Salesforce CPQ

Untangling Salesforce CPQ Configuration for Professional Service Providers

You are a niche service provider for instance, one that is invested in making digital workflow transformation easy with intelligent automation. You aim at maximizing ROIs for businesses through automating workflows via connected systems and process orchestration. Your business has different verticals with varying subscription pricing for distinct product configurations – this makes for an operational knot for your sales and marketing team to accurately price services while taking into account customizations, discounts, add-ons, etc. This is where Salesforce CPQ, hosted within Salesforce Sales Cloud comes in.

Renew - Upgrade - Swap - Upsell - Cancel

Apart from increasing the bottom line and slashing the sales cycle to half, Salesforce CPQ will give your business a lean selling capability. Processes like submitting proposals and delivering quotes will be streamlined for good, reducing time and resources waste, AND zero stalling of the sales pipeline due to any unforeseen circumstances.

BUT, merely having Salesforce CPQ deployed is not going to troubleshoot all your sales woes, to make the most of the Salesforce CPQ ecosystem we need to customize options, features for configuration of every business vertical to increase quote accuracy and effectively upsell/cross-sell.
Salesforce CPQ includes a Configurator but here we will explore scenarios, wherein a use case requires a custom app, component, or even an external software to offer complex services or products.

Probable use cases – Custom UI, Legacy Apps, Complex Selectors, Visual Configuration, and Existing Configurators
External Configuration comes in when the use case involves – A Plugin Framework, Mix & Match, and EasyXDM
Possible options for External Configuration – Platform Components, ISV Partners, and Heroku Apps

Before we proceed let’s understand what Custom Actions are, as they will be defining most of your experience on Salesforce CPQ:
‘Custom actions are buttons that sales reps can click to perform an action in the quote line editor, configurator, or several other detail pages. For example, sales reps can select to show a filtered section of your price book or to direct users to an internal or external URL.’ – salesforce.com

Let’s begin with creating a very common custom action deployed by most businesses:

Now, if you want to add your lookup field to your quote line:

And finally, manage your bundles the easy way:

Apart from numerous configuration options, Salesforce CPQ offers a world of benefits for professional service providers, some of them are

Ability to renew multiple contracts through list views
Ability to use a single renewal quote for all of an account’s subscriptions
Easily amend your contracts and assets and if you’re using an asset-based renewal model, you can readily change the assets on your quotes and orders
The Advanced Approvals package for Salesforce CPQ will help you automate and customize your approval process
Enhance quotes by using JavaScript code for adding extra functionality to the CPQ quote line editor

This way you can push the boundaries of your Salesforce CPQ and shorten otherwise prolonged sales cycles. Configuring your products that typically have complex requirements can easily be implemented with the shared custom actions for maximized revenue growth.

For more information on Salesforce CPQ implementation for US and Canada based businesses, please write to sumeet@advanz101.com

Dinesh Srinivasan

Dinesh Srinivasan is an enterprise technology maven with CRM, CPQ, and Analytics consulting and implementation as his focus areas. With 24 years of diverse experience in the Information Technology space, Dinesh is known for providing leading-edge technology solutions to treat operational challenges across all sectors and especially those that accelerate economies. In his spare time, he likes to share his experiential knowledge with netizens and marketing professionals to navigate the sector better and to ultimately lead with innovation. He can be reached at LinkedIn