Get to Know Industries Pricing
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Summarize the purpose and benefits of Pricing Designer in Enterprise Product Catalog (EPC).
- Describe the basic Pricing Designer components.
Before You Start
How much do you know? We assume you’ve already:
- Created and amended quotes and orders in your workplace.
- Used Product Designer to create products for your company’s catalog offerings.
- Discussed key pricing strategies with the sales team at your office.
Still trying to figure it out? Complete the badges in the following learning path to help with the concepts and tasks you do in this module.
Setting the Right Prices
Ada Wilson is the pricing manager at Infiwave, a communications service provider (CSP), and this week, she’s on a mission. The end of the quarter draws near, and Infiwave has a surplus of products. New pricing strategies could boost the company’s performance in the market, not to mention attract and retain customers.
Ada is responsible for defining pricing schemes for products and services, and her job tasks include:
- Defining separate pricing for businesses and individual customers
- Configuring limited-time pricing, discounts, and promotions
- Varying pricing for products sold individually and those that are part of a bundle
- Controlling the pricing of products and services over time
- Customizing pricing for different variables, like customer status, location, and service-level agreement (SLA)
Despite all her talents, Ada faces several challenges. The Infiwave pricing toolkit is her biggest roadblock, with its disconnected systems and complex spreadsheets. Nearly constant data entry and manual upkeep consume her workday. Ada feels burned out, big time.
EPC Pricing Designer
Despite her ongoing job pressures, Ada sees a glimmer of hope on the horizon. Now that her company has adopted Industries CPQ (Configure Price Quote) and Enterprise Product Catalog (EPC), she and her team can efficiently manage products and their prices.
Pricing Designer is included with Industries Shared Catalog and EPC. The scenarios in this module are based on Infiwave's implementation of EPC, but the content applies to Shared Catalog too.
It’s time for Ada to learn all about Pricing Designer. It’s the no-code EPC workspace where she can configure prices for all products and services in the Infiwave catalog.
Here are some benefits of Pricing Designer that will accelerate and simplify Ada’s work. Click each box to learn more.
Sign Up for a Training Playground
We don’t have any hands-on challenges in this module, but if you want to practice and try out the steps, you need a special training org that contains Industries CPQ and our sample data. A regular Trailhead playground doesn’t have Industries CPQ or our sample data.
Here’s how to get the training org now.
- Sign up for an Industries Training Playground.
- Fill out the form.
- Enter your first name and last name.
- Enter an active email address.
- Enter your company name.
- Click Sign me up. A confirmation message appears.
- Enter your first name and last name.
- When you receive the confirmation email (sometimes this takes a few minutes), log in to your training playground using the credentials in the email.
For hands-on practice, use the practice guides in the Resources section of the subsequent units.
Pricing Designer Components
Pricing Designer works alongside Product Designer and has all the tools Ada and her team need to create and control product pricing for Infiwave.
They can use price lists, pricing variables, and more to streamline the pricing process.
Price Lists
Create a price list to offer custom pricing for different market segments or for other categories, like geographical location. For example, you could set up a price list for students with special prices for back-to-school products and another price list for residents only.
Price lists hold pricing entities, such as charges and adjustments, which you can apply as needed across your catalog. Setting up pricing for a product involves assigning a price from one or more price lists. For products with more than one price list entry, the product price changes based on the selling context, such as B2B for business pricing or B2C for consumer pricing.
In this example, a B2B customer sees a price of $45 per month for a Broadband Cable Service product in the Cart, while a B2C customer sees the price for the same product as $54.99 per month.
As part of the out-of-the-box Industries CPQ process, you choose a price list when you create an opportunity, quote, or order. Only those products that are active and featured in the selected price list are visible to the customer.
Long-time Salesforce admins may ask, What about price books? Don’t worry–price books are still there, behind the scenes. Think of price lists as pages within a price book. Every price list must be linked to a price book, and typically, most implementations use a single standard price book.
Pricing Variables
A pricing variable is a type of charge or adjustment applied to products in the catalog. It determines whether a price is a regular charge or a penalty, a one-time or recurring charge, or charged to the customer versus the company. You can also use pricing variables to specify whether the charge can be paid with currency or loyalty points.
Time Plans and Time Policies
A time plan is the length of time that pricing applies to a product measured by days, weeks, months, or years. A time policy indicates the event that triggers when the time plan should start and stop.
With Pricing Designer, establish a time plan to set the duration that a price or a charge is valid. Part of a time plan is a time policy that helps define the beginning and end dates the time plan is active. For example, use these tools to offer your customers a 30-day free trial or to create a limited-time promotion that’s available only in the month of April.
Promotions and Discounts
A promotion is a set of rules that define how and when a customer gets a price reduction or other incentive to motivate them to make a purchase. Discounts are percentages, or absolute values, that are applied to current or future purchases.
For marketing purposes, you can quickly roll out promotions and discounts for products and bundles to respond to any selling scenario—all without disrupting the consistency of your product price list.
For instance, set up promotions based on a percentage or amount to be applied for a certain length of time, configure one promotion to begin when another ends, or apply short-term promotions for only a subset of products. You can also automatically add free products to the Cart depending on certain criteria. An example is a promotional T-shirt included with every purchase by New York–based customers.
Pricing Plans
Some products in your catalog may require unique pricing scenarios. Enter the pricing plan! A pricing plan is a series of steps in sequence that invoke processes, functions, or procedures to control product prices.
With Pricing Designer, you can set up pricing plans to automatically calculate and apply tier-based costs, promotional discounts, taxes, agent discounts, and more. For example, if the total cost of an order is greater than $100, then the logic in the pricing plan computes a 50% discount on the installation.
Now that you’ve explored the benefits and components of Pricing Designer, you’re ready to learn the basics of how prices work and where EPC stores them.