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For sales and other teams, CPQ software can be an essential part of customer relationship management. CPQ stands appropriately for configure, price, and quote. This type of software is used in order to create fast quotes for products that may have dynamic pricing due to their configurable nature.
CPQ solutions can be used to help businesses efficiently offer dynamic and sometimes highly complex pricing quickly while offering consumers a simple experience. Salesforce CPQ is software that organizations can use through the Salesforce platform. When it comes to Salesforce CPQ vs. CPQ, the latter refers specifically to the CPQ software that Salesforce offers. Salesforce CPQ has robust capabilities and is a highly flexible cloud-based solution.
Salesforce CPQ can help organizations make accurate quotes quickly and, through automation, streamline the process immensely. It can also help organizations better understand their performance and revenue and gather important insights through powerful analytic tools. Through guided selling, Salesforce CPQ can help organizations better connect the right products with the right people.
What’s more, as a cloud-deployed solution available through Salesforce’s already powerful CRM platform, getting a Salesforce CPQ login, for some organizations, is only a matter of using their existing Salesforce account and getting the right CPQ plan. Salesforce CPQ also offers easy integration between other Salesforce products, such as Salesforce CRM and Salesforce Billing. This can make it simpler for organizations to take a holistic approach to sales, marketing, operations, and more which can make it easier to make data-driven decisions.
Depending on the needs of your organization, you might opt for one of several distinct plans, each offering varying levels of features. The standard CPQ plan offers robust basic capabilities, such as a product catalog, price book, product bundles, guided selling, and more. The CPQ Plus plan additionally offers features, including Salesforce CPQ APIs and usage pricing and quotes. For even more features, even advanced ones, such as discount controls and legal entity rollups, organizations might opt for CPQ Billing Growth.
Salesforce CPQ is a highly useful CPQ tool. That may beg the question ‘what is CPQ?’
CPQ stands for Configure, Price, and Quote. It refers to software tools that enable businesses to create quotes quickly, even for configurable products. Though product configurations offer customers a way to access products that are better tailored to their needs and can even help organizations save costs or appeal to wider audiences of potential customers, they can represent a serious challenge in offering pricing and quotes.
For example, if you sell a device that has several optional features, but not all of them are compatible with one another, pricing various configurations can quickly become highly complex. CPQ software might aim to address this challenge by creating a dynamic pricing system that can automatically generate quotes based on various configurations. Salesforce CPQ can help organizations do this and more. Salesforce CPQ basics address these concerns, while advanced features enable organizations to also utilize data that can help them enhance their sales. For example, through data-informed guided selling, organizations may be able to not only quickly offer quotes and pricing but also better market the right products to the right consumers.
ADDITIONAL LINKS
There are numerous CPQ licenses that organizations might look at, each plan offering its own benefits. No matter which plans organizations opt for, Salesforce CPQ has many highly useful features that can help organizations better implement dynamic pricing systems and offer quick quotes to consumers. In addition to the robust features offered in the basic CPQ plan, other plans offer organizations even more capabilities. A comprehensive Salesforce CPQ guide can help illustrate the myriad capabilities of Salesforce CPQ, and we’ll cover a few important features here.
Guided Selling:
Guided selling can help sales representatives connect customers with the right products and services. By allowing team members to easily find the right products based on customer needs, this feature can help bolster sales efforts.
Product Bundles:
Salesforce CPQ allows organizations to create product bundles which combine multiple services or goods to create a single product. This can enable organizations to leverage the modularity of their offerings and create tailored solutions easily.
Analytics:
Salesforce CPQ doesn’t only help organizations with pricing. It can also help organizations better understand their performance through insights provided by robust analytics. These insights can help organizations better make data-driven sales decisions.
*Product Catalog:
This feature enables organizations to build one centralized and comprehensive product catalog that features all products available for sale. This can help organizations easily keep track of their offerings and stay organized.
Product and pricing rules:
Organizations can use Salesforce CPQ to create product and pricing rules which can help them ensure that sales reps are able to create consistent pricing and remain compliant with established guidelines and policies.
These are just a few particularly notable features that Salesforce CPQ offers. In addition to these, various plans also offer tools designed to help with billing, usage-based pricing, invoice and revenue schedules, and much more.
Training can be highly important for the use of Salesforce CPQ. As useful as Salesforce CPQ can be to organizations with its myriad features and robust capabilities, it’s crucial that project managers and other team members who will be working with Salesforce CPQ be adequately trained in order to use the software to its full potential. This can enable team members to get the most value out of Salesforce CPQ for the organization and avoid unnecessary mistakes.
What’s more, with proper training, team members may find that their job becomes much easier, and they’re able to operate much more efficiently. In addition to the potential productivity boost, proper training may also be able to reduce frustration among team members that might otherwise be associated with using unfamiliar software.
Through the right training, project managers and other team members will not only become familiar with Salesforce CPQ but may also be able to utilize advanced features that go beyond the basic scope of CPQ systems. By being able to utilize this powerful software to its full potential, teams may find that their efforts are significantly bolstered, and they’re able to enjoy desirable outcomes. Without proper training, team members also may find that it becomes easy to make mistakes or use the software improperly.
There are numerous ways to get training in Salesforce CPQ, and Salesforce CPQ training material can range from reading over relevant Salesforce CPQ documentation to attending courses or classes. Organizations may seek out CPQ training materials, such as training guides and tutorials to help team members learn Salesforce CPQ. How effective various approaches to training are may vary, however.
For example, team members may find that taking courses, or joining classes with instructors, or attending webinars designed to teach how to use Salesforce CPQ provide them with in-depth, useful knowledge that helps them better understand Salesforce CPQ, than simply reading over documentation or tutorials alone. While study materials alone can be useful, they may be even more valuable in conjunction with instruction and teaching.
What CPQ training costs may depend, in part, on how thorough the training is and what training materials are used. As being able to fully utilize enterprise software can have an impact on ROI in the long run, the costs associated with in-depth and comprehensive training may be considered well worth it to some organizations.
In order to become a CPQ specialist, individuals can seek certification. The Salesforce CPQ Specialist certification is designed to demonstrate skills and knowledge that can help users best use Salesforce CPQ. Certification is not only useful to candidates who hope to set themselves apart and demonstrate their expertise and authority to potential employers but to organizations themselves who are seeking talented and skilled individuals to become important team members. As useful as CPQ specialist certifications can be, it can be important to understand the path to Salesforce CPQ certification.
Salesforce CPQ certification requires that candidates pass the Salesforce CPQ Specialist exam. The exam will cover topics such as appropriate pricing methods, setting up products and price books, configuring price rules, and more. In order to prepare, candidates may take courses or acquire study materials such as practice salesforce CPQ certification exam questions.
CPQ certification training is available in the form of training modules through Salesforce’s Trailhead where candidates will find everything from exam overviews and documents to learning units designed to explore various important concepts relevant to the CPQ Specialist certification exam. Candidates may find that through rigorous study and training, they’re better equipped to complete and pass the exam, as well as more familiar with Salesforce CPQ software.
Adequate Salesforce CPQ preparation can help prepare candidates to perform well on the exam by helping them understand key concepts and absorb essential information. But this preparation can go beyond helping candidates perform well on the exam. Not only can this preparation help them prepare for the exam, it can also help them better understand how to use Salesforce CPQ software to its full potential, which can help prepare them for future roles where they work with the software.
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