We’re going to talk a little bit about the Salesforce CPQ pricing waterfall. And specifically, we’re going to talk about how the partner discount fits into all of this. In our last videos, we talked a little bit about all of the different fields that are in the line editor that come out of the box. So for example; the list, unit price, the list total, the net total and those fields, we also talked about how the additional discount works and the target customer amount field. So, if you have any questions on those items relating to Salesforce CPQ for Salesforce Billing, please look at our previous videos.
Today we’re here for the partner discount, something Salesforce Revenue Cloud consultants will use in customer engagements.
In this example:
- I’ve keyed in a partner discount of 5%.
- We have our backpacks with the list price of $10.
- We’re purchasing five of those for a total of 12 months.
- This $10 is a one-month-at-a-time price.
So, our list total takes our quantity times our lists, unit price times our subscription terms. The list total is 12 months of these $10 backpacks and five of them; that’s where we’re getting our total for 600 at this canvas backpack line in Salesforce Revenue Cloud.
The ad-ons for this backpack also get factored into our price. So, our grand total is $625. We know:
- We have applied an additional discount of $10 to the canvas backpack itself, that $10 amount. Now, that $10 is being taken off of the customer unit price.
- Our regular unit price is $10 times our 12 months.
- Our customer unit price is going to be less than that: it’s going to be the $10 off of that $120 price.
- We have a total of $10 times 12 months minus $10. So this is taking an additional discount off of a single unit of 12 months.
- It’s not applying a $10 discount to the unit price, it’s applying a $10 discount to 12 months of that unit price.
That gives us our customer unit price of $110 because it’s been discounted. This is one of the many ways that Revenue Cloud makes things much easier for customers while using Salesforce Billing.
You’ll notice that the 5% partner discount has not been factored in. We just have our customer unit price looking at the discount of this additional discount. Now, as we scroll over, we can see that our net unit price is actually lower, so the net unit price has factored in that 5% partner discount.
When we get to the bottom of our discount here, we can see that this price is significantly lower than our customer total. We can also see that this price over here, if we wanted to try to put an additional discount, we can’t. We cannot apply a discount because this line is locked.
It is marked for do not discount, but the partner discount is actually still discounting it. That can cause a lot of confusion if you don’t have all of your prices laid out on the screen, so let’s take a look at how we can fix that as a Salesforce CPQ Consultant.
For our partner discount, we need to make sure that the special damage product (which I have pulled up on the screen over here) is not only non discountable for our additional discount, but also non-partner discountable.
Let’s go ahead and:
- Edit this product
- Check the box for non-partner discountable
- Scroll down and check that box
- Click save
We’ll remove the whole bundle, then we’ll go ahead and add these products back again. I’ll choose my canvas backpack, and then I’ll just choose an extra potion all by itself. So we’ll choose this and then I’m choosing a few of these, we’ll say this is a large berserker, and save.
So, we still have both our terms that’ve been saved for 12 months and our partner discount. Our special damage potion is the one that we marked for non discountable.
We can’t apply an additional discount here (even though it’s not part of the backpack). It’s indicated as non discountable. We also can see that now that the 5% partner discount is not applying to this anymore.
Marking this as a partner, non partner, and discountable stopped it from getting marked down by this partner discount over here. I know that this is a lot of information to take, but I wanted to recap a little bit with a rainbow of pricing. So to recap, our list unit price is equal to one month for one backpack.
We can use:
- Our regular unit price, 12 months of one backpack.
- Our customer unit price, which is equivalent to the regular unit price, which is this one minus the additional discount.
- The net unit price, equivalent to the customer unit price minus the partner discount.
I just wanted to also let you know that there is an addition to all of these, we also have a distributor discount which sometimes gets factored in as well. It behaves an awful lot like the partner discount. Those go together. So if you need even more discounting that is available to you, I hope that this tutorial has been helpful in walking you through a little bit about the pricing waterfall with Salesforce Billing and how you can use the partner discount in your quotes.
If you’ve enjoyed this tutorial, please like and subscribe and if you’d like to learn more about this or any other Salesforce Billing, 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.
