We’re going to talk a little bit about subscription pricing in this Salesforce CPQ tutorial. Right now, our canvas backpack is a bundle and it’s using a list price. And that list price is coming from our price book. Our price book is the standard price book, and it’s currently being sold at a suggested $10 per backpack.
If we want, we can expand our business because our customers love our backpacks so much that they want to have backpacks delivered to them every single month. So they would pay $10 per month for the backpacks that we can figure when we sell them their initial backpack, they would just have a copy of that backpack sent over to them. We can adjust this to be sold with subscription pricing in Revenue Cloud.
In order to specify subscription pricing. First, we’re going to edit the canvas backpack product, and we are going to scroll down to the subscription area or find the subscription pricing field on your screen. If you don’t see this field, you may need to adjust your page layouts. There are out of the box Salesforce CPQ layouts that you can use. We’re going to say that this subscription product is going to be a fixed price, meaning it’s $10, as opposed to a percent of total. Those might come in handy if you were going to sell a warranty or some kind of product that is based on a percent of the total, think of it sort of like the way that you have sales tax as a percent of the total. That’s not the way that this backpack is being set up.
This is a fixed price for our subscription term. This is a point of confusion, sometimes. Think about this in the way of, when you’re looking at your price book entry, that $10. What does that $10 stand for? How much time does that $10 stand for? Is it $10 a day? Is it $10 a month? Is it $10 a year? So your subscription term here is going to be one for one month. For a percent of total base, we can leave that alone because we’re not working on percent of totals right now. For subscription type, you can have this be renewable so that at the end of your subscription term, you can continuously renew your product. This could be sold just one time. So it wouldn’t renew. And then there are other options for renewable or evergreen.
We’ll talk about these in the following videos, but for right now, we’re talking about renewable products that can be added to a contract and then the contract can renew. So this is a subscription term of one. So $10 per one month. I am going to save this now. And we will add our backpack to our quote. Now our quote has a subscription term of 12 months, whereas our backpack is $10 per month. Salesforce CPQ has a lot of options to customize subscription terms, and this is how we are going to in this example.
So let’s see what happens when we add our backpack to this quote. We’ll also add a standalone potion here so that we can compare what that looks like. We’ll say this is a small backpack for a Druid, and we’re going to get some minor potions here. I will save this. Now we have our backpack and we have our potion. You can see that the net price here is saying that it’s $120 for a net unit price. This is considering one unit of 12 months. So that’s $10 for the backpack times a quantity of one times the subscription term.
Let’s see what a quantity of two would look like. Now we can see, we have a quantity of two, $10 per month for 12 months, gives us $240. So our net total is term times the list, unit price, times the quantity. Whereas our net unit price is the single quantity of just one or the list unit price, times the subscription term. This can start to get tricky for some people, but I would highly encourage you to set this up in a sandbox. Just try it on for size and see how you can get your subscription products to have the pricing that you need.
Keep in mind the other tools that we’ve already talked about, such as having an additional discount available, having your target customer amount, having a whole quote discount percent rather, and indicating certain products that are just not discountable at all. Also you can leverage bundles and you can have included products. And so when you’re starting to layer your pricing together, you’re going to want to make sure that each piece of the puzzle fits really nicely before you layer on another item.
I hope this video has been helpful in talking about subscription pricing and how your subscription term works together with your price in order to get you your subscription pricing. If you’ve enjoyed this tutorial, please like and subscribe and if you’d like to learn more about this or any other Salesforce CPQ, Revenue Cloud, or Salesforce Revenue Cloud Consulting items – you can work with us. Thank you so much!
Note: The information in this blog post is still applicable to Salesforce CPQ; however, as of Q1 2025, Salesforce CPQ has been officially deemed End of Sale and Salesforce’s new lifecycle management product has been rebranded to Revenue Cloud (previously named RLM). To view the timeline of CPQ and Revenue Cloud history, click here.
If you’d like to know more regarding the differences between Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce’s new offering, Revenue Cloud (RLM), please click here.
