Turn Carts into Negotiated Deals
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the business value of supporting cross-channel sales.
- Describe the buyer and sales rep experience of changing channels.
- Explain pricing considerations of cross-channel sales.
- Describe how quotes are converted into sales agreements.
Cater to Customers with Blended Channels
Ursa Major Solar has found that the large majority of their sales go through the B2B Commerce self-service channel. But a significant amount of business requires a sales rep to engage with their buyers, leveraging CPQ to negotiate discounts. In fact, the most high-value sales opportunities often involve a sales rep using CPQ. Unfortunately, until Ursa Major connects B2B Commerce and CPQ, a sale that begins in one channel stays in that channel. So Ursa Major may be missing opportunities to win over self-service customers by offering personalized discounts. And if the buyer needs help with a more complicated quote, Ursa Major wants to offer rep-assisted sales within the storefront.
The CPQ & B2B Commerce Connector meets these needs by allowing sales that start in one channel to seamlessly switch to the other. Switching from B2B Commerce to CPQ is often referred to as cart-to-quote. Going in the opposite direction is quote-to-cart. The connector handles these scenarios by syncing the transactional data between the two clouds as needed.
These use cases assume that the company is already synchronizing its primary product and pricing data.
Converting a Cart to a Quote
From the buyer’s perspective, engaging a sales rep for personalized discounts is easy. They browse the product catalog and fill their cart as usual. The cart itself has a Request for Quote button, with a form that prompts the buyer to provide additional information to the sales rep.
When the buyer clicks Submit, the connector changes the Cart Active field on the CC Cart record to false, preventing it from being taken to an order. Then the connector creates a Quote record along with Quote Lines based on the CC Cart Item records. One key field it automatically populates is the B2B Source lookup, which ties the Quote record back to the CC Cart record. You can also extend the connector to sync additional data such as Bill To and Ship To information.
Sales reps need to know about incoming quotes, so you can configure the connector to use Flow, Account Engagement with Engage Alerts for Sales, or Marketing Cloud Engagement to handle transactional alerts. From this point, the sales rep can use the quote to negotiate prices with their buyer, apply discounts to quote lines, and eventually seek approvals if necessary.
Once a quote is approved, there are a few paths for completing the sale. One option is to continue along the sales rep-led process, using CPQ functionality to help generate an order. Another option is to publish the negotiated prices as customer-specific pricing, and then allow the buyer to build another cart using updated prices. Sales reps simply check Update Customer Pricing on the Quote, and the new prices appear in the buyer’s storefront. Be aware, if you allow sales reps to check this box, we recommend that you create a validation rule to check that the quote is approved beforehand.
By default, when the connector converts a cart to a quote, it doesn’t create a related opportunity. Although you don’t need an opportunity to update customer prices based on your negotiations, you do need one if the sales rep converts the quote into an order. It’s easy enough to create an opportunity manually, but the connector can automate this task.
Other Cart-to-Quote Pricing Considerations
When the connector creates a quote, it uses pricing from B2B Commerce to define the pricing on the generated Quote Lines by setting their Special Price fields. Because you want CPQ to respect the incoming price, make CPQ price rules and Quote Calculator Plugin functions conditional, so they only run if the B2B Source field is empty.
Similarly, B2B Commerce handles tiered pricing before the quote is ever created, so the Special Price of the generated quote lines already represents a price adjusted for volume. For that reason you do not want Discount Schedules to apply their volume-based discounts. So in the Cart-to-Quote scenario, create a process or price rule to clear the Discount Schedule lookup on the quote line. Again, use the B2B Source field to determine when the rule or process runs.
Finally, discounts from product-based coupons are carried into the Special Price too. However, you represent cart coupons as an additional quote line using a dummy product that is priced as a credit. That’s because CPQ doesn't support quote-level discounts.
Converting a Quote to a Cart
Occasionally buyers want to engage with a sales rep to construct a personalized quote, but they also want to complete the purchase through a self-service checkout. In that scenario the sales rep needs to convert the CPQ quote into a CC Cart for the buyer to pick up. The connector can be extended with Lightning Components and a custom action to support the Quote-to-Cart use case.
When the sales rep clicks the Publish to Cart custom action on the quote, the connector creates a new, active CC Cart record with CC Cart Items. The quote’s price book and currency determine which CC Price List the new cart uses. It’s important to note that the cart is associated with an existing community user based on the quote’s Primary Contact lookup field (the connector can’t create new users).
From this point, the buyer sees the cart in their storefront, and can check out as if they created the cart themselves.
Converting a Quote to a Sales Agreement
In the manufacturing world, there’s one more important piece to the negotiation puzzle: the sales agreement, a core functionality of Manufacturing Cloud. Sales agreements represent a buyer’s commitment to purchase products over time instead of a one-and-done sale. Manufacturers like Ursa Major Solar benefit from sales agreements because they can coordinate production and storage of inventory. Buyers benefit from knowing their orders will be fulfilled consistently, and typically at a lower negotiated price.
If a sales rep is already using CPQ to negotiate prices and obtain approvals, it only makes sense to use the finalized quote as the basis of a sales agreement. The connector can do just that with almost no effort on the part of the sales rep.
As the rep builds the quote, they set quantities to account for the entire duration of the sales agreement. So 1000 units a month for 12 months means 12,000 units quoted. Then, after the quote is approved the rep clicks the Create New Sales Agreement action on the quote. This opens up a window to enter a few key details for the sales agreement.
The Start Date, End Date, Schedule Count, and Frequency fields all play a role in how Sales Agreement Product Schedule records are generated. A few moments after the rep clicks Save, the connector creates the sales agreement and all related records. The sales agreement shows the total quoted quantity divided over a series of months. As sales are processed over time, the ERP pushes actual ordered quantities back to the sales Agreement.
The sales price comes directly from the CPQ quote data, so reps should not change it. If they do, the change creates a data discrepancy with the database of record and subverts the approval process. If the rep needs to amend the agreement, they should clone the quote and move through the normal sales process. When the rep is ready to create a new sales agreement, they make sure that only the new one is marked as primary. Reps can retain the others for historical data, but don’t include them in reports and forecasting.
Finally, we highly recommend implementing a way to enforce that a quote is approved before allowing sales reps the option to generate a sales agreement. That way, Ursa Major can count on the sales agreement to represent realistic, approved pricing.
With the help of the connector, you can convert a cart to a quote, and then a quote to a sales agreement, making it easy to negotiate prices with buyers across all your clouds.
