Salesforce CPQ for Beginners: The 101 of Price Rule

A general rule of thumb is that when you’re trying to sell something, you need to determine its price. For most situations, a fixed price per unit is sufficient.

However, many businesses want to be able to charge more sophisticated prices. The term sophisticated pricing may leave you wondering, what exactly does it entail?

Let’s understand with an example:

Imagine you have to sell Product X and Product Y but want to make sure that one Product X is included for every five Product Y. In this case, you will need to create a price rule that calculates the quantity of Product X based on the quantity of Product Y added to the quote.

Here’s another example:

You want to sell an item for a lower price if more than a certain number of units are purchased by your customer.

Now, answer this:

Can you manually calculate the price and prepare a quote for the above cases? Of course not, unless you are ‘Katherine Johnson’.

If this calculation is not easy to be processed by the average human brain, can you expect your sales rep to prepare quick and accurate quotes that incorporate the above-mentioned calculations?

Besides the scenarios we discussed around sophisticated pricing, there are many instances when sellers have to incorporate complex calculations and prepare pricing models depending on the nature of the product they are selling.

That’s when the CPQ system with its price rule emerges as a paladin for sales reps.

Smart Price Rule: Sell Smarter and Faster

The power of Price Rules cannot be overstated. Admins can conditionally update almost any field on a quote line, quote line group, or quote record.

Rules for pricing follow an IF/THEN format. If something is true, then it takes action.

As part of the IF portion of the rule, lots of different data can be evaluated. You must be specific enough so that prices only change when you want them to.

In the THEN part of the rule, CPQ tells which fields to change and how to change them. Usually, this involves replacing the field value with a calculated value, but it can even be a simple static value.

Businesses use pricing rules to adjust and set prices based on a variety of determinants, factors, or limitations. Generally, pricing rules are the smallest unit within a more or less complex pricing logic.

Nevertheless, pricing tools are limited in their capacity and cannot meet every possible pricing requirement. Fortunately, Salesforce CPQ provides a way for complex pricing use cases that extend beyond out-of-the-box tools.

Salesforce has proved to be the cloak of levitation for market leaders who aim to transcend challenges and ascend the growth ladder. Its Price Rule feature offered by CPQ solution is one of its strongest assets, which the business community recognizes!

Let’s give you a brief rundown on applying the Price Rule in Salesforce CPQ.

How to Apply Price Rule in Salesforce CPQ

Now that you are familiar with the Price Rule, here’s how you can easily apply it:

You can target the configurator or the quote line editor’s calculator with price rules.

To apply the price rule to the calculator, you can set the Calculator Evaluation Event field:

1. Prior to calculation
2. Post calculation
3. During calculation
4. Or during any combination of the above three

The price rule can be applied to the configurator if you set the Configurator Evaluation Event field:

• During the saving process
• When the user edits the bundle or saves it, the price rule record contains Price Rules, Price Conditions, and Price Actions

Let’s understand the process with a use case: The number of Window Sensors will always be double that of Home Security Consoles.

1. Select the Price Rule tab
2. Set up a price condition
3. Set up a price action
4. Select the Object Manager and add the Quantity field to the Target Field of the Price Action
5. Set up a summary variable
6. Return to Price Action and link the summary variable
7. The quote line editor will appear

And, you are done!

The Bottom Line

You can use Salesforce CPQ Price Rules to apply special prices to products when they meet certain conditions based on their attributes, for example offering a discount when the customer has added products worth some amount to their cart.

For example, offering a discount of 10% after adding a product worth $850 from a particular brand.

Using this method, you can motivate your customers to complete their purchases and help you get better ROI.

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