Decoding Salesforce CPQ: Exploring Configure, Price, Quote in Salesforce

9 min 22.06.2023 Updated: 20.06.2024

Introduction: What is Salesforce CPQ?

 In simple terms, CPQ in Salesforce is a special sales tool designed by Salesforce to empower companies to provide the right prices for any product configuration. The software helps sales representatives quickly specify prices, considering variables such as additional features, modifications, and discounts. In the end, you give sales departments a simple and mobile-friendly tool that connects to your CRM to let you make the most effective sales decisions.  

Benefits of Salesforce CPQ

Get automation to help your business improve customer satisfaction by making personalized products and offers and facilitating the process of changing quotes to meet specific customer requirements. The tool assists sales managers to recommend the most suitable products, services, or packages to their customers, thereby empowering them to achieve CRM goals. 

CPQ in Salesforce allows the prevention of quotation errors and expands sales opportunities by contributing to increased revenue. In addition, it can both increase the average volume of deals and ensure a steady improvement in margins. The company collects all the necessary information to provide an accurate price that meets specific customer needs. Thus, you will exceed the expectations of your customers by offering a professional price offer without human errors potentially leading to increased sales. 

It’s so easy to simplify the cost calculation process by making complex pricing structures clearer and reducing the number of errors. Salesforce CPQ halves the sales cycle time. So, your sales managers can generate prices faster without compromising the accuracy of these prices, and as a result, enable them to close deals faster. 

While compiling quotations, the Salesforce CPQ tool may provide sales representatives with proposals for cross-selling products or services. The size of the order can be increased by recommending customers purchase accessories, related goods, and services. You can give your sales representatives more opportunities for cross-selling without aggressive marketing. 

Imagine you can streamline sales processes by automating quote generation. So, your sales departments will focus more on sales than on administrative responsibilities. CPQ uses complex rules to automatically match products with your customer requirements. Also, you can see prices and set your own. After determining products and prices, you generate a PDF file with detailed pricing information with just a few mouse clicks. 

Your sales departments no longer need to spend time coordinating with management, thus leading to enhanced customer satisfaction and reduced sales managers’ workload. With pricing automation, your sales representatives spend less time drafting contracts. Therefore, they allocate more time to generating more leads. 

CPQ helps businesses determine which product combinations meet consumer demand and improve orders by providing product sales statistics. CPQ enables cutting down costs by reducing the number of administrative tasks required, by doing so improving productivity and eliminating the number of errors in the sales process. 

You can find out more about what is CPQ in Salesforce by reading our related Article.

Still, have questions about how your industry can win with CPQ? Let’s dive deeper to clarify.  

How can you use CPQ in Salesforce?

Salesforce configure price quote is a beneficial solution for companies providing complex products or services that require configuration, have various pricing options, and involve quoting for sales transactions. Here are some types of businesses that can benefit from Salesforce CPQ: 

Whether you produce industrial equipment, machinery, or consumer goods, your customizable or configurable products can be leveraged by Salesforce CPQ. The tool enables streamlining the quotation process, managing complex product structures, handling various pricing models, and ensuring accurate quotes for their customers.  

Are you selling software, hardware, or IT services? We are sure you typically have a wide range of product options, pricing tiers, and subscription models. Salesforce CPQ can help you to create accurate quotes, manage discounts and promotions, and handle complex product configurations. 

Your retail and e-commerce company – offering customizable products or subscription-based services – can employ Salesforce CPQ to simplify the quoting and pricing process. CPQ helps manage product options, handle volume-based pricing, automate discounts and promotions, and generate customer-friendly quotes. 

Does your financial institution offer complex financial products, such as insurance policies, investment portfolios, or banking services? Salesforce CPQ enables you to configure products based on customer needs, calculate premiums, manage pricing rules, handle discounts, and generate comprehensive quotes. 

Your company as a telecommunication and utility provider often has diverse pricing structures, complex service packages, and bundling options. Salesforce CPQ can assist you to manage and automate the configuration, pricing, and quoting process, ensuring accurate quotes for customers with multiple service options. 

Is your healthcare company dealing with medical equipment, pharmaceuticals, or healthcare services? You can use Salesforce CPQ to configure equipment or service options, manage pricing tiers based on healthcare plans, handle regulatory compliance, and generate accurate quotes for healthcare providers or patients. 

If you are a consulting firm or marketing agency, you can also benefit from Salesforce CPQ. The tool empowers you to define and price different service offerings, manage hourly rates, set up pricing bundles, and generate professional quotes with detailed breakdowns of services and associated costs.   

Find more about signs to recognize your business needs a CPQ solution in our related Article.

Choosing CPQ for Salesforce is just the beginning. The tool has different features to address all challenges your sales departments strike with.   

Features of Salesforce CPQ

The Routine Automation Salesforce CPQ expert highlighted the top 7 features that assist in streamlining your pricing and quote operations.

1. Product Configuration 

Salesforce CPQ allows users to easily configure complex products and services using a guided, rules-based approach. This feature ensures accurate configurations, preventing errors and reducing manual effort. 

2. Pricing and Discounting 

PQ enables businesses to define and manage pricing rules, including discounts, promotions, and price books. This feature ensures consistent and accurate pricing across sales channels. 

3. Guided Selling 

With guided selling, CPQ provides sales representatives with product recommendations and suggestions based on customer needs and preferences. It helps reps upsell and cross-sell effectively, increasing revenue opportunities. 

4. Renewals and Subscription Management 

This feature enables businesses to manage and automate subscription-based products and services. Salesforce CPQ helps track renewal dates, manage contract amendments, and streamline the renewal process. 

5. Advanced Approvals 

Advanced Approvals uses approval rules to determine which approvers receive an approval request and the email template used to send the requests. When a sales rep submits a record for approval, such as a quote or opportunity, the Advanced Approvals package evaluates the package’s approval rules. If any of those rules meet their conditions, the rule runs, and Salesforce CPQ sends approval request emails to your approvers. Users or user groups with approval permissions in your org can be approvers. Approval chains allow you to send requests to a series of approvers in sequence. The record isn’t approved until all approvers in all chains have confirmed their approval. 

6. Salesforce CPQ’s Quote Template 

Salesforce CPQ’s Quote Template feature empowers sales teams to create visually stunning and personalized quotes. With customizable branding elements, dynamic product catalogs, and personalized messaging, sales professionals can generate accurate and engaging quotes that align with their company’s identity. The feature supports various output formats and is mobile-responsive, ensuring easy access and convenience for both sales reps and customers. Simplifying the quote creation process, Salesforce CPQ’s Quote Template feature enhances sales efficiency and drives revenue growth. 

7. Javascript Quote Calculator Plugin 

Add extra functionality to the quote line editor in Salesforce CPQ with custom JavaScript code. Seven available methods allow you to change how calculations are performed and manage page-level security such as field visibility.  

Sounds impressive? Now it’s necessary to configure these features to let your sales managers boost productivity.   

What does the CPQ implementation process look like?

🧩Step 1. Start from business requirements and goals. Identify the needs and challenges of your sales departments, determining how Configure Price Quote in Salesforce can address them. Find out more about your product catalog, pricing structures, discounting rules, etc.  

🧩Step 2. Then create a data model that accurately represents your product catalog and pricing structure. Define product families, bundles, options, features, pricing rules, discounts, and any other relevant data.  

🧩Step 3. Use the Salesforce CPQ features to set up your product catalog, pricing rules, and the whole quoting process. Based on your unique business requirements define pricing rules and discounting strategies, and in the end, set up approval processes for discounts and ensure compliance with pricing guidelines and policies.  

🧩Step 4. You can customize the quote templates to include relevant product details, pricing information, terms and conditions, legal disclaimers, and any other required elements. Use the Salesforce CPQ template editor to create dynamic and personalized quotes to fulfill all your pricing needs.  

🧩Step 5. Thoroughly test your Salesforce CPQ implementation including various quoting scenarios, pricing calculations, discount approvals, and any other critical operations. 

🧩Step 6. Don’t forget to provide comprehensive training to your sales team and other relevant stakeholders on how to use the solution effectively.   

Successful implementation of Salesforce Configure Price Quote requires a combination of technical expertise and thorough planning. Let’s look through the successful CPQ implementation cases delivered by the RA team.  

Salesforce CPQ implementation success story by Routine Automation

The Client of Routine Automation is faced with a problem of a huge amount of manual work. Their sales department needed a special contract management solution allowing them to replace manual contract building with automated creation and to add a billing platform with an electronic signature feature. Based on the Client’s request and our conducted discovery phase, the RA team suggested implementing Salesforce CRM & Billing package with additional DocuSign integration.  

The solutions our team delivered are the following…  

💥Salesforce CPQ package set up to boost the Client’s Quote-to-Cash process, generate accurate quotes, and reduce sales cycle time. Contract Renewal implementation to automate the process of new contract creation and accelerate contract approval. And Billing function configuration to manage subscriptions and payments with ease. Cause before the client spent more time on manual data input, now with automation the client manages it 4 times less.  

💥Integration with DocuSign to add an electronic signature function allowing to manage secure contract signing processes. 

The key results have been obtained… 

🚀 Boosted Productivity  

Previously sales managers made quite a lot of manual work but now implemented automation empowered managers to focus on prioritized tasks. 

🚀 Time and Costs Savings  

The client got the automated solution which brought budget optimization and increased sales teams’ performance.