Explore Derived Pricing and Discovery Procedures
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe derived pricing and its importance to businesses.
- Sign up for a special Developer Edition org for Revenue Cloud.
- Explain the use of discovery procedures in derived pricing.
- List the three elements within a discovery procedure.
Before You Start
Before you start this module, make sure you complete this content. The work you do here builds on the concepts and work you do in that content.
Also, consider completing the following recommended content.
A Pricing Recap
In the Price Management with Revenue Cloud module, you used the Price Management application to adjust prices and set pricing rules to meet your unique business needs. You explored the three types of price adjustment schedules and created pricing procedures to support various strategies, such as incentivizing larger purchases with volume discounts and creating compelling offers with bundle-based pricing. You even tested your product pricing on a quote to ensure everything worked seamlessly.
In this module, you build on what you learned and you explore advanced ways to set prices. Tackle complex pricing scenarios, from dynamic calculations of derived pricing to the personalized application of contract-based pricing. But first, start by setting up your Salesforce org.
Sign Up for a Developer Edition Org with Revenue Cloud
To complete this module, you need a special Developer Edition org that contains Revenue Cloud and our sample data. Get the free Developer Edition and connect it to Trailhead now so you can complete the challenges in this module. Note that this Developer Edition is designed to work with the challenges in this badge, and may not work for other badges. Always check that you’re using the Trailhead Playground or the special Developer Edition org that we recommend.
- Sign up for a free Revenue Cloud Developer Edition org.
- Fill out the form.
- For Email, enter an active email address.
- For Username, enter a username that looks like an email address and is unique, but it doesn’t need to be a valid email account (for example, yourname@example.com).
- After you fill out the form, click Sign me up. A confirmation message appears.
- When you receive the activation email (this might take a few minutes), open it and click Verify Account.
- Complete your registration by setting your password and answering the challenge question. Tip: Save your username, password, and login URL in a secure place—such as a password manager—for easy access later.
- You’re logged in to your Developer Edition org.
Revisit the Business Scenario
Remember Richa Mani? She's the pricing admin at SmartBytes, an electronic product and solution provider.
Richa has successfully implemented various pricing strategies, including volume discounts, attribute-based pricing, and bundled pricing, which have been well-received by the pricing team. However, the team is now looking to implement more advanced pricing capabilities to address their increasingly complex pricing scenarios. Additionally, they’ve been receiving complaints about order fallout due to incorrect pricing related to subscriptions and contacts.
To identify areas for improvement in pricing-related processes, Richa reaches out to her sales team. Here’s what she discovers.
Armed with these insights, Richa is ready to tackle the challenges and streamline the pricing process. With Revenue Cloud’s Price Management application at her disposal, she has nothing to fear. Without wasting any time, she gets to work.
Introduction to Derived Pricing
Derived pricing is a strategy for calculating a product's price based on the price of another product, asset, or the overall quote. It’s a dynamic and flexible way to manage complex pricing relationships, reducing the need for manual calculations. This helps businesses to enforce their pricing policies effectively.
Take an example. SmartBytes sells Google Workspace subscriptions and offers GPT for Workspace as an add-on. The price of GPT for Workspace, a derived product, is automatically set to 20% of Google Workspace's list price. Google Workspace is the source product.
The image shows an example quote with both products added.
You can see that the derived price of GPT for Workspace is $5, which is 20% of the Google Workspace list price. In the future, if the price of Google Workspace changes due to a discount or an updated price book, the GPT for Workspace price will instantly adjust to maintain this 20% relationship. That’s the core functionality and benefit of derived pricing.
For derived pricing to work, it has to fetch and consolidate all the necessary data sources that influence the calculation of the derived product’s price. This is where discovery procedures come in. Don't confuse them with pricing procedures—they're different! Get ready to explore discovery procedures in the next section.
Meet Discovery Procedures for Pricing
Think of discovery procedures as the data-gathering scouts for derived pricing. For derived pricing to work, it needs the right values for its formulas, but this crucial data isn't always ready to use. It might be scattered across various records or require some on-the-fly pre-calculations. Discovery procedures bring all this scattered yet vital information into a structured format that the pricing engine can readily use.
Here’s how discovery procedures work in Salesforce Pricing.
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Gathering the data sources: Discovery procedures fetch data from various sources, such as:
- Products: List price, net unit price, subtotal of specific products
- Assets: Information about products the customer already owns
- Quote Header: The total value of the current quote or a specific segment of it
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Populating the Context Definition: The collected data is then written into a context definition, which serves as a structured repository of contributing factors.
Without a discovery procedure, the Price Management application can’t retrieve the dynamic data needed for calculating derived prices.
Salesforce Pricing includes a Default Discovery Procedure as shown here.
You can either use the default procedure or define a new discovery procedure that better aligns with your business needs.
Discovery Procedure Elements
Discovery procedures collect all the data needed for derived pricing by using specific elements. Follow along using your Developer Edition org to discover these elements.
- From the App Launcher, find and select Discovery Procedures.
- Change the list view to All Discovery Procedures.
- Click Default Discovery Procedure.
- Under Discovery Procedure Versions, click Default Discovery Procedure V1.
This opens the Discovery Procedure builder in a new tab.
The Fetch Pricing Rules (1) element locates and retrieves the specific pricing rules that govern how a product's price is derived in a transaction. When your main pricing procedure has to determine a derived product’s price, it relies on derived price records, which are the blueprint for these calculations. The Fetch Pricing Rules element is a lookup mechanism for finding the correct derived price records and sharing them with the pricing engine for accurate price calculation.
The Map Products (2) element defines and retrieves related products involved in a derived pricing calculation. In this step, you configure rules to identify the source product and then map it to the derived product.
Finally, pricing uses the Asset Discovery (3) element for awareness of a customer’s existing products or services. It helps retrieve data from customer assets, such as their original price, quantity, active contract period, or any custom fields that might influence the derived price. This is fundamental for subscription and renewal-based businesses.
By combining these elements, discovery procedures ensure that Salesforce Pricing has the complete, accurate, and dynamic data needed for even the most complex derived price calculations. This makes your quoting and contracting processes highly efficient and reliable. In the next unit, you get hands on and implement derived pricing using your Developer Edition org. Stay tuned!