Salesforce CPQ vs. Salesforce Industries CPQ

Salesforce CPQ vs. Salesforce Industries CPQ

You probably already knew that CPQ stands for Configure, Price, Quote. CPQ is software that standardizes and automates the creation of complex quotes. In this article, we explain all about Salesforce Industries CPQ. After reading this article, you will know the most important features and in what areas the solution stands out from the rest.

Want to know more about Salesforce Industries? Read our blogs, "What is Salesforce Industries CPQ?" or "OmniScript Migration" to learn more. In this article, we look at Salesforce CPQ vs. Salesforce Industries CPQ.

The basics:

CRM and CPQ are closely linked. With Salesforce CRM (the Sales and Marketing Cloud), your Sales and Marketing teams can generate more and more leads.

Salesforce CPQ lets you manage products and simplify the quoting process. It provides a solution for product management, product pricing, price lists, quotations, documentation and many other things you do when you offer products and services. CPQ actually starts where CRM ends.

The ins and outs of Salesforce Industries CPQ

Now that the basics are known, it's time to take it a step further. Salesforce offers two variants of CPQ.

First, there is Salesforce CPQ. This is the acquired Quote to Cash SteelBrick package. In addition, there is Salesforce Industries CPQ. This is the former Vlocity.

Salesforce CPQ is more of a horizontal solution. This means the solution is industry independent. As the name suggests, Salesforce Industries CPQ focuses on specific industries. Telecom and Energy are good examples.

What features can you expect?

Salesforce Industries CPQ offers numerous features. For convenience, we have compiled a top five. Of course, there are many more features.

Curious about the full story? Contact us for a demo.

#1 Order capture

Discover the options for capturing Orders in Industries CPQ. Using the Cart (shopping cart) and an asset-based ordering system, managing your sales process is flawless. The Guided Selling feature helps customer service representatives and sales teams do their jobs smoothly and bring in the perfect order time after time.

You can further extend the features of Salesforce with the system proprietary or out-of-the box features Industries CPQ design your Order Capture process that best suits your business. And one that you can easily manage. Opportunities, Quotes and Orders are standard Salesforce objects, but Industries CPQ goes the extra mile with these features.

#2 Enterprise Product Catalog (EPC). 

The Enterprise Product Catalog is an Industry Cloud module for managing and modeling product data in a single interface. Products can be designed by modeling attributes, forming bundles, creating pick lists and object types, and specifying product rules. In the EPC, you'll find the Product and Price designer and can enable features such as product version management and multilingual support for your product catalog.

In fact, the Enterprise Product Catalog acts as input for Industries CPQ and your Order Management.

EPC is Industry Standards Compliant, which means that the products you model comply with industry standards. For example, in the telecom industry, companies model products using different layers based on TMForum standards (SID-based models)

Are your products not visible in CPQ Cart? Read our blog: 'Troubleshooting product visibility in CPQ Cart' for more information.

Challenges with your pricing policy?

In Salesforce Industries CPQ, there are many ways to address these challenges. For example, you can create time-limited promotions or bundle products.

#3 Pricing and promotions

Implementing good pricing policies is a big challenge for many companies. Especially when it comes to creating and correctly applying promotions and discounts.

Salesforce CPQ vs. Salesforce Industries CPQ

Salesforce Industries CPQ gives you several options to meet this challenge. For example, you can create promotions that are valid for specific periods of time. Very effective further is bundling products that qualify for discounts when products in that range are purchased.

You can even create rules to control what type of account you are dealing with when you put together an order. For example, is it a normal customer, or a customer with a special Service Level Agreement?

With Industries CPQ, you get a system made up of different components, all of which are reusable. That means they will appear in the catalog independently of the regular products.

This way, the products retain their data. Only when the promotion is active and applicable to the particular customer will the price of the product change. The system calculates this immediately.

You can also configure different types of pricing to offer exactly what the business needs. Some products may include a one-time surcharge, a penalty for price or perhaps a change to an existing price. Perhaps the frequency of charges changes as you charge monthly or annually for your products.

You can purchase the automated Promotions module separately. This gives you a lot of flexibility within your Industries CPQ implementation for designing and publishing promotions and discounts.

#4 Product Rules and interfaces

When you go through the Order Capture process, it is essential that you have rules associated with your products so that they are always priced correctly. With Industries CPQ, you have control over all parts of your product pricing. Moreover, you can ensure that the system generates perfectly correct orders every time. You can also use rules to determine penalties for cancellations or product changes.

An example of this is the Qualification Rule.

This rule checks if a customer is eligible to buy a product and can get an offer for that product. The system checks everything before adding the product to the cart. By setting these rules, Industries CPQ filters all your products and promotions in the cart. The customer or representative placing the order only sees eligible products.

Want to go a step further? With Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce Industries CPQ, you can use qualification rules to control which price list entries appear in the shopping cart. For example, you can adjust the price list based on the customer's location.

#5 Guided Selling: Salesforce CPQ vs. Salesforce Industries CPQ

Guided Selling guides the user through the ordering process in a series of steps, resulting in a better customer experience. To design these steps OmniScripts are used.
When using the cart-based guided selling experience navigates the user through a visually appealing interface to complete the ordering process. The cart (cart) provides the opportunity to select and assemble products from the catalog. All the rules and promotions we mentioned earlier are also applied here!

Developers and admins can configure their own steps using the Cart API hooks and OmniScripts. An ideal way to reuse and build upon existing components and off-the-shelf functions.

Colin Hammer

Colin Hamer is a Software Engineer at CaseNine. He is responsible for various Salesforce projects at clients.