What is Salesforce CPQ?
Salesforce has many clouds and products, and it is easy to lose track of what they do and when to use them. In this blog, I will tell you what Salesforce CPQ is, where it sits in the product suite and its primary use cases.
Within the Salesforce product suite, CPQ is part of Revenue Cloud. You might be thinking that all Salesforces products are about revenue, so what does the product set do that is different? Well, Revenue Cloud has a much deeper level of functionality around revenue functions. Due to this, it fits nicely into RevOps Mentalities. For instance, some other products found in this cloud are Billing, Advanced Approvals and part of Commerce Cloud. For this reason, Revenue Cloud projects often include workshops with Sales, Marketing, Finance, Customer Success, and Legal to name a few. Within Revenue Cloud, it is worth noting that CPQ is the primary offering and is required if you want to use any of the other products, although CPQ can be bought on its own. There are two versions of CPQ licences, CPQ and CPQ+. These have different levels of ability, as covered here.
So what does CPQ do?
Put simply, it enables more complex product structures with bundling abilities (the 'C' stands for configuration), multiple pricing options like block and cost plus (The 'P' stands for Price), and dynamic quote documentation (The 'Q' stand for Quote). All of this functionality provides a massive step up from standard functionality, but it doesn't stop there as subscription, renewal, and amendment functionality move the abilities of Salesforce into a different stratosphere. I will be covering each of these areas in separate blogs.
So what are good use cases for CPQ?
I have implemented CPQ in multiple industries and for many use cases, from Events to Fintech to telecoms. From my experience, the perfect use case is a company with a complex subscription product offering that needs to get good documentation to customers quickly. However, if you struggle with any of these areas, then Salesforce CPQ is worth investigating.
Mid to high-range product setup complexity and/or interdependency
A growing product suite
Using different pricing models than just list price
Onerous approval processes
Delays in getting quotes to customer
Subscription management
Customers requiring amendments to their contracts
Data on what happens in your sales process.
These are just a few that I see frequently. Please get in touch if you want to discuss the challenges you are facing and if CPQ could help you resolve them.
