What is Salesforce CPQ? Features, Uses, and Pricing

“Ever wished you had a genie to create accurate and instant sales quotations? Or perhaps a crystal ball to predict the perfect pricing strategy?”

While we can’t provide magical genies or crystal balls, we’ve got the next best thing: Salesforce CPQ.

You are at the edge of closing a fancy deal with a major client with which the stakes of closing are high. But instead of attending them or staying in constant touch with them, you are navigating your way through complex pricing structures, discounts, and product configurations

In the traditional world of sales, this could be a daunting task. But in the world of Salesforce CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote), it’s where the magic begins.

“Well, it sounds great, but what good can it do for us?’ Don’t worry; this blog is an insightful resource that will help you explore Salesforce CPQ in depth.

It’s high time you redefine your conventional sales practices. Let’s start with the basic question.

What is Salesforce CPQ?

CPQ (Configure, Price & Quote) is a tool introduced by Salesforce to help the sales team determine the precise pricing after analyzing product specifications. The CPQ salesforce software inspects elements such as features (main+optional), quantities, product customizations, discounts, etc., that help the sales team to finalize the best-suited price range for the products.

The survey conducted by Salesforce over the user experience of the CPQ software revealed that:

• The sales team can generate the product pricing 10 times faster than before.
• There is a 95% reduction in price quote rejection, which establishes CPQ’s accuracy factor.
• 2 times quicker than quote-to-cash processing.
• Around 30% increase in the training aspect for new representatives.

Configure

In the first step, you configure the product or services your customer has raised requirements for. With Configuration, your sales rep can pick the right offerings, configure them as per requirements received from customers, and ensure that the chosen products are compatible and fulfill the customer’s requirements. This configuration step ensures that the proposed solution is tailored to the unique requirements of each customer.

Price

In the pricing phase, Salesforce CPQ calculates the pricing for the configured products. It takes into account various factors such as quantity, discounts, custom pricing rules, and any other variables that affect the overall cost. The tool automates the entire pricing process, ensuring accuracy and consistency in pricing quotes.

Quote

After configuring the products and determining the pricing, Salesforce CPQ generates a professional and accurate sales quote. This document outlines the proposed solution, including the configured products, pricing details, terms, and any other relevant information. The generated quote is not only precise but also easy to understand, making it a powerful tool for closing deals.

No more late-night spreadsheet acrobatics, no more sales reps scratching their heads over pricing, and no more lost opportunities due to manual errors. Salesforce CPQ streamlines the entire process, making your sales team more efficient and, most importantly, more effective.

Who uses Salesforce CPQ?

Salesforce CPQ permission sets are granted to four types of users for different purposes:

Why Choose Salesforce CPQ?

In an era where customers demand personalized interactions and timely, high-quality service, Salesforce CPQ gain its vitality in efficient business operations. It empowers you to manage processes, partnerships, and teams like a maestro, aligning them with both short and long-term business goals. Here are compelling reasons to embrace Salesforce CPQ:

1. Complex Product and Pricing Structures

Products with dynamic pricing, expandability, and customization can be challenging to manage. Failing to position it effectively can lead to miscommunication, errors, and unhappy customers. Salesforce CPQ simplifies this complexity by enabling sales teams to swiftly generate and exchange quotes with preset pricing and discount criteria, regardless of the product’s intricacy. It streamlines processes for renewals, dynamic pricing, and complex offers.

2. Guided Selling

Guided selling is essential for sales representatives to identify customer needs and recommend tailored solutions. Salesforce CPQ’s guided selling feature empowers sales reps to capitalize on cross-selling and upselling opportunities, ultimately delivering precisely what customers desire. This automated approach enhances sales, provides optimized solutions, and saves valuable time.

3. Time Management

If your sales team spends excessive time on quoting instead of closing deals, it’s time to consider Salesforce CPQ. Manual quoting can become tedious and hinder the sales process’s efficiency. Salesforce CPQ quoting automation factors in product grouping, price structures, discounts, and bundles, ensuring that product offerings are distributed across various channels. This analytical approach streamlines operations and keeps everyone up to date.

4. Streamlined Approvals

Lengthy approval processes can lead to gaps in the sales funnel and delayed transactions. Salesforce CPQ’s enhanced approvals feature optimizes approval procedures and business requirements. It facilitates multi-approval chains and accelerates the process, allowing salespeople to understand exactly which approvals are needed during quotation development.

5. Reducing Excessive Discounts

Overusing discounts to close deals can harm revenue margins and return on investment. Salesforce CPQ tracks closure rates, identifies up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, and suggests appropriate pricing bundles to boost order size. This strategic approach enhances ROI and maintains profitability by providing targeted discounts to customers.

Salesforce CPQ is your solution to the challenges of complex products, sales efficiency, approval processes, and pricing strategies. It empowers your team to deliver personalized customer experiences while maximizing revenue and profitability.

Salesforce CPQ Features

Below are the features describing features of Salesforce CPQ showcasing its importance in business process:

1. Product Configuration

Businesses use this feature of Salesforce CPQ to develop and sell products on demand. This helps them to manage the price and quote factors efficiently. Businesses finalize the demand and quantity of the product on that basis.

Utilizing Salesforce CPQ has several benefits listed below:

• The sales team manages and clarifies complicated product structures or formations with various selections and customizing options.
• Built-in validation capabilities to provide certainty with product compatibility and avoid invalid structure.
• A guided selling interface for the sales team and representatives to build required product configurations to acquire the designated product.

2. Price Control

Deciding the price of any product requires intel on its ongoing demand in the market. This insight arrives through price books that contain a list of products with their base price. With this, businesses can build their price books, giving them multiple price ranges.

Using this information, businesses can offer different pricing to build products. Their customers can select the precise price book based on factors like volume discounts, customer-specific rates, product block prices, etc. This process allows businesses and their clients to finalize apt pricing for their products.

3. Quick Quotes

Generating quotations consumes much time as this document contains every required detail for the process. The missing information issue could affect and take away the company’s brand image and both client & business time.

Thus, Salesforce CPQ offers:

• Real-time generation of high-quality documents using its automation function for in-form and content to match the business requirements.
• Assistance to the sales team to pre-define aspects such as terms & conditions, and other sections based on quote models and templates given by the document generator.
• The documents are adaptable to the brand’s identity as they are generated considering the structure, uniformity, and presentation aspects.

4. Bundled Products and Rules

Catering to customer’s needs and choices requires complete product availability. It includes related products allowing businesses to deliver overall buying satisfaction. It helps them to influence choices and turn them into consistent customers.

The role of Salesforce CPQ is to:

• Simplify product structure and specifications allowing the sales team to bundle related products. With this arrangement, customers receive dynamic product packages that cater to their needs and contain every required component.
• Initiate automation to finalize the amount to sell the product including discounts on the components. Also, it maintains the profitability factor by considering the importance of the components added.
• Help the sales team create four product bundles, static, configurable, dynamic, and nested. These bundles help the sales team meet customer’s expectations and deliver service satisfaction.

5. Guided Sales

Businesses must deliver efficient services to customers, which includes navigating the buyers to find the exact product they need. The sales team is responsible for performing this function since they remain in regular contact with customers.

The Salesforce CPQ benefits the sales team through:

• The ‘Guided Selling’ feature acts as a navigator helping customers reach their desired product through a complex configuration structure. This simplifies their decision-making since buyers have their desired product.
• Pre-defined rules and customs to customize product pricing, discounts, and quotes. It helps the brands cater to customers’ needs and maintain accuracy throughout the process.

6. Product & Pricing Rules

They are the foundational functionality that backs up sales reps in adding accuracy in quotes, every single time. Within CPQ, product rules are used to establish conditions that ensure customers adhere to the specific guidelines of your products. These rules can be configured to include, exclude, or conceal options within a product bundle. Product rules include a dedicated list of Error Conditions, Actions, and Configuration Rules.

Another facet of product rules is price rules, which automate price calculations, subsequently updating quote line fields. Price rules govern predefined conditions that can be applied to transaction prices. This feature is valuable when you sell products that impact each other’s prices within bundles.

7. Advanced Approvals

Quotation documents should be prepared by keeping the stakeholders a part of the inner circle for finalizing the price. However, it should be kept safe from any disturbance or infiltration that could influence the pricing.

The Salesforce CPQ provides:

• The quote approval workflow function automates the routing quotes process flowing the quote document through the approval channels.
• It ensures the quotations matching the pre-defined set or criteria receive approval, and the rest seeking higher-end suggestions are grouped.
• Surveillance throughout the process, providing clarity during the audit. Also, it ensures compliance with pricing policies, discount limits, and sales guidelines, reducing delays and errors.

8. Advanced Order Management

Businesses face various challenges with handling and managing their orders from request to delivery. It becomes more difficult if the region and time zone differ from the brand location.

The CPQ software offers:

• Simplification to businesses by splitting a single order into multiple customer orders based on various categories such as location or timezone.
• Seamless order generation from the quotes to deliver the specific product to the customer on time.

9. Quote Line Groups

Quote line groups in Salesforce CPQ provide an essential framework for structuring quotes with multiple products and services. They offer a range of benefits, including logical organization, customization to align with your brand, enhanced clarity for customers, precise pricing control, simplified quoting processes, and comprehensive reporting capabilities. By utilizing quote line groups, your organization can streamline the quoting process, maintain a professional image, and gain valuable insights into the performance of different product or service categories within quotes.

Benefits of Salesforce CPQ

CPQ opens up the door for sales professionals to instantly generate accurate and impressive quotations. Not only does the team get ahold of the entire sales cycle but easily clubs products &/or services to the customers as per their requirements.

Eliminating rework and reducing lead times will reinvigorate your sales team’s agility. This enhancement also amplifies core factors like efficiency and customer satisfaction, delivering tangible benefits.

What other benefits does Salesforce CPQ offer and how to streamline sales process using Salesforce CPQ.

Salesforce CPQ Use Cases: A Solution for Diverse Industries

Salesforce CPQ is a versatile tool designed to streamline pricing and quoting processes, making it an indispensable asset for businesses in different industries.

CPQ for Manufacturing

In the manufacturing sector, intricate pricing structures are the norm due to diverse customer and partner segments. Salesforce CPQ simplifies this intricacy through a multi-step pricing process that calculates a final price from a base list price. This approach offers versatility in price adjustments, accounting for volume, discounts, and exclusive partner offers.

With CPQ, your sales team can handle numerous variables with ease, ensuring precision in quotes while delivering a personalized approach to clients.

CPQ for Retail

Retail is a fast-paced industry, and winning the competition requires efficient pricing tools. Discounts and special offers play a significant role in demand stimulation, upselling, and market share growth. Salesforce CPQ’s pricing and discounting tools enable retailers to strategically manage prices, saving time for sales reps and facilitating more profitable deals. It allows for dynamic pricing adjustments, such as seasonal pricing and bundled product offerings, enhancing profitability and customer satisfaction.

CPQ for Healthcare

In the healthcare sector, product bundles are a common requirement. Salesforce CPQ excels at managing product bundles with optional features or components. For instance, a hospital or lab owner can create bundles that include multiple tests, satisfying the diverse needs of patients. This approach offers cost savings to customers while increasing revenue for the provider.

CPQ for Health Insurance

Health insurance sales involve a multitude of influencing factors and variables that impact pricing. Salesforce CPQ is a perfect fit in this industry, offering customization options to meet the needs of different client groups. Custom fields collect essential data about insured individuals, chronic diseases, etc. Account executives can select plan options, add-ons, and government or commercial plans, all while using advanced approval processes to ensure accuracy and compliance. CPQ simplifies the management of expiring contracts and renewal processes for insurance managers.

Salesforce CPQ’s adaptability and feature-rich capabilities make it a valuable asset across diverse sectors, optimizing pricing, quoting, and customer satisfaction.

Salesforce CPQ Pricing

Salesforce CPQ pricing is a topic that many businesses are interested in, as it helps in optimizing sales and marketing processes, increasing revenue, and improving customer satisfaction.

Check out the different pricing Salesforce CPQ offers:

Conclusion

In conclusion, Salesforce CPQ is your key to assessing data, streamlining business architecture, and crafting profitable, time-saving quotations. Its proven benefits have empowered leading enterprises worldwide.

While simple quotations may suffice in some cases, the complexity of product configuration and pricing combinations demands a more robust solution. As part of Sales Cloud, it seamlessly integrates into the Salesforce ecosystem, ensuring data uniformity across the client’s entire journey. Plus, its cloud-based nature lets you access it from the device of your preference and place.

By embracing Salesforce CPQ, you embark on a path to success. And with Cyntexa’s comprehensive Salesforce CPQ implementation services, it’s all within reach from the comfort of your workplace.

Imagine a world where configuring, pricing, and quoting become a breeze, and your sales team can focus on what they do best – selling & generating revenue.