Insiders Guide To Overcoming Pricing Frustrations In Sales Cloud

Why do users get frustrated when they are pricing and quoting in Sales Cloud?

Well, in our opinion, the single most frustrating aspect about pricing in Sales Cloud is the clunky interface that Sales reps are given to interact with products, prices and discounts.

Yes, Salesforce’s standard product selector.

It’s so “one-dimensional”.

All the powerful CPQ platforms offer advanced, interactive and real-time ways to manipulate products, prices and discounts – irrespective of the back-end configuration and data model.

And that’s where they excel.

They create a beautiful, intuitive environment where users can pick and choose products, move prices up and down, and crucially act as a spare brain to ‘remember’ all the calculations that are being made.

Okay, we’ve established that the standard product selector is a pain, and a big one.

So, how do you move your reps from hating Quotes and Opportunities to being wow’d?

Step 1: Replace the Product Selector

If you’re looking for a quick way to make your sales reps happier when quoting – give them a better product selector!

You could use screen-flow to try to improve the experience – it’s certainly better than the standard product selector – but building that flow to work with all the weird permutations around pricebooks, pricebookentries, quote-syncs, multi-currencies and the such-like is a tough job with lots of time, effort and money to self-build.

Not many CPQ platforms will allow you to use their product selector for free, but uniquely, Flexpricer^® CPQ does.

It’s called ‘Vision Product Selector’.

You can install from AppExchange and because it utilises all the standard Sales Cloud objects, your sales users can have an impressive new interface in which to interact with products, prices and discounts on standard Opportunity Products and Quote Line Items.

And it costs nothing.

But it is the exact same interface that businesses that need clever CPQ use to sell enterprise software, hardware, warranties, machinery, services and the such-like…

Using Vision Product Selector is risk free for two reasons.

It interacts with all your existing Products, Pricebooks, PricebookEntries, Opportunities, Opportunity Products, Quotes and Quote Line Items – because it sits directly on top of Sales Cloud.
You can uninstall it at any point in the future and still have access to all these records AND records created using Flexpricer AND data in standard fields populated by Flexpricer on those records (e.g. Quantity in Quantity field, Sales Price in Sales Price field etc.)

Step 1 to wow your Sales Cloud users is to give them an interface they’ll love.

And Flexpricer is a great first step.

Whether you’re a Salesforce Admin or Consultant and working for end-user, partner or just freelancing in the gig-economy, in practice, this is something that you can do right now.

But don’t… not just yet anyway…. check out Step 2 first…

Step 2: Don’t Force Users to Have to Remember Stuff Themselves (like prices)

The purpose of a database is to store data. Salesforce is a big online database.

The purpose of having Sales Cloud is that you’re able to use that data to help you sell.

Spreadsheets have their place in the market, but they’re not a great place to hold data. They’re great at doing sums. Complex sums.

So, if, in Sales Cloud, you’re not storing all the data needed to help your team sell, and instead you’re putting that data in spreadsheets, you’re really not using Salesforce for the purpose it was intended.

To support a business in scaling and becoming more efficient, you need to find a way to store that useful sales data – the data that’s used in calculations and getting to the right price for the right customer – in a way that Salesforce users can access quickly.

Sure, you can attach spreadsheets as files to records, but there’s little in the way of assistance to the sales rep in moving that data out of an Excel file and into Salesforce so that they can use it for a quote.

You need to find ways to bypass a dependency on a user’s personal knowledge and insight and to have data accessible to all users without them needing to remember… and without the data needing to be entered more than once.

Having a colleague with a great memory doesn’t count as a solution because sales reps come and go – and with it the intelligence they have gathered.

The solution is to store the data in Salesforce as structured data. That means entering information as data fields and records so that it can be viewed, reported and accessed by automations.

Creating a scalable data model is key to this.

As an example – you may have quantity discounts to offer on certain products at certain price points.

As a Salesforce Admin, it’s harder to set this up using a related list of quantities and prices than it is to

a) create several products, each representing quantity and price point; or
b) creating custom fields on a product record with each field representing a different price point.

Option a) quickly becomes a problem when you try to report on sales of an individual product or want to introduce additional price tiers.

Option b) stores data as metadata (which is very much against best practice) and you’re restricted by the number of fields you can have on the product record.

The best option is to create a related list of quantities and prices. It’s easier to visualise and easier for a user to see the price of a product for a given quantity.

But, to get the right price for a given quantity to be automatically set on a line item when it’s added to an opportunity or quote requires much more back-end configuration and automation effort.

And, the product selector we were talking about earlier is key to presenting the pricing information to the user in a friendly and intuitive way.

Step 2 is all about you designing a great data model to store relevant pricing data – be it around volume prices and discounts, bundles, recommended addons etc.

A great data model helps your users see up to date information. It helps you report and dashboard more easily. But to utilise, unless you have a product selector that has the automation pre-built in the interface (like Flexpricer) it takes considerably more effort build in flows and screenflows.

Step 3: Tie Together your User Interface with Data Model

Okay – so you’ve given your users a great interface to work with – your product selector – and have a great data model to store your pricing information.

So, how do you bring it all together?

When you’re using standard Sales Cloud, there’s a lot of functionality that Salesforce implements behind the scenes that can get in your way. Things such as…

Enabling and using revenue schedules changes the behaviour of sales prices and quantities.

Enabling multi-currency changes your data model and pricebookentries.

Performing quote sync removes your opportunity products and recreates based on quote line items.

The good news is that Vision Product Selector has been designed to handle all these scenarios AND has 38 different CPQ features accessible at the flick of a slider switch.

If your use case has no need for CPQ capability – you can wow your users simply by giving them a more powerful product selector.

And what does ‘more powerful’ mean? It means simplifying adding products. It means being able to see product images. It means seeing pricing calculations the effects of discounting in real time before data is saved. It means being able to change pricebooks or currencies and have the previous line items recreated from new pricebook entries. It means being able to sell with higher levels of decimal precision without affecting the rest of the org. It means being able to clone line items. It means a whole host of features.

You can try this out by installing Flexpricer and its Vision Product Selector in your org or sandbox – and making it available to your users.

You then have the capability to unlock CPQ features which don’t force the sales user to have to learn a whole new behaviour in the interface – they just start to see products behave in the way they expect.

“I see that we have some new pricing tiers for our Essential Widgets…”
“Ah, so the list price of Advanced Widgets is increasing by 10% at the start of next quarter… better use that insight to help close some deals now.”
“Would you like the steel or chrome option on the Super Widget – the chrome comes with an extra polishing service included…”

In summary…

Step 1 Find an intuitive, real-time product selector
Step 2 Design a great data model to store your pricing data
Step 3 Build it… or install Flexpricer – where the product selector is free and implementing CPQ is easy