What is Salesforce CPQ?
The Salesforce CPQ Journey Series
Are you considering purchasing a CPQ tool? Have you looked into many Quote-to-Cash solutions, but can’t decide which is right for your business? This blog post will review some of the foundational functionality of Salesforce’s CPQ to help you decide if CPQ is right for you.
What is Salesforce CPQ?
CPQ stands for Configure, Price, Quote. Though Salesforce still offers standard quotes, many companies invest in CPQ to take advantage of additional built-in functionality during product and packaging configuration, standard & custom pricing, and quoting.
The purpose of CPQ tools are to help increase overall efficiency for sales reps in the Quote-to-Cash process.
How is Salesforce CPQ different from Salesforce’s standard quoting?
Salesforce does offer an out-of-the-box quoting object, but it is much less robust than what you would get with a CPQ tool.
Check out the graphic below for a visual compare and contrast of the standard quote tool vs. CPQ:
What are the Pros and Cons of Salesforce CPQ?
If you’re in the market for a CPQ tool, then you know there’s a lot to choose from. Which one is best depends on your needs. Salesforce CPQ is a great choice, of course. As with any tool, there are benefits, pitfalls, and other key considerations. Let’s jump in.
Pros
Product Bundling/Packaging
Products that are required or optionally sold together can be “bundled” (CPQ lingo) and configured as the sales rep builds their quote. This allows for standardization and customization within boundaries.
This also helps you build in product dependencies so that your reps sell the right combination of products.
Subscription Friendly
Salesforce CPQ uses a concept called multi-dimensional quoting to allow users to quote subscription products for multiple years.
Robust Pricing Tools
The tool offers several ways to discount, including volume, partner, and customer-specific discounts.
You can also use price rules to inject calculations for your users.
User-Friendly UI and Process
The quote line editor — where reps configure and build their quotes — is very user-friendly and aims to guide users through their choices. Plus, CPQ offers other objects that can truly optimize the quoting process:
Guided selling: Takes users through a process to guide them to the correct products.
Custom actions: Create buttons on the quote line editor, which provides a quick list of filtered products based on specific attributes.
Product rules: These can act as validation rules, or alerts that let the users know if they made an invalid choice, and what to do next.
Approval Process
Salesforce CPQ is compatible with the standard approval process.
You also have the option of utilizing Salesforce CPQ Advanced Approvals package when you purchase CPQ Plus. This option allows you to utilize a few more features, such as approval chains.
Salesforce Native
Salesforce CPQ (formerly SteelBrick) is owned by Salesforce, so you will be guaranteed to receive the latest and greatest with each seasonal Salesforce update.
There are also many training resources for users and admins alike, which makes the tool very scalable.
Cons
An Added Layer of Complexity
Salesforce CPQ is powerful — it's also very complex. It brings many new objects into your org. Much of the automation it boasts is done through these custom objects and not necessarily in Setup the way standard Salesforce does things. To mitigate this risk, include super users and admins on your team who can help identify issues.
This complexity isn’t unique to Salesforce CPQ though, all CPQ tools will bring additional complexity to your tech stack.
Permissions
It’s worth repeating that Salesforce CPQ will bring many new objects into your organization. If you have a complex role hierarchy, be sure to thoroughly review these objects and document what each persona should have access to.
What are the other key considerations?
Any big change to process comes with many other considerations before committing to the change. Some of these include:
Renewal Model
When you hear about CPQ, you often hear about subscription-based pricing. However, Salesforce CPQ supports subscription-based products and perpetual products.
Quote Template
Salesforce CPQ has a robust quote template tool, but if you have very custom quote documents, you can also integrate a tool like Conga.
Custom Quote Object Considerations
Salesforce CPQ uses a custom quote object, so you will need to transfer your users to the new quote object and cut off access to the old object. You should weigh the pros and cons of doing a data migration into CPQ.
Multi-Currency Considerations
CPQ is multi-currency enabled, but you will need to set up all of your product and price automations to work with all of the currencies respectively.
Upkeep and Maintenance
You may hear that CPQ implementations will be fast, quick, and easy. While the end result may make your users feel that way about their sales process, the implementation should be well planned and executed.
Your sales process and pain points should be well documented before even thinking about purchasing a tool. And when you do go down the implementation path, remember to document your CPQ administrative guidelines for future users. Think: How do we build products? How did we build those price rules?
Is Salesforce CPQ right for my business?
Companies, regardless of size, should consider CPQ if the following statements are true:
We sell a large number of subscription products and have no way to quote over multiple years. We struggle to give multi-year discounts and communicate those discounts to our customers. ✔️
We face challenges when we try to ensure that certain products are sold together consistently or that all appropriate add-ons are considered when a certain product is sold. ✔️
It’s difficult and time consuming for reps to build quotes properly. ✔️
Our packages often have dependencies or constraints based on the products within them. It’s near impossible for us to accurately reflect those dependencies in our current quoting process. ✔️
We give discounts to specific customers and want customers to see the discounts we are offering them. ✔️
We give complex volume or tiered discounts, which are currently being updated via an ever-changing spreadsheet or numerous pricebooks. If ever there is a pricing change, it’s a nightmare to manage. ✔️
Our renewal process is time-consuming, manual, and a bit fragmented from our sales cycle. ✔️
Any Quote-to-Cash solution will require an investment of time and money. It’s a big decision! Ultimately it should solve enough significant pain points to be worthwhile.
With any luck, you’re already one step closer to knowing if CPQ is right for you. If you’re still left scratching your head, we’ve got your back! You can schedule free time with our experts to talk out your challenges and the potential ways forward. Get in touch here.
Want even more info? Check out Salesforce’s CPQ Features & Editions resource.
And don’t forget to join us next week for the latest blog post in our Salesforce CPQ journey series: Do I Need CPQ?
Lindsay S. is a 7x certified Salesforce professional who has worked with some of the fastest growing tech companies in the region on their CPQ implementations.
She is a Salesforce Certified Administrator, Advanced Administrator, CPQ Specialist, Platform App Builder, Sales Cloud Consultant, Service Cloud Consultant, and Sharing & Visibility Designer.