What is Salesforce CPQ?

The face of Sales is changing by the minute. Customers are now more informed and connected, and they are looking for trusted and responsive partners. When business is booming, your sales rep can find it harder to keep up with that demand.

Did you know that some companies today find generating accurate pricing as one of their biggest challenges? Most companies currently maintain their product catalogs through manual spreadsheets and files, leading to outdated information. On top of that, they can also experience unorganized offline and email approval processes for the invoices; if you are experiencing these in your sales organization, it’s high time that you consider adopting Salesforce CPQ to your sales workflow. This article will guide you on Salesforce CPQ and how it can help your organization’s efficiency in closing deals.

What is CPQ in Salesforce?

Salesforce CPQ stands for Configure, Price, and Quote. It’s an extension of your Salesforce CRM that allows you to create structured and scalable sales processes using a unified platform. It’s a sales tool for companies to provide accurate pricing with any given product configuration scenario.

CPQ in Salesforce makes sure that your team is selling the right product combos, controlling discounting efficiently, and automating approvals without even relying on Excel spreadsheets. Since it’s a cloud-based platform, it gives your sales team easy-to-use software available on any device.

How Does Salesforce CPQ Work?

salesforce cpq guided selling
By answering a few questions, your sales reps can narrow down large pricing and quotation needs.

salesforce cpq deal structure
They can easily select products of multiple revenue taxes in a single quote, such as one-time, usage, and subscription. There are guard rails to make sure that the quote products are compatible.

Your reps can also try out multiple deal structures to build the right one to close faster. These are some of the features of Salesforce CPQ that your sales company will benefit from:

salesforce cpq

  • Instantly apply a discount to a specific line and monitor that line item overtime
  • Change quantities in different periods
  • Calculate discounts depending on the client’s budget
  • No spreadsheets needed

salesforce cpq parallel approval

  • See approval list per quotation or pricing invoice
  • Runs approvals in parallels across multiple departments to move deals faster

salesforce cpq template proposal

  • Reps can choose from a selection of templates delivering a quickly branded proposal

10 Important Salesforce CPQ Features

The features of Salesforce CPQ go beyond closing deals faster. It also enables you to configure complex processes, grow your customer base, reduce financial risk, automate the sales life cycle, and turn data into actionable insights. Below are essential features of the cloud-based solution:

  1. Guided Selling: A step-by-step configuration wizard that helps your sales rep quickly identify and select the right products and services
  2. Solution Configurator: Modify rules and preconfigured solutions to simplify complex sales cycles and boost product add-on attachment rates
  3. Pricing Engine: Create different deal scenarios for complex quotes using predefined pricing and discount guidance, including one-time, recurring, and usage-based pricing models
  4. Quote Generation: Create accurate, branded quotes within just seconds, with options to hide or reveal discounts and quote lines
  5. Contracted Pricing: Streamlines repeat business by defining negotiated prices or inheriting pricing from previous quotations
  6. Product and Pricing Rules: Ensure reps quote complete and compatible solutions with automated guidelines and dependencies
  7. Accurate Prorations: Avoid price discrepancies between quotes, orders, and invoices with a single unified pricing engine
  8. Advanced Approvals: Automate cross-functional approval chains to ensure policy alignment without slowing sales cycles
  9. Flexible Invoicing: Ensure timely cash collection by automating invoicing for one-time, recurring, or usage-based fees, including invoice consolidation
  10. Pricing and Quoting Analytics: Leverage AI to analyze discounting trends across products, geographies, and sales teams

7 Benefits of adding Salesforce CPQ to your CRM

Salesforce CPQ increases business efficiency

Sales organizations need to work smarter and more efficiently. To do so, you should eliminate manual processes that lessen productivity and replace it with automation software that does the job perfectly in less time.

Salesforce CPQ simplifies critical sales processes like proposal creation, approval, and submission. Because it is also integrated into the Salesforce platform, your sales team will be able to connect all the necessary information they need from your customer information, previous purchases, and more. After all, you should focus new sales relationships on delivering value to the customer.

Salesforce CPQ increases quote accuracy

When some information is missing, your sales rep can spend their time going back and forth on configurations. This scenario wastes the time of both your customers and your team.

CPQ apps can project any possible scenario in pricing, giving you a more accurate quotation process. The more efficient your pricing is, the more your customers look at you as a trusted partner.

Salesforce CPQ speeds up the sales process

Having faster processes is vital to the new landscape of selling. Unforeseen circumstances, such as budget changes, reorganization, requirement changes, or decision-maker leaving the company can stall or kill a deal.

When you have a quick selling process, it gives you a higher chance to close deals faster. Salesforce CPQ users have reported having faster sales, up to 80%, and a 34% increase in approval time. CPQ apps help your sales organization protect more deals from stalling in the sales pipeline by speeding up your sales process.

Salesforce CPQ increases business profitability

Adding CPQ to your Salesforce CRM results in higher profitability, increased revenue, and increased efficiency. The CSO Insights’ Sales Performance Optimization Study surveyed more than 1,000 firms worldwide. When companies augmented their core CRM functionality with CPQ, they showed significant revenue increases beyond the capability of CRM alone. Similarly, Salesforce CPQ users see a substantial return on their investments. Politico reports a 17% average revenue contribution, and Mitsubishi shows a 50% increase in ROI in quote-to-cash.

Salesforce CPQ helps Sales Reps close deals faster

Some sales organizations still rely on manual spreadsheets and email for their final sales cycle stages. They waste hours trying to figure out how to price a product or chasing down a contract approval. Salesforce CPQ changes that by giving your sales rep their deal-making canvass to speed up even the most complex quotes.

Salesforce CPQ gives you control over product and pricing offers

It gives your company control and visibility over what you are offering and what’s being sold. Without it, sales teams can operate in chaotic scenarios like sending out pricing that is not approved or offering obsolete products. Salesforce CPQ helps you accurately track, analyze, and forecast with guard rails.

Salesforce CPQ enables you to launch new revenue models

Customers nowadays demand more flexibility when it comes to paying for products. Multiple industries respond to that by creating new revenue streams, and Salesforce CPQ can also help you with that.

Salesforce CPQ Pricing

It can cost you a minimum of $75 per user and month. To help you get a better understanding of what features can you have per plan, here’s a price and feature comparison chart of the different packages:

salesforce cpq pricing

Best Salesforce Consultant for CPQ

To deploy Salesforce CPQ smoothly, you will need a Salesforce Partner to oversee the rules and options for your configuration and train your key users. If you are looking for an expert Salesforce CPQ consultant to talk to, we have listed the most recommended Salesforce Partners for Salesforce CPQ based on G2 Highest Satisfaction Score:

Conclusion

Salesforce CPQ is beyond just a sales solution. It is a digital solution for your company that transforms complex sales processes into productive and efficient organizational operations.

Find the best Salesforce Implementation Partner for CPQ at CRM Consulting. Feel free to search for the perfect one for you on our worldwide directory of highly trusted consulting companies!


Althea Mateo
Thea is an international award-winning Digital Marketer who loves writing about Salesforce and the tech industry.