Whether you are studying for the certification or trying to understand if Salesforce CPQ is the right tool to automate your company’s quote-to-cash process, there first two questions that will land on your head are:
- What is Salesforce CPQ?
- Why is the industry progressively leaning towards it?
After being a Salesforce Developer and Architect for 9 years, recently obtaining my Salesforce CPQ Specialist certification and having consulted in several Quote-to-cash projects and implementation, I will try and give you straight answers to the what’s and why’s of Salesforce CPQ.
What is Salesforce CPQ?
To start, the feature you know and love today as Salesforce CPQ was formerly known as SteelBrick’s Quote-to-Cash, it was on December 15th, 2016 when Salesforce bought, both, the Company (SteelBrick) and Its product for an outstanding price of 360 million dollars.
OK. But what is Salesforce CPQ?
Well, Salesforce CPQ is a collection of features that are commonly used together to produce a client-facing document containing the right products at the right price. Some of these features are:
- A Product Catalog.
- Pricing Mechanisms.
- Discounting Tools.
- Usage-Base Pricing (available with CPQ+).
- Advanced Approvals (available with CPQ+).
- Contracting Methods.
- Quote Generator Engine.
Technically speaking, under the hood Salesforce CPQ is a Managed Packaged owned by Salesforce and sold as a per-user license. This add-on license provides users access to the 85 objects, 23 tabs, and a single App, allowing them to walk through the Configure, Price, and Quoting (A.K.A. CPQ) process with ease.
Why is Salesforce CPQ taking the industry lead?
To round up this introductory post, I would like to outline some of the reasons why it is clear to me how Salesforce CPQ is taking the lead role of the Quote-to-Cash industry.
First, being part of the Salesforce product ecosystem, while fitting seamlessly into the workstream of millions of sales and service cloud users gives it a top-notch user-adoption advantage. Besides being subject to:
- Salesforce quality standards.
- Continued support (3 releases per year).
- An ever-growing community of passionate professionals.
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