As your company expands, it gets harder to keep clients happy with the service. Sales staff are accustomed to using tried-and-true strategies that don't fit with the expanding customer base and volume of orders. Particularly when it comes to complex sales transactions like recurring purchases, subscriptions, or usage-based payments, manually configuring quotes for each of them might take up the majority of the working time. Thankfully, there's no need to create the wheel from scratch. By eliminating common sales team barriers, Salesforce CPQ (Configure Price Quote) software turns your quote-to-cash cycle into an automated flow.
However, before taking advantage of this chance, keep in mind that Salesforce CPQ is more than simply a standard sales program that should be used without careful assessment of its advantages and disadvantages. It is a highly adaptable addition to your CRM system designed to assist, enhance, and better the current business and sales processes. Salesforce CPQ costs $75 /user/month and takes, on average, 3 weeks to 2 months to develop a basic set of quoting and pricing rules, product dependencies (bundles), and certain quotation templates.
To get the most out of Salesforce CPQ, we'll aim to assist you in finding the best implementation strategy in this post.
Salesforce CPQ Functionality
Salesforce CPQ Configuration:
- Guided Selling
To help sales representatives choose the items based on the necessary criteria and build quotes more quickly, a set of questions are presented at the start of each configuration process.
Product Rules & Product Bundles in Salesforce CPQ
Reps create bundles – product bundles that may be customized and sold together. To ensure that they quote compatible solutions and reduce the possibility of errors, they might specify boundaries to remove comparable products from a bundle.
To stop customers from choosing alternatives that are against your rules, Salesforce CPQ's Product Rules can be set up to add, remove, or hide options in a product bundle.
Want to master Product rules and Product Bundles? Enroll today for Salesforce CPQ Online Training
Advanced Approvals & Advanced Order Management
Sales, operation, finance, and legal teams may quickly access quotes by setting up preset approval paths in Salesforce CPQ.
For example, for recurrent purchases, advanced order management enables breaking quotes into numerous orders based on time and location. Service teams consequently provide their services on schedule.
Pricing in Salesforce CPQ
Support for various pricing strategies with Pricing Rules
In Salesforce CPQ, pre-established pricing and discount rules enable modeling of a variety of deal scenarios for complex quotes, including add-ons, swaps, and upgrades. Additionally, you can specify account-specific pricing for particular products or product categories using contractual pricing.
Automated Payments & Pricing Analytics
ACH or credit card-enabled electronic payments accelerate contract completion. For better forecasting and reporting, artificial intelligence aids in the analysis of discounting trends across products and regions.
Quotes in Salesforce CPQ
Quote Line Editors
In Salesforce CPQ, you may add or remove goods, use markups and discounts, and figure out prices by using quote line editors.
Quoting Analytics
Other internal systems can be coupled with Salesforce CPQ to give the team more information.
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Salesforce CPQ Implementation Challenges
No matter how useful these features are, a lack of a plan and clearly stated objectives can cause the project to fail, costing your business money on a product that will slow down rather than speed up your sales cycle.
Here are some typical Salesforce CPQ implementation issues and advice to help you prevent them.
- Over-Complication and Time-Consuming Configuration of Salesforce CPQ
Salesforce CPQ is frequently criticized for its difficult and drawn-out setup, which overwhelms sales teams with new procedures. However, a careless approach to project goal-setting may lead to such a problem.
What steps should you consider in advance?
Clarify your objectives:
Salesforce CPQ is designed to produce quotations quickly, dynamically, and accurately. To create the main flow and to keep your attention there, think about the current sales procedures and client purchasing patterns. Avoid introducing internal operations like managing financial assets, automating the sales pipeline, or creating documents for third parties. better incorporate other systems that have the necessary features.
Use a project management tool:
Even a simple Salesforce CPQ deployment could require several weeks to many months. Your chances of failing with your CPQ deployment are substantially higher if you don't have adequate planning or project management tools to help you. Given that your company is probably currently using Salesforce, a highly regarded native Salesforce project management app like Inspire Planner can be a fantastic option.
Prioritize: Particularly with a lengthy implementation project, the requirements frequently alter. Draw attention to the areas that are most susceptible to change, implement the project gradually for greater adoption, and set up time in case you need to rebuild or retest.
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Address the requirements of all teams. Sales, marketing, customer support, engineering, IT, legal, and financial teams are all involved in the CPQ process. Since the solution is knowledge-based, you should get this information from the people who will utilize it.
Ensure the balance between customization and built-in features. Only after ensuring the easy adoption of all "out-of-the-box" features, add customizability. Replace Salesforce Flow or Apex with product rules, quotation templates with custom pages, and embedded product structure with a customized schema.
2. Using Irrelevant or Wrong Data
Your data must be accurate, current, and reliable if you don't want to give bids with inflated prices or miss delivery deadlines.
3. Lack of Collaboration and Transparency
Since Salesforce CPQ enables extensive customization, it occasionally happens that the configurator addresses every issue instead of the configuration issue itself.
To ensure that your users comprehend and profit from Salesforce CPQ, choose the appropriate stakeholders while designing a proper flow.
How one should overcome this?
Verticalize the design of your Salesforce CPQ solution. To create a successful workgroup, be careful to secure senior management's backing and choose the appropriate stakeholders. Select those with the appropriate expertise and sector experience to offer to consult on the most frequent operations.
4. Continued Support and Lack of Testing of Salesforce CPQ
Even if the Salesforce CPQ is built by the plan, further support may be needed. The advice is straightforward: You will require less maintenance if you prioritize and test more.
How to Improve Continued Support and Lack of Testing?
- Install correctly. Think about the database, the system architecture, and any potential integrating apps. As Salesforce CPQ interacts with numerous internal and external systems, incorrect configurations or protocols can result in mistakes during real-time usage. Ensure that the implementation doesn't disrupt current procedures.
- Test. Test. Test. Conduct extensive pre-implementation testing before launching. Start with the tools that are easy to adopt and beneficial to most employees. As a result, you will simplify the onboarding process and free up time for potential improvements.
Want to know the steps to improve continued support? Enroll today for Salesforce CPQ Online Course
Change Management during Salesforce CPQ Implementation
It may be intimidating to move from spreadsheets to an automated process, which will cause users to ignore the new software.
How do you make them understand the value?
- Support the learning curve. Make sure to have enablement materials (slides, recordings, how-to manuals, Q&A sessions) during the roll-out. While the solution is still being created, start developing a user guide with a clear FAQ resource.
Alternatives to Salesforce CPQ Software
There are more CPQ apps on the market in addition to Salesforce CPQ. You can find additional solutions on the Salesforce AppExchange, so conduct a gap analysis to see which software will best serve your company's needs. Consider various choices before reaching a final decision.
Sculptor CPQ
When your requirements are not overly complex, Sculptor CPQ is an accessible and efficient substitute for Salesforce CPQ. It has a simple setup process and many customization options to expedite the quotation creation process. Even in a free edition that never expires, all fundamental functionality is accessible.
You can organize your product catalogue and deal with discounts by setting up Pricing Rules and Bundles using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. Interactive Quotes also let you communicate with clients in real-time. Furthermore, the entire implementation can be completed in less than... a day!
Conga CPQ (formerly Apttus CPQ)
Enterprise businesses with complex negotiations can utilize the Conga CPQ software to optimize the product, price, and administration process. It is a highly customizable program that supports a range of connectors and offers access to support and training.
Kugamon Quote to Cash
An excellent app for managing contracts, subscription-based payments, and financial transparency. To connect products from quote to cash to your financial system, it could need some configuration. This will give you useful information that will help you increase sales more quickly.
Conclusion:
As a business owner, you must swap out your antiquated practices for modern ones to stay on top of trends. Become an expert in CPQ by enrolling in the Salesforce CPQ Training provided by OnlineITGuru. To learn more about your demo date, get in touch with our support team right away.