Admins / CPQ

8 Ways to Explore Salesforce CPQ

By Lucy Mazalon

Salesforce CPQ (configure, price, quote), now known as Revenue Cloud, helps your sales reps create accurate quotes for customers, going beyond rudimentary Opportunities Products and Quotes, to sell complex sets of products and bundles.

Streamline the sales process by customizing product offerings (using the correct configuration), seamlessly generating proposals and quotes, have guided selling keep deals on target, all while ensuring compliance – leading to fewer errors and delays on your way to winning revenue.

Due to the sheer volume of features available, use cases you could encounter, and the differences in maintaining Salesforce CPQ (i.e. deployments) makes for a steep learning curve – but, a rewarding one!

Salesforce CPQ was featured on our Salesforce specializations run-down, because CPQ-knowledgeable people are scarce, which leads you to possible high earning potential, and the ability to work with some very cool companies.

READ MORE: 30+ Salesforce Specializations to Consider in 2023

Whether you’re new to CPQ, or have some configuration experience, we hope that you find some useful nuggets from the Trailblazer community in this guide.

1. Salesforce CPQ vs Products and Pricebooks

First things first, understand how CPQ differs from what you’re already familiar with.

Products and Pricebooks are standard Salesforce objects every admin would have worked with in some capacity.

Salesforce CPQ does use the same Product, Pricebook, and Pricebook Entries objects, as well as the Opportunity Product object. However, CPQ then goes way beyond these capabilities – with 66 custom objects, its own set of fields, configurable settings, and logic.

There’s a handy comparison guide for you to get to grips with the differences:

READ MORE: Salesforce Products and Pricebooks vs. Salesforce CPQ

2. Salesforce CPQ: Top Features

As we mentioned, the sheer volume of features available and use cases you could encounter, makes for a steep learning curve.

If you feel that your reps are not getting the most out of this sales tool, then check out these Salesforce CPQ features you should know about and (hopefully) inspire you to try some out in your org!

READ MORE: 10 Salesforce CPQ Features You Should Know About

3. Subscription Products in Salesforce CPQ

A subscription product has some recurring payment element to it, whether it be a monthly payment (e.g. a Netflix subscription), or an annual subscription (e.g. Amazon Prime).

Tracking which customers have subscription-based products is one of the major highlights of Salesforce CPQ, and is worth considering for any organization with recurring renewal opportunities.

READ MORE: Set Up Subscription Products in Salesforce CPQ

4. Extend CPQ With Custom Actions

Do you want to show/hide products to specific users, in an easy (and declarative) way?

Yes, it’s possible! This tutorial will teach you how to filter product selection using CPQ custom actions. Prepare the user, Product and Quote objects, create the custom action (button for users), and you’re pretty much on your way.

READ MORE: How to Use Custom Actions with Salesforce CPQ to Filter Products by User

5. Combine CPQ With Salesforce Campaigns

There are many Salesforce features that you can combine with Salesforce CPQ in order to build cool solutions to ultimately delight your customers and internal users.

One example is CPQ combined with Salesforce Campaigns – for either marketing or sales team led promotions. For example, a stakeholder in your business has asked you to set up a campaign for a specific product, where a promotional price will be applied to specific Contacts within this Campaign.

Find the tutorial below:

READ MORE: Combining Salesforce CPQ & Price Promotion Campaigns

6. Add-on Tools for Salesforce CPQ

No matter how stellar your sales reps are, failing to deliver product information quickly and accurately can cost leads and longtime customers. The good news is that several integrations for Salesforce’s Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) platform can simplify a complicated process.

From visual configurators and augmented reality – to automated billing and an integration with your accounting platform – there are an increasing number of add-ons to extend Salesforce CPQ, and build a customer experience that stands out in the marketplace.

READ MORE: Salesforce CPQ Toolbox: 4 Add-on Solutions to Try

7. Salesforce CPQ Deployments

As we mentioned, the differences in maintaining Salesforce CPQ (i.e. deployments) makes for a steep learning curve.

The number of data relationships between CPQ objects makes it difficult to deploy changes between environments. In a nutshell, you will be working with CPQ object data across multiple orgs, each record with their own unique CRM ID per org (as opposed to metadata, which you’ll be familiar with deploying).

Ongoing administration (deployments) are often overlooked – but are, in fact, one of most important topics to discuss before a CPQ implementation even starts. Ensure you check out these guides to keep this topic front and center as you progress through you CPQ learning journey:

READ MORE: CPQ Deployments: 6 Tips from a Salesforce CPQ Specialist
READ MORE: Gearset for CPQ: An Easier Way to Deploy CPQ Configuration

8. Get Salesforce CPQ Certified

The Salesforce CPQ Specialist certification leads the way for ensuring that those implementing CPQ and the Quote to Cash process are fully prepared for complex requirements and business models.

While there’s no substitute for hand-on experience, getting certified will prove you have a broad understanding of Salesforce CPQ, and will give you a confidence boost (it’s not an ‘easy’ exam to pass!)

READ MORE: CPQ Specialist Certification Guide & Tips

The Author

Lucy Mazalon

Lucy is the Operations Director at Salesforce Ben. She is a 10x certified Marketing Champion and founder of The DRIP.

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