Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) is helping more teams see a greater ROI from Salesforce but it’s notoriously hard to deploy. Gearset wanted to change that.
With Gearset for CPQ, you’re able to deploy metadata and CPQ configuration together in one easy deployment.
What is CPQ and why is it important to Salesforce teams?
CPQ has been around since the early 2010s but has skyrocketed in popularity over the past few years.
Sales reps no longer have to rely on complex pricing spreadsheets or risk sending incorrect quotes to customers — once products and prices have been configured, CPQ can generate quotes in just a few clicks. Introducing CPQ helps teams streamline their sales process by delivering quotes quickly, accurately and with consistency.
For businesses looking to increase their Salesforce ROI, CPQ is rapidly becoming invaluable — Salesforce found that CPQ has helped teams reduce the number of quotes with pricing errors by 38% while making quote generation 10x faster!
But as CPQ adoption continues to increase, teams are grappling with the difficulties of trying to deploy CPQ config successfully.
What makes CPQ deployments so tricky?
CPQ started out as a managed package developed by SteelBrick but later became part of the Salesforce Revenue Cloud after SteelBrick was acquired by Salesforce in 2015. Due to its history as a managed package, CPQ has a complex configuration and dependency model that makes it difficult to deploy.
In fact, CPQ config can be so painful to deploy that lots of Salesforce teams avoid it completely, choosing to recreate changes directly in production instead. Even when migration solutions are used, the workflow usually involves at least two deployments: one for CPQ configuration and another for related metadata. Some of the headaches that Salesforce teams encounter while deploying CPQ in this way include:
- A split or incomplete audit trail, because metadata and CPQ config are deployed separately.
- Lots of time sunk troubleshooting deployment errors, slowing down other pieces of development work.
- Needing CPQ-specialised knowledge and skills, which hampers collaboration and creates a bottleneck.
- Delays for end users because the release process is error-prone and slow.
- Difficulty integrating a CPQ deployment process into an existing DevOps workflow.
You can make these pains a thing of the past with Gearset’s metadata and CPQ deployment process.
Compare and deploy easily with Gearset for CPQ
With Gearset for CPQ, you can deploy CPQ config just as easily as metadata and in the same intuitive, click-driven deployment flow.
Gearset’s user-friendly UI displays a comparison of both the metadata and CPQ config in your source and target orgs together. Separated into changed, new, and deleted items, you can easily browse your CPQ records, dependencies, and associated metadata. Clicking on any item in your CPQ diff will flag any dependencies and all related components, so you can be sure you’re including everything you need as part of your deployment.
To set you up for success, Gearset runs a series of pre-deployment checks to identify common issues that cause deployment failures. Missing dependencies become a thing of the past and you can go into each deployment with confidence.
Gearset shows you a pre-deployment summary page with all the metadata and CPQ configuration that will be included in the deployment package. Plus, you can give your deployment a name and add notes, so everyone in the team can easily identify what you deployed and why.
Once your package is built, named and ready to go, Gearset will begin deploying the metadata in your package first before migrating the CPQ config. If the deployment fails or hits any errors at the metadata stage, Gearset will stop the deployment and rollback any changes that were made with no intervention needed; your org will simply be returned to its pre-deployment state and no CPQ config will be deployed.
Details of all deployments are available in the deployment history for easy auditing. You can also roll back any type of metadata as well as CPQ changed items from the deployment history page.
Find out more about how to run a CPQ deployment with Gearset here.
How can Gearset for CPQ help you?
Being able to view, compare and handle CPQ and metadata simultaneously in Gearset’s intuitive UI is a game changer for Salesforce teams.
Here are just a few ways that deploying metadata and CPQ config together with Gearset can help you and your team.
Everyone can deploy CPQ
Migrating CPQ config across environments shouldn’t require specialists; be confident deploying CPQ with Gearset regardless of your experience or role.
Incorporating CPQ config as part of the metadata deployment flow that thousands of Gearset users are already familiar with makes CPQ accessible to everyone. The more members of your team that are able to deploy CPQ config, the quicker you’re able to release updates to end users.
Automatic change monitoring
Gearset’s change monitoring automatically checks for differences to your org’s CPQ config and metadata every day, and notifies you of any changes found.
Your monitoring job will detect any changes made directly in the org, to catch any potentially unwanted updates to your CPQ config, and alert you to differences from the previous day. Keep your orgs in sync easily by deploying these changes to your other environments in just a few clicks.
Gearset keeps a complete audit history of all new, changed and deleted CPQ config, which can be downloaded and shared for easy reporting.
Save time and effort
Using two different workflows — one for deploying metadata changes and another for CPQ config changes — is time-consuming, inefficient and stressful. Not only does it make the process much more complex than it needs to be, if something goes wrong you then have two separate deployments to unpick.
With Gearset for CPQ you can cut your workload in half with a single, comprehensive metadata and CPQ deployment.
Comprehensive auditing
When CPQ migration is spread across multiple deployments — and often different solutions — it can create an auditing nightmare. With a split papertrail, it can be time consuming or even impossible to get a full breakdown of what was deployed, by who and when.
Deploying metadata and CPQ config together with Gearset means that all deployments can be audited in a single place. This includes a full history of every deployment carried out in the app. Gone are the days of manually tracking what has been changed — simply download a full deployment report from Gearset for stress-free auditing on demand.
Roll back changes
Even with the best planning, sometimes deployments need to be undone. Gearset’s rollback functionality helps you easily revert new, changed and deleted metadata items, as well as changed CPQ config items.
Gearset automatically takes a snapshot of your target org before a deployment which is then used as the source of the rollback comparison. With the snapshot as the source and your org as the target, you can use the same compare and deploy flow to rollback deployments.
Plans for future development of Gearset for CPQ
We develop Gearset by constantly listening to user feedback, which helps guide and prioritize feature development. Based on existing feedback and the opportunities that the new approach affords, our development plans currently include:
- Ability to source control your CPQ configuration
- Integration with CI as part of your release pipeline
- More CPQ problem analyzers that find and fix common deployment errors
- Custom rendering for CPQ configuration to make it more readable in your comparison results
Get hands-on with Gearset for CPQ
Take the stress out of CPQ migration, with Gearset for CPQ. Sign up for a free trial to see how Gearset can easily handle these tricky deployments with just a few clicks.
To get the most from your trial of Gearset for CPQ, speak to one of our experts for guidance and advice or reach out via the live chat.