We price monthly, and our customers all get different prices for different products. We can pull in current pricing from SAP.
I need my reps to be able to look at current pricing, make changes for the following month, and submit it for approval. Is this a possibility with price books?
If it matters -- we aren't really your typical opportunity -> quote -> order organization. We aren't really incorporating pricing into opps and our pipeline. We pretty much have established customers who order varying amounts of different products throughout the month. We do more account management than prospecting.
Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer!
12 个回答
So, could I use Opportunities as my approval mechanism?
Yes you can and I would suggest to you that besides Contracts, approvals on pricing in Opps are probably the most common object used in approvals.
What if I have a pricebook for each customer, each month. And those pricebooks contain the products for which that customer has pricing in SAP, along with the SAP prices.
This should be ok. Are your users used to choosing the right pricebook today? If not, it might take some training to make sure they select the right price book. In an org I managed, there was a similar issue with "fluid" prices so we focused more on the discount applied. This allowed the price to "float" and kept people focused on the size of the discount they were giving and the bottom line value of the Opp. We had to add custom discount fields to the Opp and then gave "front line" sales reps the ability to discount up to 5%, their manager up to 10% and so on to the VP of Sales. I would highly recommend getting the approval process approved on paper (simple word doc) before building it in SF.
What if my salesreps created a new opportunity for each customer, each month, using those customer-specific pricebooks?
Should be no problem especially if they are use to this today. Try to make sure it doesn't feel like busy work. If they are doing this in Excel today, SF should make this much easier espeically if you can drive the calculations that Excel are doing into SF so they don't have to it or risk messing up the formulas/formatting in Excel.
And they added the products as opportunity line items and changed the prices there to whatever they wanted the price to be for the next month?
When do the close won the Opp? It seems maybe they don't?
They could then submit that opportunity for approval.
Correct.
I could differentiate those pricing opps from other opps via a record type (Pricing vs Standard, or something like that?), and only enter an approval process is it's the Pricing type.
This could work but I would be very cautions about expanding record types. This adds complexity and you want to make sure that the added complexity is worth the trouble especally if that complexity will impact your users meaning they will have to pick the right record type. If they have to pick, they won't get it right 100% of the time and your process will need to be fault tolerant to that happening.
Am I close?
Yes, I would recommend you build this in a sandbox and put some of your best AND worst SF users thru a couple of common scenarios with thier best and most difficult customers.
