time zones and various locations. Advanced Order Management allows your business to create multiple orders against a single quote just by segregating the orders.

It simply takes your approval process to the next level with some complex processes and dynamic approvers. Something that becomes extremely helpful for sending products at different locations – at different times.

Here are some key features of Advanced Order Management:

• Deliver Faster orders: Generate orders from quotes rendering services quickly on products and services.
• Flexibility: Manage the orders of the future based on segregating quotes based on multiple orders.
• Provide a Panoramic view of the Customer: Generate contracts at a faster rate with details such as pricing, contract terms, asset, and subscription details.
• Establish Connectivity: Sync order details to the backend ERP software for order fulfillment.

Benefits of Advanced Order Management:

• On-time delivery of services and products for the clients.
• Deliver a clear view of the operations team on what all happened at what time.
• Enable the service teams to deliver concerning SLAs, but with minimal efforts.

Want to get some more details?

>> Please go through this video on Advanced Approvals.

#3) Salesforce CPQ and Time

This is the only CPQ in the market that comes with in-built time. CPQ enables to automate the renewal opportunities and the quotes. CPQ automatically generates renewal opportunities and quotes for the sales reps.

Whenever the renewal comes up, a reminder is sent by Salesforce. As a result, all that is left over by the sales reps to do is to get into the opportunity, ensure the correctness of data, and then simply execute.

Please refer to the below video for further details on how Salesforce CPQ can help your business with the renewal process:

Benefits:

Customer engagement is a critical aspect of CRM. Here are some benefits:

• Enable the sales reps to understand the exact time of ideal engagement in the entire customer journey.
• Provide valuable insights to sales, marketing, and post-sales teams as well on launching new products and add-ons.
• Allow service teams to devote their energy in the right direction with the services rendered at the right time and for the right customers.

Why CPQ?

Salesforce CPQ automates the process of sales quoting. It explains how your business goes to the market and delivers service for the customers.

The reasons for adopting a CPQ for your business are:

• Automated pricing
• Generate accurate and formatted quotes
• Sell faster and generate revenue.
• Control discounts automatically and not manually.

>> Please this for further insights on why use CPQ.

Benefits Of CPQ

CPQ differs from the traditional sales process in the following ways:

• Narrow down the list of products for the sales reps avoiding any sort of manual work.
• Assign prices of products and services, automatically and also save the sales rep’s time by controlling the pricing and discount.
• Create the quote automatically, unlike the traditional system and emails to the clients.
• Enable sales, legal teams to work with higher efficiency with advanced approval systems – for ensuring the existence of appropriate checks and balances.
• Allow the post-sales teams to deliver services on-time and as per client requirements – with advanced order management.
• Track your customers better with enhanced iteration for efficient execution as well as delivery with an in-built time of Salesforce CPQ.

Conclusion

Today, customers prefer personalized engagement and would like to render the right level of services and at the right time. Salesforce CPQ helps you with your processes, relationships, and management of teams so that your business can achieve all of its short-term and long-term goals.

CPQ is not just a back-office or a sales solution but streamlines your bulky sales processes into a lean, productive system, thereby improving the efficiency of your sales process.

In this tutorial, we have defined Salesforce CPQ and covered the basic features and advanced features of CPQ such as price and product rules, advanced approval and order management, and CPQ with respect to time. We concluded with what makes you opt for CPQ and enlisted some benefits as well.