Product Rules in 5 Mins
In the world of Salesforce CPQ, People sometimes get Price Rules and Product Rules confused. They actually have totally different roles to play. Price Rules Populate and Product Rules control. We have already covered what Price Rules do, so what can you do with Product Rules?
What are the types of Price Rule
You can do a lot of things with a Price rule, but fundamentally it comes down to the Type field on the Price Rule record. This has 4 options which are:
Validation. These are like validation rules at an object level, except that they fire within the Quote Line Editor (QLE). This means that they stay up to speed with calculating in real time or even on load so everyone knows where they stand at all times.
Alert. These Price Rules work like a soft validation, ie instead for making you do something before you can save, they inform you that it needs to happen. Some of the best use cases I have sen for these are when letting people know they could be offering a product that has just come on offer, or warning that approvals are taking a while, so they may want to reconsider what they are offering.
Selection. When a price rule is set to selection, you can use it to control the visibility and preselection/deselection of products. The control options include add, hide, enable & add, and multiple other options and are available within the associated Product Action.
Filter. This is the least used Type but can be useful, it allows you to add a filter to a bundle. As you have such a high level of control over when price rules fire, this can be really helpful for controlling what products appear in a bundle without needing a massive number of Option Constraints.
Depending on which option you go for, you will want to use different related lists to get your results.
How to use Product Rules
Without wanting to regurgitate information already available, here is a great overview of Product rules and how to use them that Salesforce provide.
Hints
With years of experience using Product Rules, here are a few of my hints when using them in the real world:
Don’t shy away from building for the future. No one likes a rule that holds them up later on. As I was once told, build to scale, or those scales will make a dragon called technical debt.
Don’t forget about Alert’s. I often see clients who have very few and don’t use them for short term scenarios. Having said that, I have seen them use for great effect for helping with add-ons.
If you have a lot of Filter or Selection Product rules then you should probably consider if your should have different bundles. This can help with reporting and is easier to maintain.
Remember you can fire the rules in the Product Configuration screen using the ‘Apply Rules’ custom action. As such you may want to remove that custom action or, make sure your Users know it is there. This button is very rarely used in my experience.
I hope you found this helpful, if you have any comments, other learning you think we should add or would like help then please don’t hesitate to get in touch via the form below.
