Once your product catalog is in order, the next critical challenge every organization faces in the quoting process is how your reps select the necessary products and services to meet the needs of your end customers. Many enterprise organizations have an extensive product catalog, several different business units, and a variety of similar offerings. To address this variety, there are four ways that Salesforce CPQ helps you simplify the journey: filtering, search, favorites, and guided selling.

Filtering

When presented with the product selection page, Salesforce exposes certain filters based on the product fields in your catalog that allow you to quickly narrow down the list of selections available to your reps. An example is a company that sells SaaS and On-Premise offerings. By creating a field called Offering Type, we can query the product data to return only products that match the criteria for SaaS. Filtering by Offering Type would return a list with all of the On-Premise offerings filtered out. These filtering options are invaluable for your sales reps, allowing them to focus on the unique set of offerings relevant to a specific deal scenario.

Search

What if I want an easy way to enter text and search for a product? In Salesforce CPQ, you can enter the keyword of the product or offering you’re looking for, and Salesforce returns all the relevant entries to you. It does this by querying all of the relevant product data and identifying instances of the product that you’re looking for in the database. It’s one of the easiest and fastest ways to find a specific offering that meets your customer’s needs.

Favorites

Do you find that your reps are quoting a particular set of products or a configuration that is configured a specific way each time? Favorites is a simple way to store your favorite products, services, and configurations. Salesforce can even remember the specific feature, option, and attribute selection you made on the configuration, so you don’t need to remember every specific detail of the product you last configured!

Guided selling

Guided selling is one of the most powerful capabilities in the entire toolkit for helping your reps find the right products for your customers. Guided selling allows you to ask a series of questions to determine how to find the right offering for your customer. Questions like company size, industry vertical, and geography can give you more information about what offerings are relevant. You can even leverage business rules and logic to trigger different sets of questions based on deal context to ensure reps answer only the most relevant questions—spending less time sorting through options and more time selling!

Let our consultants help you determine the most efficient way to select the right products for your end customers. Reach out to Simplus to begin simplifying your Quote-to-Cash journey. And check back for the next installment in this product series: bundling.