Salesforce CPQ is a cloud-based software application created by Salesforce to streamline product configuration and quote generation for quote-to-cash. It enables businesses to manage their quoting and pricing processes using a drag-and-drop interface for creating and configuring quotes.
Salesforce CPQ offers features such as pricebooks, product catalogs, and discount rules. It integrates with Salesforce CRM, making it easy to manage customer data and quotes in one place. Its many advantages for sales teams include the quickly configuring quotes and proposals, increasing quote accuracy and efficiency, and streamlining approvals.
Why this product is good
Positives of Salesforce’s CPQ software
Product Details
What is Salesforce CPQ?
Salesforce CPQ has many features which make it stand out as a robust quoting solution.
Features include:
- Configure Products
- Discounting
- Automate Contracts and Renewals
- Receive Insights from Analytics
- Automate the Complete Customer Lifecycle
- Advanced pricing methods
Configure Products: It helps configure products by automating the process of creating and managing quotes, contracts, and pricing. It provides a central repository for product information and pricing, and offers tools for creating custom quotes and contracts. It also helps manage discounting, bundling, and other special pricing arrangements.
Discounting: It supports discounting in several ways. It allows you to configure price rules that automatically apply discounts based on certain conditions. It also allows you to manually apply discounts to specific line items on an order. This can be useful if you need to give a one-time discount to a particular customer or product. Salesforce CPQ also supports bulk discounts, so you can configure a discount that will automatically be applied to all orders that meet certain criteria.
Automate Contracts and Renewals: Salesforce CPQ can automate the contract and renewal process for your organization, making it easier and faster to get new contracts signed. When a customer wants to sign a contract, the software can generate the contract automatically and send it to the customer for signature. It can also manage the subscription renewal process by sending reminders to the customer and allowing them to renew their contract with just a few clicks.
Receive Insights from Analytics: Salesforce CPQ provides insights on quoting, pricing, and subscriptions. By analyzing quote data, sales teams can identify areas where they can improve their quoting accuracy and efficiency. Additionally, Salesforce CPQ analytics can help sales teams understand the impact of discounts on their overall profitability.
Automate the Complete Customer Lifecycle: Salesforce CPQ automates the customer lifecycle by simplifying and streamlining the quote-to-cash process. It provides a complete end-to-end solution that helps organizations accelerate sales, improve deal margins, and reduce errors and omissions.
Unified Revenue Processes: This software is part of Revenue Cloud in its Customer 360 solution. This enables users to unify revenue processes and drive efficiency across the product-to-cash journey, from payment to renewal to revenue recognition.
Advanced pricing methods. Salesforce handles blog pricing, percent of total, cost-plus markups, option pricing (for bundles), contracted pricing, and manual pricing/overrides with ease. For discounts, you can add optional, volume-based, and manual inputs, plus special discounting rules for distributors, suppliers, and VARs.
What are the advantages of using CPQ?
Salesforce CPQ Benefits
There are multiple benefits to using Salesforce CPQ. A few of the most notable benefits include:
- Allows the automation of configuration, pricing, and quote generation processes
- Assists with the streamlining of the creation of quotes
- Generates accurate and personalized quotes
- Easily generates contracts and close sales efficiently and effectively
- Maximizes productivity of sales representatives
- Automatic management of subscription renewals
- Fast and simple integration with other Salesforce CRMs
- Increased profitability
- Simple to use and very flexible CPQ
What industries are CPQ solutions best suited for?
Salesforce CPQ for Industries
Salesforce CPQ is specifically designed to address the challenges of IT Services, Computer Software, and Manufacturing companies face in the quoting process. Here’s how it caters to them:
IT Services
Configurable Quoting: IT services often involve complex configurations with various service tiers, resource requirements, and potential for customization. It uses guided workflows where sales reps can configure service packages based on customer needs. This ensures accurate quotes that reflect the specific services being offered.
Automated Pricing and Discounts: Managing pricing for IT services can be complex with variable costs and potential for volume discounts. Salesforce CPQ automates these calculations based on pre-defined rules, ensuring consistent and competitive pricing in quotes.
Service Bundling: IT services are often bundled together to create comprehensive solutions. The software allows the creation of predefined service bundles or enables dynamic bundling during the quoting process, streamlining the presentation of complex offerings.
Computer Software
Integration with Salesforce CRM: Since it integrates seamlessly with Salesforce CRM, all customer data and opportunity details are readily available for generating accurate quotes. This eliminates the need for manual data entry and ensures consistency between sales and quoting processes.
Improved Sales Efficiency: By automating configurations, pricing, and workflows, Salesforce CPQ frees up software sales reps to focus on building relationships and closing deals. Additionally, generating error-free quotes faster improves customer satisfaction and reduces sales cycle times.
Subscription Management: Many software companies use subscription-based pricing models. Salesforce CPQ allows for defining flexible subscription terms, tiers, and recurring billing configurations, making it easier to quote and manage these complex offerings.
Manufacturing
Streamlined Quoting for Complex Products: Manufacturing often involves products with various options and configurations. Salesforce CPQ allows sales reps to configure these complex products accurately and efficiently, ensuring customers receive the correct quotes.
Integration with ERP Systems: It integrates with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, creating a seamless flow of information between sales and production. This avoids discrepancies between quoted prices and actual manufacturing costs.
Enhanced Visibility: Salesforce CPQ provides real-time inventory visibility, allowing sales reps to ensure quoted products are actually available. This improves customer satisfaction by avoiding order fulfillment delays.
Prices
Salesforce CPQ Pricing
The pricing of Salesforce CPQ per user is $75 per month. CPQ Plus per user is $150 per month.
Is there anyone else out there?
Salesforce CPQ Alternatives and Competitors
There are several competitors to Salesforce CPQ, each with its strengths and weaknesses. At the enterprise level, businesses need features like advanced pricing and configuration abilities, scalability, and team collaboration. Other important factors to consider include price, integrations, ease of use, and customer support.
Top 4 Salesforce CPQ Alternatives
DealHub CPQ
DealHub CPQ’s code-free implementation means it can be up and running within weeks, and sales ops teams can make customizations without IT involvement. With DealHub CPQ, you can quickly create customized quotes that are automatically sent to your CRM, even if you sell complex products or subscriptions. Quotes can be generated in various formats, such as DealRoom, Word, PDF, or Excel, making them compatible with any device or platform. Guided selling and automated approval workflows help sales teams close deals faster. It comes with a user-friendly interface and 24/7 customer support.
PandaDoc
Pandadoc CPQ is a cloud-based software application that helps businesses automate their sales quoting process. It provides a simple, efficient way for sales teams to create and manage quotes, proposals, and other sales documents. PandaDoc allows you to automatically generate and customize quotes in a single click, calculate pricing, discounts, and profit margins, and accept payments right inside your quotes.
Oracle CPQ
Oracle CPQ software is used by businesses in a variety of industries, including manufacturing, retail, and financial services. Oracle CPQ is a popular choice for businesses because it integrates with Oracle ERP and CRM applications and supports the complete quote-to-cash process. It offers many features, including product configurations, pricing engines, and quote management. For companies looking for a visual configurator, it provides a complete visualization of product components with an intuitive user interface.
Conga CPQ
Conga CPQ is an excellent configure, price, quote tool that works best for businesses with complex pricing structures and those that are expanding their product lines and services. Its feature-rich CPQ automation software makes it simple for businesses to generate quotes and contracts quickly. Conga CPQ makes it easy to manage even the most complex quotes by allowing sales teams to assign tasks and add notes. You can also track progress so that the entire quote-to-cash process is expedited. Plus, since it’s cloud-based, team members can access it from anywhere in the world.
Valuable Insight From Real Customers
Gartner Peer Insights
Salesforce CPQ is rated 4.4 out of 5.0 stars on Gartner Peer Insights. In their reviews, users note the software’s robust features and customizability. However, some users mention that while the software is highly scalable, you may need outside vendors to build all the capabilities you need.
The reviewers and customer demographics are as follows:
Reviewer’s Company Size
- Less than $50M: 6%
- $50M-$1B: 43%
- $1B-$10B: 24%
- Over $10B: 18%
- Gov’t/PS/Ed: 7%
Reviewer’s Industry Size
- IT Services 18%
- Software 14%
- Miscellaneous 10%
- Manufacturing 8%
- Other 51%
Reviewer’s Deployment Region
- North America 50%
- Asia/Pacific 24%
- Europe, Middle East, and Africa 18%
- Latin America 8%
Gartner Peer Insights affirms that Salesforce CPQ streamlines and automates many deal processes, from generating a quote to finalizing a contract. This provides more control to the end user, who can easily configure, price, quote, negotiate, communicate and finalize the deal.
FAQs
Common Questions and Answers
Salesforce CPQ is a configurable platform that helps organizations streamline and automate their sales quoting process. It provides users with the ability to quickly create accurate quotes, without the need for manual interventions.
No, Salesforce CPQ does not require coding. It is a point-and-click configuration tool that allows users to quickly and easily configure pricing, quoting, and product rules without writing any code. This makes it an ideal solution for businesses that need to quote and price complex products and services, but don’t have the resources or expertise to write custom code. Salesforce CPQ is also highly customizable, so if you do have coding skills, you can use them to further tailor the tool to your specific needs.
However, it’s important to note that while basic configuration and setup do not require coding, Salesforce CPQ does offer advanced customization options that can involve coding for users who wish to extend or customize the application beyond its standard configuration capabilities. This could include using Apex code for creating complex price rules or triggers, or Visualforce pages for custom user interfaces, among other things. Therefore, while coding is not required for the basic operation of Salesforce CPQ, having coding skills can enhance the ability to tailor the solution more precisely to a business’s specific requirements.
Salesforce is a CRM software that helps businesses manage their customer relationships. Salesforce CPQ is a tool that helps businesses automate their pricing and quoting processes. The two products are often used together to help businesses streamline their sales operations. However, there are some key differences between the two products.
Salesforce CPQ is a tool that helps organizations automate the process of quoting and pricing for their products and services. It is used by sales teams to create accurate and consistent quotes, and by finance teams to ensure that pricing is aligned with company objectives. CPQ can also be used by marketing teams to develop and manage pricing strategies, and by operations teams to streamline the quoting and pricing process.
Salesforce CPQ is used by a variety of organizations, including companies in the manufacturing, healthcare, technology, and automotive industries. In addition, Salesforce CPQ is also used by non-profit organizations and government agencies.
Like any other sales tool, Salesforce CPQ takes time to learn how to use effectively. How long it takes to learn Salesforce CPQ depends on several factors, including your previous experience with Salesforce and other sales tools, your willingness to learn, and the amount of time you are able to dedicate to learning.
Salesforce CPQ is a managed package, meaning it is delivered and supported by Salesforce. This means that customers can be confident that they are getting the latest features and bug fixes from Salesforce, and that they have a single point of contact for any support issues.
To check the Salesforce CPQ package version number in your org:
1. Go to Your Name > Setup.
2. In the Quick Find box, enter Installed Packages, and then select Installed Packages.
3. Click the Salesforce CPQ package name. The version number appears in the Package Version column on the right side of the page.
If you have an older version of Salesforce CPQ, you can check to see if there’s a newer version available by clicking the Available Updates tab on the Installed Packages page. Newer versions of Salesforce CPQ are listed in the Package Version column on the left side of the screen. If there’s a newer version available, you can upgrade to it by clicking the Upgrade button next to the Salesforce CPQ package name.
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