“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?

Salesforce CPQ (Configure, Quote, & Price) is a sales tool that gives the sales team an added advantage to create accurate and instant quotes for products & services. Apart from a cloud-based platform, CPQ streamlines sales processes through its three core steps, let’s discuss them all in detail:

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

Here are some features of Salesforce CPQ:

1. Product Configuration

With Salesforce CPQ, you can configure various products and services depending on your offerings. This covers product bundles and complex quoting products, even with time-based order lines, unique quantities, and discounts. Product rules ensure compatibility and ease of cross-selling.

2. Price Control

Salesforce CPQ offers multiple price books for various business scenarios. It selects the right book, utilizing advanced options like block prices, volume discounts, and client-specific rates, ensuring precise pricing.

3. Quick Quotes

Create high-quality documents that match your business in real-time. Predefine elements like terms, conditions, and sections using templates. The documents maintain brand identity, enhancing your company’s image.

4. Bundled Products and Rules

Sales teams craft different product bundle types (Static, Configurable, Dynamic, Nested) containing customizable products. Product rules manage bundle options, preventing conflicts and enforcing compliance during quoting.

5. Guided Sales

These features simplify sales reps’ lives by helping them determine the best offerings from their catalog for customers. Instead of navigating a vast product catalog, they can utilize CPQ’s Guided Selling by answering predefined questions to present relevant products to customers. You can also guide the system to choose a product automatically when it’s the sole result of a search.

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

Advanced approvals enable businesses to establish complex workflows that ensure quotes and deals adhere to company policies and standards. Custom workflows, conditional approvals, and auto-approval rules under it ensure adherence to company policies. It supports parallel and sequential approvals, maintains an audit trail, and integrates seamlessly with Salesforce CRM. With these advanced workflows, sales teams can focus on selling, while compliance, accuracy, and policy alignment are assured.

8. Advanced Order Management

Managing orders from receipt to delivery involves various steps, especially when operating from multiple locations across different time zones. Advanced order management simplifies this by splitting multiple orders from a single offer. It enhances your approval process with dynamic approvers, making it invaluable for distributing items to various locations at different times.

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.