Generate PDF Quotes

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to

• Describe the advantages of using a Quote PDF generator.
• Identify common content included in a Quote PDF.
• Explain how a single dynamic template can result in the perfect Quote PDF.
• Describe how Salesforce CPQ handles quote distribution.

We talked in the second unit about the different things that quote can mean in Salesforce CPQ. In this unit, we talk about the quote as the document you give your customer. This document contains information about the products and services your customer is interested in buying.

Why does Infinity Solutions need PDF quotes?

• Your customers want a summary and details about products and services that they’re considering.
• Your customers want a breakdown of prices and totals of those items.
• Infinity Solutions wants to provide accurate information to your customers, and wants to give them that information quickly in a standard format.
• Infinity Solutions wants your customer to sign the quote electronically for a faster sales cycle.

Salesforce CPQ makes all this easy.

A typical PDF quote contains a list of products and services you’re quoting [1] and the prices and discounts on those items [2]. If prices and discounts also have totals and subtotals [3], they display in summary below the list of products and services.

Any important terms and conditions are also in the PDF document [4]. Depending on the products and services being quoted, you sometimes provide additional specification documents for review.

Since this is the final document for your customer to sign, the PDF includes appropriate signature blocks [5].

As you can see, there’s a lot of information to display in this PDF document. What information to include, and when or how to present it, can differ from customer to customer. In Salesforce CPQ, the PDF document is dynamic.

For example, you can hide specific columns in the line items table under certain conditions. Specific pages, sections, and even individual quote terms can appear dynamically as well. You can add to the output by attaching supplemental materials, such as product specification sheets, to get a single, concatenated PDF.

After you finalize the information to display on the quote, you generate the PDF document itself. The document is stored on both your quote and your opportunity, so others at Infinity Solutions who have internal access can open and view the quote when they need to.

Then you choose one of several ways to share the quote with your customer. Here’s a simple method: With the click of a button, send the quote as an email attachment using a standard Salesforce email template.

Just remember: Salesforce CPQ can dynamically display several different pieces of information about your quote, quickly and easily, in a PDF document. And you can email that PDF to your customer like you would any other email attachment.