Do You Need Salesforce CPQ For Quoting?

Preparing a quote during the sales process is a fairly standard process. In some cases the quotes are very straightforward and don’t need any system to generate them. They are prepared outside the system in an email or a simple document. When you move beyond those simple scenarios you arrive at a situation that prompts the question of whether you need to buy Salesforce CPQ for your quoting needs. These are situations where your quoting process is not simple – you have many product SKUs and pricing possibilities and often have some complex business rules while building the quote. 

Quoting in Salesforce

There are two options in Salesforce. You can either use the quoting capabilities that come with your Sales Cloud license or you can go with Salesforce CPQ. The good news is that the base Salesforce platform has pretty good quoting capabilities and you can accomplish a lot with the power of the Salesforce platform before going for a full blown Salesforce CPQ product. The key is to invest some time to analyze and map your business needs to the right Salesforce offering.

Salesforce Sales Cloud comes with a standard quoting functionality. Using this functionality, you create a quote from an opportunity and its products. Each opportunity can have multiple associated quotes, and any one of them can be synced with the opportunity. It also allows you to generate a basic quote document pdf that can be emailed to your customers.

On the other hand, Salesforce CPQ provides much more advanced quoting capabilities. Product bundles, subscription product management, advanced discounting, dynamic product selection, advanced pricing models and pricing rules, advanced approvals, dynamic quote document generation are some of the features that Salesforce CPQ provides. So naturally, you will tend to favor Salesforce CPQ when it comes to applicability of these features in your use case.

But when doing this comparison, the standard quoting functionality should not be looked at as just a point quoting solution with certain features. This functionality is built on top of the Salesforce platform which provides you with a lot of control over configurability and customization. When doing comparison and choosing between standard Salesforce quoting vs CPQ, a more nuanced approach is needed.

Key Considerations When Choosing Between Standard Salesforce Quoting vs. Salesforce CPQ

Product Complexity

In Salesforce CPQ, you can create complex product bundles to represent various sub-components or product combinations sold together. Each of the sub component products could also have various attributes that need to be selected/configured as part of a quote. Beyond bundles, you could have other types of products such as subscription products, usage based products (where rates defined in the quote but actual total cost is based on quantity consumed over time) or multi dimensional quoting products (subscription product broken down into segments of time such as quarter/year. Pricing and quantity of these segments can be independent of other segments). In addition, Salesforce CPQ also provides powerful product rules. Using product rules, you can create validations or automatically show/hide/add products to the quote based on configured rules.

Standard Salesforce quoting allows you to simply choose products and apply pricing from selected pricebook. You can use the platform capabilities (e.g. Flows, Apex) to extend the product complexity in some ways

• Showing and/or hiding different fields representing product configuration details depending on chosen product
• Adding certain products automatically based on selection of some other products
• Validating product selections using a combination of validation rules/flows and custom code.
• Rolling up prices or other attributes of some sub component products to parent product

Above list shows some areas where platform capability can be used to extend standard quote and product features to include more complex setup. Such an extension of the platform works for many businesses. But if there are many such bundle products with frequent need to configure additional bundles on the fly or if the product validations keep on changing and need to be managed by end super users or if there are many subscription products with corresponding functionality needed or other usage based products needed out-of-the-box then Salesforce CPQ is an appropriate choice. Also, Salesforce CPQ has comprehensive order, contract and asset management functionality.

Pricing and Discounting Complexity 

Salesforce CPQ provides out of the box pricing methods such as Block Pricing, Cost-and-Markup Pricing, Batch Pricing. Such pricing methods allow you to price the products beyond price book list prices. In addition, Salesforce CPQ provides price rules which automate price/quantity calculations based on configured criteria and quote level summary metrics. Salesforce CPQ also supports a variety of discounting strategies including discount schedules (volume/term discounts), distributor discounts or even pricing guidance, which create recommended discounts based on historical pricing trends.

Standard Salesforce quote pricing starts with price book price. A simple discount % field is also available to apply a discount. In this case, pricing or discounting complexity can be extended using the platform capabilities as per following examples

• Using a lookup object to come up with pricing based on selection of various attributes of the selected product and override the price book price.
• Using default or configured % to apply markup to list price or directly storing marked-up prices in pricebook entries
• Using custom object and flow to come up with a simple block pricing structure
• Modifying the price of a product based on some configured complex criteria

This list shows some areas where platform capability can be used to extend standard quote and product features to include more complex setup. This kind of extension works if the change is primarily in some custom pricing logic. Companies will choose CPQ if the requirement extends beyond just pricing complexity into how the pricing rules are set up and how frequently those change. Also, out of the box subscription pricing features in Salesforce CPQ are a great draw for those selling subscription products/services.

Approval Complexity 

Salesforce CPQ comes with an advanced approval feature which enables complex approval scenarios. With features such as approval rules, approval chains, approver groups and smart approvals, many complex approval use cases can be implemented with ease.

Standard salesforce approval feature is quite robust in itself and can serve many companies for their approval requirements. But anything more complex will require Salesforce CPQ’s advanced approvals.

Dynamic Quote Document 

Salesforce CPQ comes with an extensive feature set when it comes to quote document generation. From structuring documents into different subcomponents of different types, to styling the documents, to generating documents in bulk batches, Salesforce CPQ document generation simplifies these steps. With Salesforce CPQ+, you also get OmniStudio Document Generation which merges content from text-based files, such as Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, with data from any standard or custom object to produce custom .docx, .pptx, and .pdf files. With this, you can create your document template in Microsoft Word with all formatting and populate key information through merge fields.

The standard salesforce quote document generation offers very limited functionality. Most typical quote document requirements will need customization using Visualforce or require use of an appexchange package such as Conga Composer, Docomotion, PDF Butler etc.

Wrapping It Up 

In summary, it is good to go one level deeper than high-level feature comparison between Salesforce standard quoting and Salesforce CPQ while deciding your strategy. The Salesforce platform allows you to stretch the standard quoting functionality to meet a wide range of business needs. It is worth investing that effort upfront before picking the right product for your organization.