CPQ – A Pricing Calculator in Salesforce?
Have you ever thought about how your prices are calculated in Salesforce CRM.
Actually, scratch that – when you think about it, there isn’t really much to a pricing calculation in ‘out-of-the-box’ Salesforce.
- Select Product(s)
- Get List Price(s) from Pricebook
- Manually change the Sales Price and Discount
- Click to Add Products to Opportunity or Quote
- See all the prices added up as the Opportunity or Quote “Amount”
So, incredibly simple. Prices are plucked out of your pricelist and popped straight onto your opportunity/quote.
Arguably, it’s too simple. There’s nothing particularly clever or intelligent about the it!
If you believe the hype, the only way to get clever pricing calculations in Salesforce is to invest in one of those big, complicated CPQ systems.
Options to Consider
Yes, lots of these CPQ systems are like Enterprise-level, super-computer calculators (hugely customisable and complex) and for most SMEs they can be a bit overwhelming… and dare we say it, a bit too expensive to setup and license.
Actually, if you take it to extremes, you might consider the out-of-the-box experience to be a little like using an abacus – just adding numbers up – and at the other end of the spectrum is an Enterprise CPQ that feels like a reverse-polish, scientific, engineering super-computer!
The good news though, is that there is a middle ground. A platform native to Salesforce that – in more ways than one – is like having a powerful calculator with a big memory. One that performs basic and advanced functions but is not so complicated that it takes a University degree to understand.
Customer-Specific Pricing using “Memory”
An ‘Advanced’ Pricing Calculator with a big memory would help you work out the right price for a product because it’s using information that’s already captured and stored about either product or about the customer.
For example, given a particular customer or a particular product your calculator could automatically applying discounts or adjust prices using data that you’ve saved in its “memory” (as records in Salesforce).
And, unlike the out of the box experience, using a pricing calculator tool in Salesforce shows you the results of your pricing calculations instantly and in real-time just like a you’d expect from its desktop equivalent.
Let’s consider a situation where you have a price that you’d like to apply for a particular customer because it’s the price that you’ve agreed with them.
You might have agreed that price many weeks or months ago but a new sales rep has joined your business and doesn’t immediately know that you’ve already agreed that price.
In the old world you might have a spreadsheet that calculates a discount for that particular customer or specifies their exact price that you’ve agreed. And that spreadsheet might be buried in some notes somewhere.
However in a simple CPQ, you have that information already stored as data related to the customer. It’s already in your calculator’s memory.
So, when a new rep arrives and creates a quote for this customer, the correct prices are pulled out of memory and automatically applied to their quote or opportunity.
It’s as easy as that.
Simplicity Rules
When we hear the phrase CPQ – Configure Price Quote – it’s easy to think big and complicated. It’s easy to think about systems that are going to take a long time to get set up and expensive to implement. That can be true for the Enterprise systems.
But when we hear the phrase “pricing calculator”, we think in much simpler and easier terms. We might press a few keys and the results are there – displayed quickly and accurately.
So if you’re looking for a CPQ system in Salesforce and you’re looking to perform pricing calculations on opportunities and quotes – choose a system that makes it simple for your sales team.
Choose a system that makes it simple for your administrators to set up the prices in your calculator’s memory.
Most pricing challenges in Salesforce are not big and complicated. So, you don’t necessarily need a big and complicated CPQ.
When you unwrap a new calculator and take it out of its packaging, you expect to be able to start using it really very quickly. You expect it to show you the results in real time. Why shouldn’t your CPQ be that simple.
Why not try Flexpricer today – it’s the CPQ that’s as easy to set up and use as a calculator.
