How to Group/Ungroup Products in Salesforce CPQ for Better Product Pricing

As a marketer, reducing the complexity of your product line can free up your busy schedule and uncomplicate your daily tasks.

Tracking orders, and then grouping and ungrouping them save your time and reduce the sales cycle.

Salesforce CPQ is the solution that helps you do this. Hosted on the Salesforce Sales Cloud platform, CPQ enables sales reps to quote prices quickly and accurately.

It is a tool for businesses to provide accurate pricing with any given product configuration scenario.

Products can be configured in quotations using the bundles that include the features of the product.

In this article, you’ll learn about bundles and product options, how to group/ungroup products in Salesforce CPQ, and what benefits you can reap from implementing it.

Product Bundles – Organize Products in a Structural Way

A collection of products that are offered together to the customers are simply known as bundles. They may be pre-packaged, allowing no modifications. Or they may be configurable, which is mostly the case with Salesforce CPQ, allowing the user to determine the structure of the bundle. When configurable, this is often guided by rules that are put in place that validate the configuration and ensure that the products that have been chosen to make up this bundle are compatible with each other. For example, a laptop must be sold with its relevant accessories such as a charger, hard drive, processor, etc.

The Need For Product Bundles

Unorganized products will confuse your customers. They will be offered with an ocean of products that you have which may not be compatible with each other and may not make much sense being offered together. For example, a laptop offered with an unsupported charger.

Take this list of unorganized products, for example:

Based on the product catalogue, it might get confusing to figure out which products are compatible with each other. Therefore, there are more chances that you offer customers with non- compatible products.

With bundles, you can offer the products that are compatible.

Let’s take a look at how you can create Bundles.

STEP 1-

Create Bundles individually

STEP 2-

However, you need to ensure that there are individual products created and they must be related to each other by creating the Product Option records.

For example, an i5 processor can be used in multiple laptop models. Therefore, it should be created just once and can be linked to every other laptop models by creating Product Option records. In this case, an i5 processor can be used as a product numerous times as Product Options.

STEP 3-

Group Product Options together into Features

Features are not products, but are just containers for the Product Options. So, rather than having a long list of product options related to the products’ category, it is advisable to group options together logically under Features.

For instance, laptop is a bundle and i5 processor/memory/storage/warranty are different product options of the same category. These long list of product options might confuse customers in their purchasing decision. So, all these product options can be grouped into features to give customers a better user experience.

How to Logically Group/Ungroup Options in Salesforce CPQ

Now, that you’ve understood the nitty-gritty of product bundling, and how grouping options under Features help you enhance your user experience, it is time to implement it in your Salesforce CPQ.

Here are a few steps to group/ungroup options in a Feature. Let’s use the same example of laptop bundles.

For grouping product options, you first need to understand prerequisites in the product detail page:

• Go to Product Detail page > Product Options > Configure SKU (common product).

Here, the optional SKU is the link between products that is individually created as the product option on this particular bundle. And Quantity is the default quantity with this product option that you can edit and add to the quote, depending upon the number of product options.

• Set Minimum and Maximum quantity for the product options

• Click Required to ensure if the particular product is required on the bundle

• Go to Selected to check if the product options of a specific product are automatically selected by default

• Select the Bundled option to ensure that the required product is grouped/bundled with the main product

• Click Component to control the behavior of the option when multiple units of the bundles are quoted. Let’s say you are configuring a laptop and include one solid state drive in that product. So, if a customer buys 10 laptops identically configured, they wanted to end up with 10 solid state drives, i.e, 1 per laptop. In this scenario, you need to select the Component checkbox pertaining to the customers’ requirements.

• Set Discount for the standalone product as well as for the product bundles that are in purchasing pipeline by customers

• Click Discounted by Package

• Select Discount Schedule

Once you have selected and modified the product detail page, it is time to group/ungroup product options in Salesforce CPQ. For this, you can use the Configurator to add or remove options from bundle products. It displays bundle’s features and the options available within each feature.

To know how is it done, take a look at the screenshots below:

When you click on the Add Group button, the Bundle Product is added to the quote. With this, you can choose/configure the Product based on its features. And hence, this will be displayed on the Product Bundle page.

Similarly, when you click on the Ungroup button, the entire Product Bundle will be removed from the quote.

How to Layout Features and Options

Once you’ve grouped and grouped products in Salesforce CPQ according to the customer’s requirements, the next step is to organize products well.

For this, you can various options – Subscriptions, Services, Implementation, and Add-Ons on the Configure Products page.

Here are the steps to know how to organize products into different options:

• Select any of the Options

Or

• Add the other selection method that will display a link and direct the user to the list of product options

• Set the Product Quantity and Subscription to the quote. For this, follow the code mentioned below:

Code for Included Product Quantity based on subscribed months:

IF (
AND(SBQQ__RequiredBy__r.SBQQ__ProductCode__c = “SP-P”, SBQQ__Quote__r.SBQQ__LineItemsGrouped__c == false) , ROUND(1 * (SBQQ__Quote__r.Calculated_Subscription_Term__c/12),0),
IF (
AND( SBQQ__RequiredBy__r.SBQQ__ProductCode__c = “SP-PP” , SBQQ__Quote__r.SBQQ__LineItemsGrouped__c == false) , ROUND(2 * (SBQQ__Quote__r.Calculated_Subscription_Term__c/12),0),
IF (
AND ( SBQQ__RequiredBy__r.SBQQ__ProductCode__c = “SP-P”,SBQQ__Group__r.SBQQ__SubscriptionTerm__c!= null) , ROUND(1 * (SBQQ__Group__r.SBQQ__SubscriptionTerm__c/12),0),
IF (
AND ( SBQQ__RequiredBy__r.SBQQ__ProductCode__c = “SP-PP”,SBQQ__Group__r.SBQQ__SubscriptionTerm__c!= null) , ROUND(2 * (SBQQ__Group__r.SBQQ__SubscriptionTerm__c/12),0), SBQQ__Quantity__c
))))

If in case, you need to reconfigure the quote, then:

• Go to Products under Salesforce CPQ Configuration

• Navigate through multiple fields:

– Configuration Type

– Configuration Event

– Configuration Fields

– Option Layout

– Option Selection Method

– Configuration Fields

– Configured Code Pattern

– Configuration Field Set

– Customer Community Availability

And take action in these fields with the help of screenshot given below:

And voila! The reconfiguration of products is done.

Benefits of Grouping/Ungrouping Products in Salesforce CPQ

Salesforce CPQ is a great solution for you to create product bundles/options. Let’s take a quick look at its benefits:

• Gain Insights into Sales Pipeline

While grouping product options in Salesforce CPQ, you can see how each product is performing individually and as a whole. This allows you to get a better understanding of your sales cycle and helps you track trends over time.

• Get Easy Access to Data

By ungrouping products in Salesforce CPQ, you can easily discard individual products from your account without hampering the other items. With this, you can get easy access to all your products/data at any specific time.

• Store Product Information

When grouping the products together, Salesforce CPQ automatically creates a new folder that contains relevant information for every product. This means that if a certain product is added or deleted from the account, all other related information will get stored within Salesforce CPQ itself.

• Streamline the Quote Process

With the feature of grouping products in Salesforce CPQ, sales reps can easily add specific products to quotes and orders, allowing them to eliminate the need to add data manually. This saves a lot of time and hence, you can provide customers with accurate quotes/orders faster.

• Ease in Product Configuration

By ungrouping products in Salesforce CPQ, you can configure products and their price in a more flexible manner. This allows a more efficient, customized, and tailored experience for every customer.

Final Thoughts

Grouping/ungrouping of products on the fly is one of the most quintessential functions of Salesforce CPQ. With this core functionality, you can organize your products, create custom bundles, price them well, and manage the stock per unit accurately. So, harness the power of Salesforce CPQ and see how it makes a difference!