Get Started with Sales Agreements

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Define what a sales agreement is.
  
• Discuss how different industries benefit from sales agreements.
  
• Outline the core features of sales agreements in Salesforce.
  
• Distinguish between sales agreements and Revenue Lifecycle Management features.
  

This module has examples from Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud. But the basic features of Salesforce sales agreements work across many Salesforce Clouds, including Automotive, Consumer Goods, and more.

Build and Scale Long-Term Customer Relationships

In today’s business world, building and scaling relationships with customers takes more than one-time deals. Whether you're a manufacturer delivering heavy equipment or a consumer-goods provider selling to large retailers, it’s likely that you rely on long-term commitments to augment sales and streamline supply operations.

Here’s where sales agreements come in. A sales agreement, also known as a production agreement, is a long-term contract between a company and a customer. It defines the terms and conditions for selling products over a given period.

Sales agreements give sales teams a clear view of forecasted revenue, actual revenue, and order volumes. A good sales agreement provides structure, visibility, and predictability to the sales process, so companies can:

• Accurately track revenue and units from confirmed orders.
  
• View a consolidated picture of actual performance against planned performance.
  
• Convert quotes into agreements and agreements into quotes to simplify and speed up the sales experience.
  

Industries like manufacturing and automotive rely on sales agreements to establish a steady supply chain and avoid production disruptions. The same principle applies across other industries, namely those with business models involving recurring orders, negotiated pricing, and long-term planning.

With Sales agreements in Salesforce, you can manage your run-rate business with optimal pricing and best-fit products for customers. To create and work with sales agreements in Salesforce, use the Sales Agreement object. It defines ongoing commitments with customers such as pricing, product quantities, and contract duration. Use this object to track how much of a product has been ordered or shipped against the agreement, ensuring visibility and control of all orders. This supports better planning and consistent execution over time.

Sales Agreements Across Industries

Now that you’ve learned what sales agreements are and how they support long-term business planning across industries, let’s explore how different Salesforce Industry Clouds, in their unique contexts, benefit from sales agreements.

Manufacturing Cloud

In the manufacturing industry, sales agreements define long-term product sales between a manufacturer and its customers. Manufacturers use Manufacturing Cloud and sales agreements to manage their inventory with accuracy and efficiency. This helps keep track of important price, revenue, and quantity metrics for different products and categories. It also helps track customer compliance for orders that have been promised. Manufacturers keep customer trust high by giving them transparency and timely fulfillment tracking updates.

Consumer Goods Cloud

Sales agreements support long-term trade collaboration between companies in the consumer goods industry. Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud enables manufacturers, suppliers, and retailers to formalize product, pricing, and volume agreements between one another.

With sales agreements, consumer goods businesses can set clear expectations for all parties. Sales agreements lead to accurate and predictable order management with preapproved pricing and discount structures, forecastable volume commitments, and more.

Automotive Cloud

The automotive industry uses sales agreements to structure complex, high-value, long-term vehicle sales and service contracts for OEMs, dealerships, and fleet buyers. These agreements align stakeholders, refine operations, and ensure delivery against negotiated terms.

Core Features

Sales agreements offer several foundational features to make business transactions, profits, and revenue margins more predictable.

Foundational features have default settings for quick setup without manual steps. You can always customize the default settings later if needed, for example, when creating a new sales agreement.

This table summarizes the foundational features.

With these capabilities, sales teams can plan and manage their sales and operations effectively, ensuring predictability and control over sales orders and fulfillment.

Sales Agreements and Revenue Lifecycle Management Features

This module focuses on the foundational features of sales agreements. If you're using the Revenue Lifecycle Management (RLM) license, you can access certain additional sales-agreement capabilities, which this module doesn’t cover. For example, get instant pricing for a product, identify the right products for your customers from your product portfolio, track the planned and actual values of products with attributes, and view product attributes alongside a table of sales agreements. To learn more about RLM, see the links in the Resources section.

Now that you’ve discovered how sales agreements fit into the bigger picture, you’re ready to create effective agreements that work for your organization.

A Business Scenario at Pyroclastic

Meet Vance Park, a key account manager at Pyroclastic Inc., an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) that sells heavy equipment and parts worldwide. He manages product distribution and long-term supply terms with customers such as Acme.

Acme needs a steady supply of industrial equipment. So instead of placing recurring bulk orders manually for Acme, Vance simplifies the process by creating a sales agreement in Manufacturing Cloud. He uses the agreement to define which products Acme purchases, pricing, schedules, and renewal terms.

If your customers place recurring bulk orders, a sales agreement can simplify your process too, just like it does for Pyroclastic Inc.

Now you know what sales agreements are, how they’re useful across industries, and how Salesforce gives you a solution for handling these agreements. In the next unit, dive into the details and explore the key components of sales agreements.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Set Up and Configure Sales Agreements
• Salesforce Help: Revenue Management Features for Sales Agreements Setup
• Salesforce Help: Manage Long-Term Business with Sales Agreements in Manufacturing Cloud