Usability Features of CPQ - A Few Things We Love!
The Salesforce CPQ Journey Series
Salesforce CPQ is a robust and dynamic platform that has a ton of helpful features that ensure your sales team is getting accurate deals out the door fast! While there is so much we could talk about, let’s focus on just a few.
The CPQ Features We Love:
Quote Line Editor
The quote line editor is extremely user friendly and can help guide users through the quote building process. Within the editor, users can select products, provide discounts and perform other modifications as needed. Supported by functions like product and price rules you can help users in selecting products and driving pre defined prices. It acts as a workspace where your users can have full control over their deals.
Any number of Quote fields can be shown in the editor. To help organize excess fields you have the option of placing fields in a collapsible drawer which shows below each quote line. This feature can help users view even more information about each line without cluttering up the Quote Line Editor.
Bundled Products
Who doesn’t love organization? Instead of having to rely on your sales reps adding in the correct products to their quotes, why not configure it for them beforehand? Products that are typically sold together or that are required can be bundled! This helps your reps build a quote with the right combination of products.
Product Bundles are also a great way of showing consumers how much bang they are getting for their buck. Complex products are often built as collections of options integrated together to address the specific needs of an individual customer.
Automated Renewals
Automation is king. It eliminates the need for manual contract renewals. With CPQ a renewal quote can be automatically generated when the activated contract gets closer to its end date. This can save your users from remembering to create renewal records when the time comes. You can even set specific pricing for renewal products on the quote. Retain the original price of the product or add an uplift percentage.
Selecting the Renewal Forecasted checkbox automatically creates a renewal opportunity which can be used for forecasting purposes. Even if it may not be used right away it can provide visibility into future revenue from upcoming renewals.
Custom Actions
Using custom actions in the Quote Line Editor that are associated with the search filter option can help narrow products down to a subset. Users won’t have to scroll through a large list of available products and can see a filtered section of your price book.
Instead of having just the standard “Add Products” button, you could include an “Add Hardware Products” or “Add Software Products” custom action that automatically filters your price book down by certain data attributes that you can easily define.
Favorites
When reps sell the same products multiple times, favorites can allow them to add products quicker without having to search for them. A favorite can represent a single product or a configured bundle. All users need to do is press ”Add Favorites” which takes them to a shortlist of their favorite products. You can even share your favorites with other users!
A little extra: The best things are sometimes the most simple.
CPQ creates quote documents in PDF format by default, BUT did you know you can let users choose between PDF and Word? You have the ability to allow users to choose the output format of quotes from the Generate Document page. We have found that users who help manage quotes sometimes need to make a tweak or two before sending it off to a client. However, with great power, comes great responsibility! This feature is user-specific, so you can give it to admins only in case they need to make last minute styling adjustments.
So, if you’re thinking about using CPQ, keep some of these features in mind as you design the quoting process for your team. They can make a world of difference in the lives of your users and can transform how you run your business.
Candice is a senior technical consultant at Cloud Giants. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.