Solve Challenges with Industries CPQ
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Outline the purpose and scope of Industries CPQ.
- Explain how Industries CPQ helps solve common CPQ challenges.
- Identify the roles involved in Industries CPQ and the common jobs to be done.
Mind Your CPQs
Sophia from Infiwave knows Salesforce has two CPQ applications: Salesforce CPQ and Billing and Industries CPQ. Which one is best for Infiwave?
Although both Salesforce solutions are market leaders, each serves a different purpose.
- Salesforce CPQ and Billing provides a quote-to-cash system that any type of business can use. Learn more about Salesforce CPQ in Trailhead.
- Industries CPQ is optimized for specific industries, with industry-specific processes, product models, and structures.
The Infiwave management team knows about the issues with their current business processes and structures, and they’re looking for a communications-industry-specific solution.
After much due diligence, Infiwave decides to adopt Industries CPQ. The prebuilt communications processes, models, and structures provide an excellent best-practices framework to implement their digital transformation quickly and effectively.
Industries CPQ is available for other industries including media, energy, and utilities.
An Introduction to Industries CPQ
Industries CPQ is an industry-specific, cloud-based quote-and-order-capture system, built natively and additively on the Salesforce platform. With Industries CPQ, you can easily configure product offers that are just right for your customer. Driven by shared catalog product-service-resource (PSR) data, Industries CPQ gives your sales team advanced order-capture and guided-selling capabilities. This includes multisite quotes and orders and bulk quote and order processing, so teams can offer best-fit products and services to customers across different channels.
Industries CPQ extends Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to incorporate the management of customer assets and services. This way you can track a customer through their whole lifecycle with your organization.
Solution Capabilities
Here’s how Industries CPQ can solve the challenges at Infiwave.
Accurate Quotes
The sales reps at Infiwave want to offer customers different product options, configurations, and prices. But they have to dig through spreadsheets and open several applications to find the right pricing rules and create the quote. This takes time and can lead to mistakes.
Industries CPQ uses a shared catalog to give Infiwave a single source of truth for all its offers, products, services, and their prices. It holds eligibility, qualification, availability, and pricing rules for each offer to ensure that products are correctly configured, compatible, and deliverable at the right price for each customer.
Let’s look at a sample Industries CPQ order.
This example shows the cart for an order. Industries CPQ has checked the products to ensure they’re appropriate for the customer and validated the pricing. The order is 100% perfect and ready for submission to the order-management system.
When a sales rep wants to create a quote, Industries CPQ guides them through a customizable selling process to create a complete and accurate quote. This process includes browsing and filtering a hierarchical catalog of offers to show only those appropriate for the customer. Customized OmniScripts ensure that Industries CPQ processes suit business requirements. Plus, validation triggered at key stages in the quotation process ensures sales reps can’t submit inaccurate or incomplete orders.
Fast and Efficient Order Capture
Infiwave wants to provide fast, reliable, consistent customer service. Industries CPQ integrates with Industries Digital Commerce and Guided Selling to incorporate flexible sales guidance. This guidance is configured to fit Infiwave’s sales and approval processes and industry best practices. Rules configured on products mean that the customer gets the best prices available to them, and upsell and cross-sell rules prompt the sales rep to suggest alternative and additional products.
For larger, multisite solutions, Industries CPQ manages multiple sites within a single quote. And it performs bulk quote operations, such as creating multiple orders from multiple quotes for a single customer in a single process.
Reduced Order Fallout
Orders must have all the details required by downstream systems, so quote and order accuracy is key to successful order processing and billing. Industries CPQ checks and validates quotes and orders throughout the sales process to ensure the quotes are accurate and the orders deliverable.
If a quote isn’t valid, an order can’t be created. If an order isn’t valid, it can’t be submitted to the order-management system. This helps avoid order fallout and makes for happier customers.
Improved Sales Processes
At Infiwave, sales, finance, legal, engineering, and product departments are siloed. Sales reps get caught in the middle of these disconnected teams and their systems as they try to progress quotes through to orders.
Industries CPQ helps departments collaborate using standardized, streamlined processes to improve sales efficiency. Using OmniStudio tools, these processes can be customized to suit business needs.
- The sales process becomes fast, efficient, and accurate, with seamless integration between applications.
- The solution uses standard Salesforce objects, such as opportunities, quotes, orders, and assets.
- Consistent user interfaces across functions optimize the user experience and reduce training requirements.
Once Infiwave implements artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics, such as Einstein and Tableau, its sales reps can make even better data-driven decisions as part of the quotation process. Sales reps can review their performance, locate the bottlenecks, and continuously self-correct to improve their sales process.
Personalized Omnichannel Customer Experience
Industries CPQ is designed to meet the varied and changing needs of Infiwave’s complex application and IT ecosystem and works in an omnichannel environment. Consider a scenario where a customer logs in to the Infiwave website, completes half their quote online, and then phones the Infiwave call center. With Industries CPQ, the call center team can see the information already entered by the customer online. This way, the rep doesn’t need to retype the information, and even better, the customer doesn’t have to repeat their details.
Better Integration and Performance
Industries CPQ integration goes beyond the company web store. Integrate with external systems using components such as Omnistudio Data Mappers, Integration Procedures, TMF620 and TMF645 APIs for the communications industry, and billing, service, and field work APIs for the energy and utilities sectors. Integrations are customized to suit business needs. Examples of integrations include customer credit checks, service checks, and external pricing support.
Plus, Industries CPQ is performance tested at carrier-grade scale to ensure a fast and accurate service for your customers.
Faster Time to Market
Here’s how to use Industries CPQ and the shared catalog to reduce design, development, testing, and deployment time for new products and services.
- Create products, services, resources, rules, and prices as components.
- Build components into customer offers using the shared catalog as a collaborative workspace.
- Reuse components. You can override component attributes to suit a package, bundle, or promotion.
- Employ product lifecycle tools so that future-dated prices and product changes are automated.
The result? Faster time to market.
Key Strengths of Industries CPQ
Although Infiwave teams can perform some CPQ tasks with the old system, there was so much they couldn’t do. Let’s hear why Sophia’s team is going to be thrilled with their new Industries CPQ implementation.
Innovation
Industries CPQ has many innovative features that you won’t find in other CPQ systems. These include multilanguage product searching, quick orders from the customer account, and bulk updates to service attributes. To help Infiwave implement these innovations, Industries CPQ includes a library of installable, industry-specific capabilities.
Industry-Specificity
Each Industries CPQ implementation is designed especially for the associated industry and follows industry best practices in product and process design and implementation. Businesses can use industry-segment-specific applications that extend Industries CPQ, such as Mobile Subscription Management and Advertising Sales Management.
Extensibility
The solution uses all the powerful extensibility, workflow, analytics, and collaboration capabilities of the Salesforce platform. It also gives you declarative, guided process flows using OmniScripts, flexible UIs with Cards, interface implementations, and a library of plug-and-play, industry-specific features.
Industries CPQ is Sophia’s new sales superhero, but how does it achieve these superpowers? In the next unit you learn about the different functional components of Industries CPQ and how it works within your industry cloud. For now, let’s consider the roles in your organization that will use the solution most often.
Industries CPQ Roles and Responsibilities
Sophia is keen to start preparing her team for the Industries CPQ implementation, so she sets up a meeting to explain how each role in the sales cycle will use it.
Infiwave’s order-management and delivery teams won’t use Industries CPQ. However, they’ll rely heavily on the information it provides to create accurate and complete orders.