Salesforce Quoting. What can you get out of it?

Salesforce quoting is a more capable tool than you can think. My journey with quotes started back in 2009. I’ve been working with my parents in the family business. We were renting an office in a detached house. My room was in the corner of the building. Extremely small, yet very cozy. I had set up two monitors and was on a call when this idea hit me. I discovered, that I was lost in excel. We were selling apparel. Particularly down jackets. Every jacket we were selling had at least three colors and came in eight different sizes. It’s not rocket science to calculate its 24 combinations per product. We were doing all our quotes in excel just like in the picture below.

After I finished my call, I went googling for tools that could help me make quotes. But making quotes was not the only requirement. I also wanted to track if the customer has accepted my offer or not. So I remember how I discovered SuiteCRM. My the first CRM I’ve ever actually used. It had quotes and products (I didn’t know about salesforce quoting back then). So I’ve entered one product and was looking at how to add variations for it. Back then, I didn’t know that CRM systems should be customized and don’t have complicated functionality out-of-the-box. In this article, I would like to explain what salesforce quoting is capable of. And most importantly – what salesforce quoting can’t do.

Why you would want to use salesforce quoting

In this paragraph, I want to shed some light on reasons, why you would want to use salesforce quoting. Chances are you either have salesforce or you are planning to implement it. Most likely you are looking to track your sales. Tracking sales means knowing the amount of your offer plus the products you have offered. Salesforce Sales Cloud has built-in quoting functionality which gives you the ability to prepare quotes and send them to customers. It is the most essential part of the sale. Sending a quote to a customer.

Depending on the product you sell, your quote complexity will be different. Salesforce quoting is designed for simple quoting scenarios. However, it gives you transparency over what you are offering. If you do not use salesforce quoting, you are losing tones of data. You won’t be able to analyze which products are winning business. And which products are losing business? As a result, you won’t be able to track your discounts and pricing which show the best performance in sales.

Salesforce Quoting Basic Functionality

Quoting functionality of salesforce doesn’t come alone. It includes a couple of related objects. Obviously, you can’t send a quote without a product. As a result, the product should be priced. So you have a pricelist in salesforce. So when it comes to quoting functionality in salesforce, it automatically translates into multiple objects:

• Quotes
• Products
• Quote Line Items
• Pricelists

Quotes

Quotes are designed to store information about the quote. By default, it stores information about the account, contact, stages, expiration date, and other fields. The only field, which is mandatory by default is the name of the quote. Don’t ask me how you should name your quotes. But it is the only mandatory field there. This is linked to Opportunities and could be synced with them. Syncing quote with opportunities simply means that you are translating all products you have in your quote to your opportunity.

Why do you need to sync a quote with an opportunity? Well, it’s easier than you think.

• First, you need to know your opportunity value (amount). Syncing quote let’s you “pass” all quote details to opportunity. This way, you have opportunity amount automatically updated. As a result, you will have correct data in your reports for opportunties.
• Seconly, sometimes customes want multiple quotes. Because syncing quotes with opportunities “passes” all product details to opportunity, you can created another quote. New quote will be identical with the one which is synced. So you can use sync function as copy-paste workaround for quotes.
• Third. When you close a deal and you have multiple quotes, you wan’t to pick one quote which is winning. If your customer has accepted multiple quotes. Well, then you either create identical opportunity and update opportunity field for the quote. Or merge two quotes. There is no standard functionality for that, so you will have to do that manually. Alternatively you can make a flow for that. But that’s too technical.

Products

Products in salesforce represent…products. Physical or non-tangible. This could be services or goods you are selling. Or both. They store information about SKU (stock-keeping units), description, and ultimately the name of the product. Do not expect products to store pricing information. Pricing in salesforce is managed through pricelists. I will explain this in the next paragraph. Meanwhile, what you should know about products is that they store your product catalog. That’s all they do. Products in salesforce act as an intermediary object to connect your pricing with your quotes, opportunities, and orders (if you use orders).

Quote line items

Quote line items in salesforce quoting represent products on the quote. They merge prices, quantity, sale price, description, and other attributes (details) relevant to the quote. For example, you want to add five t-shirts with a sale price of 30$ each. Quote, line items will store this information. If you are looking to add more details for products on the quote, quote line items are the object you want to edit. Think of it as an intermediary in negotiations who writes down what parties are saying. Quote, line items pull description information from products, default pricing from price lists, and allow you to edit everything and store it on the quote.

Pricing

This is where things are getting interesting. Pricing in salesforce is managed via price lists. It is a special object, which stores the exclusive pricing of your product. You might wonder, why this is needed? Well. The answer is pretty simple. A lot of companies have different prices for different customers. For example, you will sell a t-shirt for 30$ in your online store. But for your wholesale customers, you will sell the same t-shirt for 7$. You still want to see the same t-shirt in your reports, but with a different sale price. Ultimately, this is what price lists are doing. They store your pricing. When you create a quote in salesforce, you chose a price list. If you do not want to have multiple price lists. Just create one, standard price list and that’s it. It will be used by default everywhere in the system.

Discounting

Salesforce quoting discounts allow you to add discounts in percentage by default. As a result, you can make discounts on every quote line item you add to your quote. For example, you are using your default price list, but want to add a discount for a particular customer. This is what discounts are doing. There is only one flaw with salesforce quoting discounts. There is no fixed discount functionality by default. However, you can add this functionality via adding a flow. It’s a bit technical but works well. You can also use process builder to create fixed discounts. You will have to study salesforce documentation to make this work. I would advise you to go to the trailhead website and pass a short course on that. It will take only a couple of hours but will save you hours later. 

Bundling

Recently we were doing a project for a Subaru dealer. Obviously, car dealers sell cars. Cars come in plenty of different options. For example colors, engines, transmissions, options, and many others variants. At first, when we looked at the project inquiry, we were looking at a CPQ solution for a customer. If you do not what CPQ means, simply put it is salesforce quoting on steroids. It has more functions and options. But few days of discovery of customer needs we found out that standard salesforce quoting will do. You do not have any bundling options by default in quoting objects. But you can create a flow for that. It will require time and effort to learn it. But it is worth it. You will not have to pay extra for the salesforce CPQ module (or any other available on the market). However, you will still be ok with standard salesforce quoting functionality.

Product validation

There are cases when you sell products in packages of something. For example, a pack of Corona beer comes in a bundle of 6 bottles. Just like that, the product validation feature allows you to create validations. That way your sales reps won’t have a chance to make a mistake during quoting. But beware, quoting will require you to learn basic formula functionality. Also, standard quoting functionality limits you to validating the product one per row. You won’t be able to check for multiple lines. For example, if you want to restrict selling monster truck wheels with VW Golf, you will have to go with Salesforce CPQ. Standard product validation rules in salesforce quoting would not allow you to do this.

Quote Documents

Salesforce quoting lets you create PDFs directly from salesforce. Hence these PDF files have limited customization options. But you can always use one of the free plugins available within the AppExchange marketplace. For example, I recommend looking at HIC Docs Made Easy plugin in the store. Guys who made the plugin are sick. They provide free support and are very responsive. We’ve recently finished one small project, where PDF quotes were very essential. We’ve used the HIC Docs plugin and it works well. Unfortunately, the plugin is not very well documented. As a result, you will have a hard time playing around and figuring out how it works. Things become even worse when it comes to formatting output. For example, you have numbers stored on your quotes. HIC Docs do not have documentation on how to show integer numbers in the output documentation. I was not able to figure this out either. But it’s still a good PDF plugin.

Summary

Salesforce quoting object comes bundled with plenty of functionality. Even though salesforce consultants see that this functionality is updated for the past years. It is still a powerful tool to fuel your sales and track products, amounts and produce beautiful PDFs. Just invest some time and effort and you won’t regret it.

Have a great day/night whatever it is now when you are reading this.

Cheers.
Jeff.