Salesforce Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) helps businesses configure complex products, accurately price services and generate timely quotes for customers. CPQ improves sales efficiency, accuracy and consistency, providing customers with an enhanced experience.
As with all Salesforce implementations, there are several steps that you can take to improve the process and maximise system suitability before an implementation.
Your pre-implementation checklist
Reliable and qualified Salesforce partners will guide you through your Salesforce CPQ implementation, however, delays in gathering information and making key project-related decisions can cause project timelines to slip and increase costs.
To avoid these project pitfalls, the steps below outline proactive actions you can take to ensure your implementation is a success.
01. Define your objectives & goals
It is important to have a clear idea of what challenges your Salesforce CPQ implementation will help you overcome and how it might help your business achieve long-term goals.
Doing so will help establish what criteria you will measure project success by and sets a baseline for decision-making during the project.
02. Conduct a process review
You can identify pain points, challenges and inefficiencies by documenting your current quoting and sales processes.
Consider what future processes might look like after a Salesforce CPQ implementation – Are there integrations or other parts of the business process that should be incorporated into the overall solution?
03. Data preparation
Data cleansing is time-consuming. Take the opportunity to start ‘house cleaning’ before your implementation. This ensures only relevant and accurate data is migrated.
You should spend time with the key stakeholders and clearly define what data needs to be migrated into Salesforce for ‘Go Live.’ Live contracts and current opportunities, quotes and orders should be prioritised.
CPQ has specific record associations and out-of-the-box automation, and each needs to be mapped for data loading. Your chosen Salesforce partner can provide a template for mapping this data, but these are all considerations and decisions that can be made before the project starts.
04. Product catalogue
A key aspect of Salesforce CPQ configuration is your product catalogue. It is a highly valuable exercise to spend time deduplicating product data and mapping any product associations, dependencies and exclusion logic.
When thinking about your ‘topline’ products and rationalising data, it can help to approach this, bearing in mind the idea that Salesforce CPQ is designed to help sales teams build quotes and proposals quickly. Think about what it is you sell, not what you are required to supply customers.
Salesforce CPQ uses product associations to eliminate product duplication based on differentiating attributes such as colour, finish, size, weight etc.
When it comes to product associations, think about what is needed to supply to a customer and any dependencies there might be. This is an important exercise, as configuring automatic inclusions or exclusions can greatly help the sales team who might not have intimate product knowledge.
05. Pricing data
A similar exercise can be completed with your pricing data. Take the time to discuss internally what ‘active’ pricelists you will need in Salesforce and how they will be mapped to your products.
Consider whether there are any customer-specific prices and an associated pricing method for each product. Ask the question, “How do I get to a starting price for a product/customer?” Would you use a list price, cost + markup, quantity-based pricing or a percentage of the overall quote?
It is important to document this for each of your products, and incredibly helpful to identify any complex or pricing exceptions so that these can be built into a solution.
06. Discounting & approvals
With CPQ, it is important to differentiate ‘pricing’ from ‘discounting’. Salesforce uses the ‘Pricing Waterfall’ to help users understand how a final price was calculated.
CPQ starts with a ‘list’ price (pricing) and then offers a series of ‘adjustment’ stages (discounting). There are two types of discounts in Salesforce: automated and manual. Automated discounts might be customer-specific pricing or banding, volume-based product discounts or custom pricing rules.
It is important to understand and document what these are, and any logic associated with these ahead of an implementation so that these can be incorporated into a scalable solution.
With manual discounting, it is important to document what levels of manual discounts users can apply. Discuss what the criteria are and what permissions are required, then map out these processes. This can take time to agree internally, so get started early and incorporate approval processes into a working solution.
07. Documentation
A review of the documents generated through the quoting and sales process is a valuable exercise. Salesforce CPQ comes with additional document-generating functionality, more so than is available in Sales Cloud.
If any product-specific documents need to be included with quote/proposal generation, this can also be configured. However, you should look to map and collate this information ahead of the implementation.
08. Change management
Change management is often overlooked in its importance to successfully implement and integrate new tools and ways of working into your business. It is important to mitigate risks such as poor user adoption, failure to meet the project objectives and managing resistance to change.
Take some time to answer questions such as: “How will you keep key stakeholders informed about changes, benefits and impacts?” or “How will you support users with training and resources to help with the transition?”
Summary
There are many aspects that contribute to a successful Salesforce CPQ implementation. Choosing a Salesforce partner with a deep understanding of the product and platform is an important element.
The ideas outlined here are some areas where your business holds invaluable knowledge. They are key to unlocking the success of the project. Following this guidance will help contribute to a smooth and successful project.
Reach out to us to find out how we can assist with your Salesforce CPQ implementation.
