Hey!
I just wanted to point you to a great introduction to a Quote Calculator Plugin (QCP). Here’s a video from Salesforce walking you through the use cases and showing an example how to implement one
Enjoy watching!
Category: Best Practices
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Apex Log Analyzer VSC Plugin
Those who work with Apex logs know, that this is not an easy task. Having Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce Billing on top of the standard cloud (well, really having any managed package with logs) makes the log review process even more complex, as we get tonnes of logs from the managed packages, that even though they are not readable for us, they just exist in the log file as you scroll through. However, just recently Financial Force released a plugin for Visual Studio Code to help analyse the logs.
When you come new to the Salesforce CPQ implementation project or when you are a part of a big programme, where many streams are working together, deployment become quite a big activity with many items to handle. The list in this article should help you to understand what areas of the current project or org setup needs to be checked. That’s not the whole list, but a good starting point for you to rock the deployment process in your project!
Price Calculation in Salesforce CPQ can be configured in so many ways! And that is great, because the product can fit into many requirements. However, due to the flexibility demanded, the whole calculation sequence is quite a complex series of operations.
People have been desperately waiting for the Dynamic Forms feature for a long, long time. It makes our life so much easier and enables us to configure a better user interface. There is no longer need for a page layout, we can group relevant fields into conditionally visible groups. We can display fields conditionally, we also can use Tabs or Accordion to organise the record detail space on even better lever than before.
I kindly recommend to use Dynamic Forms in your implementations. Make your users life easier, declutter your Salesforce setup and simplify configuration.
Review the below links for details:
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Salesforce CPQ automated testing
Have you ever wondered if and how can you automatically test your CPQ implementation? Is this feasible at all? Given the fact that Salesforce CPQ is so much dependent on the configuration data, one may think that this would be extremely difficult to do it.
Well… not really that difficult.
Here is a great read from Salesforce about automated CPQ testing:
https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2019/05/automating-salesforce-cpq-testing.html
The article describes quite a few options that we have to implement the automated testing, pros and cons of a given option on the table.
Proper testing in IT is a great investment in the long term value of systems being implemented in the organisation. Even if you don’t plan to automate testing of the CPQ implementation, it is still worth to read the linked article. It should not take you more than 10 minutes!
Salesforce CPQ is a tool that is more and more popular these days. There is more and more need for CPQ Specialists (exam description here) on the market. And it’s quite easy to validate a candidate knowledge if you already have 1 CPQ specialist in the team. However, if you are hiring the first one, you should check how well does the candidate knows the platform.
The below list of 44 questions could help you in your interview process. This is a list of questions touching on technical aspects of Salesforce CPQ. I hope you know that apart from the below, there are many other subjects to validate on the interview process.
Gilles Muys is, I believe, pretty well known in the Salesforce CPQ ecosystem. He worked for Steelbrick, which was acquired by Salesforce with its CPQ package. There is no many people on the planet with his knowledge and experience!
If you have 31 minutes to invest in your knowledge, watch the below video to grab a glance of CPQ implementations process & best practices shared by Gilles during one of the community meet-ups.
I hope you had a nice watch of the video above, that you noticed the KEY points that Gilles is talking about. Short list below:
- the need to have an executive support
- cross department implementation project: sales, finance, provisioning, legal
- smooth user experience – required for adoption
- less time for Sales Reps to build the quote, more time for selling
- identify pain-points
- document as much as possible
Very often there is a need to showcase Salesforce CPQ, end to end, to the prospect or to the client. Depending on the interest, the focus of such demo can vary between one session and another. However, I believe there is one, solid base flow to follow in such demos. That flow is based on the typical business scenario and how the business runs.
