Understanding when and where to use Salesforce quotes can be tricky especially for people who are new to Salesforce CPQ processes. Essentially, Salesforce quotes allow for sales teams to track and record product and price combinations for any product or service and present them to a customer.
Think of it as a pre-receipt in the sense that it details the different products and services a customer is interested in to help the sales team assess the value of an opportunity within the pipeline. With Salesforce CPQ, users can easily generate multiple quotes for a single customer.
That said, it can still be tricky to understand the ins and outs of generating Salesforce quotes. Here’s everything you need to know!
How to Make and Manage Salesforce Quotes
Creating and recreating quotes by hand can be both time consuming and tedious. Salesforce quotes can be easily generated with CPQ. That said, creating a quote from the ground up can be confusing if you’ve never done it before!
Simply put, the steps to generating a quote in Salesforce are as follows:
- Select the Opportunity
- Select “New Quote” in the drop-down menu
- Fill out the popup form with required information
- Edit the Quote Lines via the drop down menu inside the new quote and add relevant products
- If the quote is primary, mark it as such
- Generate the quote document
To create a quote document:
- Navigate to quote intended to be generated into a document (We recommend doing this from within the Opportunity associated with the intended quote)
- Select the “Primary quote” as that is assumed to be the most relevant
- Once in quote view, the quick actions should show a button for “Generate Document”
- Select a template and add the desired products and services (If you want to add individual markups or bulk or term based discounts to augment the prices of your offering to fit your customer’s needs, this is all possible with a few simple clicks.)
- Once complete, the grand total is calculated based on taxes, shipping, and product information
What About Quote Templates?
Wondering what a Salesforce quote template is? Well, Salesforce quote templates help to allow for quote documents to be configured to fit the parameters of the sale and present them to your customer in a neat, branded look.
For example, templates allow you to remove variables such as tax or show the quote total with currency conversion to different monetary values. Additionally, you can integrate branding elements such as brand colors, logos, terms, and case specific conditions.
Generating a quote template can be tricky, especially for CPQ beginners. Luckily, Salesforce CPQ offers a basic quote template for you to utilize. Additional sections can be added via the Quote Template and Content sections of CPQ.
What Causes Salesforce Quotes to Vary?
As opposed to a completed deal, delivering a quote does not guarantee a purchase. Customers may ask for changes or customizations to a product before committing to an order which can result in time wasted recalculating the quote.
Some factors that cause a quote to vary include:
- Pricing of different goods or services
- Varying units of measurement
- Time constraints surrounding project completion
- Timeline and designation of responsibilities to team members
- Alterations to customizable order
With a correctly configured Salesforce CPQ system in place, you can eliminate the time spent creating duplicate quotes. Any changes to an order can be appropriately calculated to generate a branded report with ease.
Need Help Configuring Your Quotes?
Troubleshooting and configuring Salesforce CPQ comes with a set of challenges many of which can be tricky to overcome. That’s why many companies partner with outside consulting companies to help them with everything, from a quickstart to full implementation guidance.
The downside to pulling in outside help is that many companies don’t learn to navigate Salesforce CPQ themselves which results in a heavy reliance on an outside team to help you troubleshoot. Having a partner that is willing to teach your team the fundamentals of Salesforce CPQ is going to be an imperative step towards maximum efficiency.
Our CPQ certified team at ITequality embraces a “Teach as we work” mentality in which many of our billable hours are clocked hand-in-hand with your internal team. By doing this, you can see firsthand how to troubleshoot implementation and daily use.
