Salesforce CPQ & Billing (CPQ) is a popular package from the AppExchange that helps your sales team create fast, accurate and professional quotes.
CPQ stands for Configure Price Quote. Using CPQ a sales rep can:
- Configure the combination of products and services which suit the customer.
- Adjust the price to handle volume pricing or special discounts.
- Create and send a quote to the customer.
In this post, we’ll take a look at some basic CPQ configuration changes in Salesforce, why those changes are tricky to deploy, and what tools are available to help. If you’re familiar with CPQ but struggling to migrate your changes between orgs, you’ll want to find out about Gearset’s new approach to CPQ deployments that cuts through the complexity.
Customizing CPQ in Salesforce
Product
A common task is to deploy quotes between environments, but before we can create quotes, we’ll need some products. A product has its own details, as well as some related objects.
The product details contain the name of the product, as well as some settings to specify how to use that product throughout the CPQ package.
It’s worth noting that the product doesn’t contain a price — instead, each product can have one price set in each related price book. When we create a quote, we’ll choose a price book to provide the list prices for products in that quote. This price book can either be CPQ’s standard price book, or a price book that you’ve created — perhaps for a specific region or market segment.
As well as associated price books, a product can also have related product options and product features. These describe components which make up the product, as well as add-ons for the product.
Finally, to use a product in a quote, the product must have the Active field set to true, and must have a price set in a price book.
Quote
Once configured, your sales team will create quotes for customers using the products available. The quote has its own details, including who the quote is for, and quote lines to document the products included in the quote.
The quote details specify the account, opportunity and contact that the quote is for. They also specify the price book that the quote uses, which needs to be set before we can start adding quote lines.
Why are CPQ deployments so tricky?
So far, so good. But now you want to deploy those CPQ changes. Unlike many other packages, CPQ configuration is stored as data — not metadata. That usually means you need a different tool and workflow to deploy CPQ than you use for metadata. CPQ deployments are also notoriously tricky, because CPQ configuration involves a complicated web of relationships and dependencies. Mapping out the configuration you need to deploy, and then figuring out how to do that successfully is no mean feat.
Deploying CPQ changes with Gearset
Here at Gearset we’ve created a completely new way to deploy CPQ that will save you time and make your life easier. Read our blog post walking you through how to compare and deploy your CPQ configuration in the same way as you do metadata.