Salesforce offers the Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) tool to help organizations supercharge their sales. This CPQ tool is amazing at enabling sales reps to speed up the sales process. This happens since the customer gets a customized and accurate quote quickly. It’s important to know about the best practice for Salesforce CPQ implementation to ensure everything is streamlined.

As per a Salesforce study, this platform is shown to facilitate quote generation 36% faster. This leads to fewer invoicing errors by 27% and 22% up-selling. With so many benefits, it is certainly beneficial for businesses to implement this tool. Before getting to the best practices, let’s take a look at the Salesforce CPQ implementation guide.

Stepwise Salesforce CPQ Implementation Guide

Businesses must always ensure that there is correct involvement of any tool they set out to imbibe. This stands true in the case of this platform too. Here is a Salesforce CPQ implementation guide to give beginners a better idea of the steps involved in this process.

1.    Plan the implementation process thoroughly - The targets should be achievable. Budget planning, risk assessment, timeline development and communication plan are a big part of this step.

2.    Outline the imperatives - Professionals should outline the necessary requirements and document it all. This step includes assessing the existing processes, identifying responsibilities and roles of the user and defining the project scope.

3.    Configure the rules, pricing & products - All the rules, pricing and products associated with the company should be configured. These should ideally match the needs of the organization. These include user role configuration, template configuration, rule configuration and workflow configuration.

4.    Test configuration & implementation - The configuration and the implementation of the Salesforce CPQ should be tested thoroughly. Various activities are used to solidify it. This includes performance testing, unit testing, user acceptance testing, security testing and integration testing.

5.    Training to end users - End users should be provided with the right training about correctly using this platform. User adoption, on-demand training and user feedback are important parts of this step.

6.    Successful integration with other systems - Salesforce CPQ should be integrated with other related systems to promote the company’s needs. This leads to streamlining of the sales process. API integration, user interface integration, system integration and custom integration are key aspects to keep in mind.

7.    Migrate prevailing quote & pricing data - Data migration is important to ensure it is consistent and accurate. It’s a crucial step anticipating actions like data extraction, validation, assessment, loading and mapping.

8.    Launch the solution - Salesforce CPQ must be deployed successfully to the production environment. Launching this platform and making it useful for the users is the motive here.

9.    Offer support & maintenance - Ensuring continued success for Salesforce CPQ implementation includes ensuring ongoing support and maintenance. This includes data maintenance, system maintenance, user feedback and user support.

CPQ Best Practices for Salesforce CPQ Implementation

There are plenty of CPQ best practices which are highly useful to ensure successful Salesforce CPQ implementation. The best practices are here on this list because of their usefulness and benefits. Organizations everywhere have been making the most of these best practices to finest results.

A Salesforce CPQ professional will surely know about the practices for desired outcomes. It is learned during a good training course and comes in handy during practical working. This list is sure to help out every professional who is looking for the right ways to make the most of this tool.

1.  Clearly Define project Goals

Defining the project objectives and goals clearly is a necessary step for CPQ implementation. Reps should understand the requirements of the sales process to establish measurable targets. This implementation helps sales teams get rid of their difficulties by finding effective solutions.

2.  Pick Implementation Methodology

Picking the right implementation methodology is an important best practice followed by many organizations. This mostly entails picking a hybrid model of Agile and Waterfall methodology for CPQ implementation. This is better because of the interdependence and complexity between various product modules.

3.  Outline Project Commitment

Many Salesforce CPQ fails because of the bad mixing of different resources. Sales reps without the suitable resources, time and skill set are just ticking timebombs for mistakes and failures. This can be elevated by maintaining continuous communications, discussing the next challenges and project commitment by the service provider. The stakeholder should be optimally involved too.

4.  Pick Apt Features

Many features will be available to the sales reps at all times but that does not mean all of them are to be used. Picking apt features is a key element that should be taken care of by experts. Stakeholders should be a part of this picking process to ensure company goals are always kept first.

5.  Plan the Data

CPQ is all about accumulating data from various sources, making this practice actually an essential one. The users must outline the essential data for this process and where it can be obtained from. This also means that Salesforce CPQ should work flawlessly with other ERPs.

6.  Configure the Features

After the organization installs the CPQ package, they must get to configuring the common features and objects. There are plenty of things to take care of here to make this practice truly work. This means taking care of approvals, discounting, page layout set-up, quote templates, company branding, product lists and sandbox, among others.

7.  User Adoption

It is important for the users to adopt the new system without any difficulties. Not every sales rep might be tech savvy, which might make them aversive to this new system. However, preparing demo sessions and having enough training materials will ease out the transition phase.

Wrap-Up

There are plenty of best practices for Salesforce CPQ implementation that could be adopted by the sales teams and companies. Some of the top ones are mentioned here with the goal of helping beginners out. The transition to Salesforce CPQ can be highly beneficial for an organization when done in the right manner. Source : salesforce cpq training

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