Use Connectors to Integrate Salesforce Clouds
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain how Salesforce cloud products contribute to a multi-channel sales process.
- Identify issues that arise when clouds operate independently.
- Describe common use cases supported by the Salesforce CPQ & Billing and B2B Commerce Connector.
Synchronize Your Multi-Channel Sales
You may have heard of Ursa Major Solar; they’re only the largest manufacturer of solar panels in all of Salesforceland. A big part of their success has been their Customer 360 strategy, using a multi-cloud Salesforce solution that gives Ursa Major many ways to connect with their customers. Nothing illustrates this better than Ursa Major’s sales process.
- Their solution starts with Sales Cloud. Among other things, it helps Ursa Major manage leads, accounts, opportunities, reports, and forecasting.
- They use B2B Commerce to give their B2B buyers a rich, personalized self-service ordering and reordering experience.
- Sales reps use Salesforce CPQ to build new-business and high-touch quotes, put quotes through an approval process, and convert them to orders.
- Salesforce Billing allows for complex invoicing scenarios such as recurring and usage based billing.
- Finally, Ursa Major uses Manufacturing Cloud to predict how much in sales they can expect over time based on Sales Agreements with their customers.
This may seem like a lot of clouds for just one company, but in reality many businesses need (or want) to support multi-channel sales, sophisticated billing, and predictable manufacturing schedules.
Although Ursa Major Solar is happy with what each cloud has to offer, they suspect that they can improve processes even more by connecting the clouds with each other. As it stands, the sales channels are isolated, leading to an inconsistent experience for their buyers. Behind the scenes, pricing managers are spending too much time managing very similar data across B2B Commerce, Salesforce CPQ, and Manufacturing Cloud. What Ursa Major needs is a way to tie these clouds together so they can share data and make for a seamless buying experience across channels.
Make a Cloud Constellation with a Connector
Ursa Major Solar isn’t the first customer to wish for harmony amongst their sales-oriented clouds, and they won’t be the last. For that reason, the brilliant minds at Salesforce Labs have developed the Salesforce CPQ & Billing and B2B Commerce for Visualforce Connector. For brevity we’ll refer to it as the “CPQ & B2B Commerce Connector” or even just “the connector.” As the full name implies, the connector is designed to work with B2B Commerce for Visualforce, not the B2B Commerce Lightning Experience. In this badge you learn about connecting B2B Commerce for Visualforce because there are more use cases to consider. (There’s a similar connector for B2B Commerce Lightning Experience that supports some of the same use cases.)
The Visualforce connector is a package that you can find on AppExchange, built to give you a launching pad for meeting some of the most commonly requested use cases involving integration between B2B Commerce, Revenue Cloud, and Manufacturing Cloud. In this badge, we take a close look at five of these use cases.
- Synchronize a single source of truth for product and pricing data between Salesforce CPQ and B2B Commerce.
- Convert a B2B Commerce Cart into a Salesforce CPQ Quote for special handling by a sales rep.
- Synchronize CPQ and B2B Commerce orders so buyers can do their own self-service reorders regardless of how the order was created.
- Expose Salesforce Billing to the self-service buying experience for consolidated, yet flexible invoicing options.
- Easily generate Sales Agreements from known data on the CPQ quote.
By design, the connector gives you full access to the source code, allowing you to modify and extend the functionality to support nuances specific to your customer. Also, each of the connector’s functions can be enabled or disabled as you see fit.
The connector saves your implementation team a ton of time tying together clouds since they don’t have to build the integrations from scratch. Additionally, the connector promotes patterns and best practices for long-term success. For example, there’s a built-in logging mechanism so you can monitor exactly what’s happening when synchronizations occur.
However, for all the connector offers, it’s still important to understand its limitations. For every use case covered in this badge you learn considerations and guardrails to ensure your project is a success.
Finally, this badge is meant to give you a high-level view of solutions involving multiple clouds. We don’t cover the finer technical details of implementation. If you need to know more about the nuts and bolts of the connector, see the CPQ & B2B Commerce for Visualforce Connector Documentation. With that caveat out of the way, let’s jump right into our first use case: syncing product and price data between CPQ and B2B Commerce.
