Configure Product Pricing
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain how to define product pricing.
- Describe the role of context definitions, pricing procedures, and decision tables in Salesforce Pricing.
- Validate that your pricing strategy is working as expected.
Get to Know Salesforce Pricing
Accurate pricing helps sales professionals draw up the best deals—for their customers and for their company.
Salesforce Pricing is a unified pricing platform that ensures consistent, compliant, and accurate pricing for quick quoting and ordering. With Salesforce Pricing, you define product pricing and customized price adjustments based on your organization’s pricing policy for consistent pricing across various channels. Sales professionals can rely on accurate prices for real-time price calculations and complete visibility into the detailed calculation process.
In this unit, you learn about the various elements required to set up pricing for the products in your catalog.
Price books, price adjustments, pricing procedures, and price recipes form the base of Salesforce Pricing.
After you’ve defined these elements, update the org settings to select the default pricing recipe and the pricing procedure, and then perform the sync pricing data operation.
When the sync happens, the pricing recipe and procedure take effect to calculate the correct product pricing and any adjustments.
The Product Pricing Workflow
Next, you explore some different scenarios and the calculation of product prices. In the product pricing workflow, all of the components you learned about so far come into play.
Imagine a customer or a sales rep creates a quote and adds products to it. The price of the selected products needs to be fetched and displayed on the quote. Remember that the price book stores product prices, which informs the price in the quote.
However, this data isn't fetched directly from database tables or Salesforce objects. With Salesforce Pricing, you need decision tables that map to the database tables holding pricing data. When the pricing admin performs the Sync Pricing Data operation, the pricing data populates the required decision tables.
Consider a more complex scenario where a quote has multiple line items and the products selected need discounting for the customer. Discounts, also known as price adjustments, are an important part of sales. The three components that work together in your pricing strategy include Context Definitions, Pricing Procedures, and Decision Tables.
Context Definitions
Revenue Cloud includes the SalesTransactionContext, a context definition used by Salesforce Pricing to link sales transactions to objects like Quotes, Assets, and Orders. Pricing admins can extend it depending on the pricing needs of the business. This context definition connects quotes, orders, and assets to pricing nodes for accurate pricing in different situations.
Pricing Procedures
A Pricing Procedure defines various pricing elements and orders them in sequence for execution. Each pricing element takes input from the context definition, uses its logic to calculate a product price, and then provides this price as output for the next element in the pricing procedure.
The screen shows a pricing procedure with various pricing elements arranged in a sequence. The elements fetch the list price, calculate various discounts—volume discount, attribute discount, manual discount, and calculate the aggregate price.
Expanding the Volume Discount pricing element displays the input and output variables.
The input variables include the product, the upper and lower bounds of quantity for the applicable volume discount, and effective dates. The output variables include the Net Unit Price and the Net Total Price.
The output from a pricing procedure is returned back to the context definition, which populates the quote displayed to the customer or sales rep.
Decision Tables
So where did the pricing elements in the pricing procedure get their data from? It comes from the decision tables. You already know that decision tables map to the database tables that store the data.
Here’s a quick summary of how the various components involved in calculating product pricing—context definition, pricing procedure, and the decision tables are interconnected and how the data flows between them.
The context definition takes the product information from the quote and passes it to the pricing procedure, which calculates the price. Then the rules defined in the decision table run to fetch pricing from the Salesforce objects. The final price calculated is passed back to the context definition and on to the quote.
Validate Your Pricing Procedure
Salesforce Pricing is a powerful tool for validating your pricing strategy before rolling it out to customers.
To simulate a pricing procedure, add the required inputs and run it as a test to confirm the results are as you expect. You can run the simulation in two different modes:
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Simplified mode: A visible user interface where you can provide the input values in the respective input fields
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Advanced mode: A field to enter values in JSON format
Select the appropriate context definition and run the simulation. The result is a price waterfall showing each step of the calculation performed to arrive at the final price.
Here, you can see the inputs provided and the resultant price waterfall that shows the calculations for list price and various discounts.
In this unit, you discovered how product information is augmented with the pricing information in the price book. You also learned how pricing procedures work to calculate final prices and price adjustments.
The next unit covers order processing in Revenue Cloud.