Empower your corporation with complex sales CPQ for corporations

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[Music] greetings to all welcome to our salesforce cpq training series my name is sudha sundaram i have 12 plus years of experience predominantly in the sales force in the agile world my last health position was at city i was vice president for program management of salesforce i'm also 11x salesforce.com certified professional and i also hold few certifications in the agile world i'm also a trail basil mentor and outside salesforce i'm an artist dancer and then a web traveler you can follow me on twitter and linkedin here here's a quick objective of the training series so this training series is targeted for anyone who is interested in learning cpq the objective of this training is to give you a basic overview of salesforce configure price code cpq concepts and use cases through the series of sessions we would cover the key sales for cpq functionalities and as i mentioned this session is intended for anyone who is interested in learning about cpq why cpq is essential and to give you a basic foundation of cpq functions and salesforce we recommend you creating a trailhead arc to get a good hands-on through the cpq flow while these concepts are fresh in your mind so here is the agenda for today's session today we will start off by introducing you to common sales challenges coding challenges that a lot of companies face how cpq addresses those in general we will also look at cpq process flow and a little dive into the c p and q of the salesforce cpq process as we all know the phase of sales is changing customers are more connected and informed we all like the different purchasing channels and look for trusted responsive fast and productive channel so this is just one side on the other side in many companies sales trips struggle to keep up with the demands what makes it so worse is the disconnected data processes and the systems they use to facilitate the sales so let's move on to some common coding challenges when we say coating it sounds like it should be easy right a customer wants to buy one or few products and we need to provide a code well great what can be a struggle here some companies truly struggle with this why we all would have seen some companies maintaining their product catalogs and pricing in excel sheets word or pdf do the sales rep go look for this file every time they start a deal most likely not many would have downloaded it once and are probably using it again and again for their deals but what happens when products and pricing change well it's easy to publish a new file version with details updated but what is hard is to ensure that the sales reps are referring only to the updated file and there is no guarantee that the product or price a customer is offered is correct and up to date even if the error gets caught before sending a code there is a considerable amount of time spent in fixing and revising it maybe it doesn't get caught at all we never know when some companies have large product catalog with complex business and technical rules to be followed and they either use a homegrown solution or an excel file with an extensive macros not everyone knows how to deal with the macros and imagine if a person who built it is no longer there in the company or the knowledge gets lost all these slow down the deals some companies do not have ways to formally request or track approvals it could entail emailing for approval or walking down to someone's desk which becomes ideally difficult to track or report on when we are the sales rep dealing with multiple deals all these can slow us tremendously down and in turn cause a bad customer experience finally many companies invest heavily in branding and building image when code documents are prepared manually say in microsoft word or any other form of document there could be a large variation from one document to the other in both branding and content in addition to the lengthy turnaround time slowing down the sales cycle a poor or dysfunction coating process can negatively affect the closure rates leave a bad customer experience and allow the money to leak in many ways for example missed opportunities to increase deal size this has a huge impact there is no common place to store or report on data and this can lead to poor visibility and control over discounting lack of accuracy in sales pipeline be it new business or renewals and not to forget the financial impact to make things right with the customer when a coating error is made it not only looks bad to go and tell your customer hey sorry we made a mistake on your code we may not have all the information you may need we will have to end up giving them a freebie or a discount heavily to please the customer or to apologize this is where cpq comes into play cpq solutions generally address the selling and coding challenges by capturing the tribal knowledge and using it to enable the users with less training or experience to prepare accurate codes cpq systems also help guide users through a consistent process of selecting the best products for the customer and with functions like ai we would understand the preferences and the buying patterns of the customers much more easily cpq system also helps enforce business and technical rules to ensure complete and valid configurations ensuring the latest product and pricing data is always available and used to prepare codes cpq systems also help in managing discounting and approvals efficiently generating dynamic proposal documents with consistent branding contents and structures help as retain our branding and the company image so what is cpq cpq stands for configure price and code so let's quickly sum this up so when we say configure what's the typical question that we are trying to address here what products does the customer want to buy that is the target when we talk about configure piece of cpq and how much do those products cost and that is about the price part of the cpq and finally how can we give the customer the details about the sale this is where q part of the cpq code comes into play so now let's get on to salesforce cpq process flow it all starts with the familiar accounts and opportunities at some point when we want to put together a code for a customer for sale and we want to begin the process the cpq process flow kicks in the code will typically have the customer information start and end date as the basic information to start with along with the rest others so let's move on to adding products the customer wants the users can search the product catalog to find and add the product let's say we have a product selected and it needs to be configured so for example let's pick a product here say we have a laptop that is being coated so what color how much memory how much storage do they want to add an extended warranty or do they want to buy some recommended products like a printer or a wireless mouse once these choices have been made for that particular product bundle the process can be repeated as many times as needed for the additional products on the code once all the products are selected user will look at the pricing for the products and the discount if necessary to get the deal done this is where pricing and discounting comes into play once the user is happy with the way products and pricing looks on a code they can sum it for approvals if need be sales for cpq can either use its sales for standard approvals functionality or use its very own advanced approval functionality for functions that the standard approvals don't provide for instance like parallel approval tracks once a code is approved a code or a proposal document is generated and sent to the customer e-signature or electronic signature is optional salesforce cpq integrates with and adobe sign to quickly generate and send documents to the customers for e-signature just with one click by this time the opportunity is closed one and the next step is contracting sales for cpq is not a contract lifecycle management application this is really a product focused contracting that we are trying to talk about taking products that customer was coated and making a record that they have purchased them so it's all about products quantity prices and term length customer has come back you know midway through the term and makes changes for example say a company is expanding and they want to add on more licenses for their software they had already purchased so this is where contract amendment comes into play it takes us all the way back to the new opportunity uh code choosing products pricing discounting generating documents and signing them so moving on to the add-on codes and orders we will be for any functions that requires an add-on to an existing code or an order this is where we come in sometimes when we have subscription products involved we are going to have contracts expire and customers need to renew them so this is where renewing contracts comes into play sales for cpq will generate renewable opportunity and codes in this case and like i said earlier for amendments it takes us all the way back to new opportunities code choosing products pricing discounting generating documents and signing them so to quickly summarize about our cpq process flow it's one of the fastest paths to optimize code to cache and enter your customer sales cycle is on single platform which makes it easy let's dive a little deep into the cpq acronym and see what each of it offers so like i mentioned c stands for configuration cpq systems guides the user through the process of selecting the right product for a customer the typical question here is what products does the customer want to buy once the product is selected further information may need to be captured in some cases and the business and technical rules may govern the combination of products that can be sold together p stands for pricing cpq systems formalize the pricing ensuring that the sales reps are always coaching the current products at the relevant and the current price cpq system also provides the mechanism to tackle complex pricing calculations without a calculator a desk or a pen and a paper some products can be sold at list price in companies and cpq system offers a variety of discounting mechanisms for them ranging from system applied volume based discounts say for example when a customer buys a certain volume of a product and you want to give them a discount or like a pre-negotiated discounts uh for example for certain customers because of their special relationships we want to give us a 10k negotiated discount to a discretionary line level or a quote level discounts so all this can be done automatically and the good thing is we can also have approval process implemented to capture any undesirable discounting behavior a lot of this happens in the background while we are configuring the product and preparing our code moving on q stands for coating once we have the product selected configured and priced it is time to present a code to the customer cpk solutions quickly merge customer product and pricing information into a predefined document template to produce a professional and consistent branded codes and proposals we can also build reusable templated content like having terms and conditions included any other legal classes and include them as sections to the code documents cpq systems can also integrate with e-signature solutions to further speed up the deal closure so that was a quick brief introduction about uh cpq uh primarily sales for cpq so here is what we need to do to begin our cpq journey so first thing to do is to sign up for a free developer edition arc with salesforce cpq i have provided the link here cpq package will be installed and you will also see the cpq data and objects pre-populated please note that the package license will be active only for 90 days so that's all we have for this session uh thank you for listening i hope this was informative thank you apexars uh for having us host this session here today you