Salesforce CPQ Product Rules

Salesforce CPQ’s product rules can significantly enhance the efficiency and accuracy of your sales process, ensuring that sales reps always offer the most relevant and compliant product combinations. This blog will provide you with a deep dive into the functionality and strategic implementation of product rules within Salesforce CPQ. By reading this blog, you’ll uncover:

• Essential Insights into Product Rules: Understand the foundational elements that make up product rules and how they guide sales reps in offering the right product combinations.
• Key Features and Fields: Discover the critical components, including Configuration Rules, Error Conditions, and Actions, that enable precise control over product offerings.
• Practical Use Cases: Learn from real-world scenarios that illustrate how product rules can solve common sales challenges, enhancing compliance and efficiency.

Let’s get started!

Product Rules

When the sales reps navigate complex combinations of products and services, product rules act as guardrails to help the reps stay on course. Product Rules help enforce business logic that helps sales reps get the right products onto the quote. A product option, quote, or quote line can be evaluated against user-made conditions, and action can be performed in response.

Key Concepts and Features

• Product rules contain related lists for Configuration Rules, Error Conditions, Lookup Query and Actions.
• When processing a product rule, Salesforce CPQ tests all the error conditions, evaluates whether they are “True” or “False”, and fires an action after considering the rule’s Conditions Met field.
• At least one condition is required for the rule to evaluate.
• The Product Rule “Type” field determines the related Actions and Configuration Rules.

Key Fields

• Active: On this field, indicate whether the rule is active or inactive.
• Type: Field to specify the type of rule, “Alert”, “Validation”, “Selection”, or “Filter”.
• Conditions Met: Choose the behavior for your conditions, “AND”, “OR”, “Custom”.
• Scope: In this field, specify whether the rule applies to the entire quote or a specific product.
• Evaluation Event: In this field, specify when this rule should be evaluated.
• Evaluation Order: In this field, specify the order of evaluation for this product rule.
• Message: Enter a message to be displayed as “error” when used for the “Validation” type and “warning” when used for the “Alert” type product rule.

Error Conditions

Error Conditions compare two data elements to evaluate whether a product rule should run or not based on the Conditions Met field.

Key Fields

• Tested Object: In this field, specify the object that contains the tested field.
• Tested Field: Specify the field on the quote object that should be used in testing this condition.
• Tested Attribute: This field is used to identify the specific attribute if the Tested Field is a global Configuration Attribute field.
• Tested Variable: Select the summary variable you want to the rule to evaluate.
• Operator: In this field, choose the operator to use when evaluating your tested selection.
• Filter Type: Choose Variable to evaluate against a Summary Variable. Otherwise, choose Value.
• Filter Value: In this field, enter the value you want the tested variable to be evaluated against.
• Filter Variable: Choose the summary variable you want the rule to evaluate.

Product Actions

Selection or deselection of Product Option within a bundle or hiding the option from the view are a few actions performed by the Product Action record. Options are targeted by the Product Action based on the parent Product Rule’s scope, conditions, and evaluation event. The product action fields can also change the action’s target scope.

Key Fields

• Type: Specify the type of action, “Add”, “Remove”, “Enable”, “Disable”, etc.
• Product: Choose the product to be automatically selected on the quote. The Type must be set to “Selection”.
• Required: Use this field if you want the product in the Product Lookup field to be selected on the quote.
• Filter Field: Pick the field to update when the rule is triggered.
• Filter Operator: Pick the operator that determines how the Filter Field will apply to the Filter Value.
• Filter Value: Add the value to be updated on the chosen Filter Field.
• Value Object: In this field, select the Salesforce Object where the value field is determined.
• Value Field: This field compares the filter field with this field instead of the filter value.
• Value Attribute: This field is used to identify the specific attribute if the Value Field is a global Configuration Attribute field.

Use Case 1

Sun Solar sells a product named Lithium Batteries. The reps are not allowed to sell these batteries to any accounts in the Healthcare industry. If they try to sell this product to an account in the Healthcare industry, they should get an error message on trying to save the quote. What should be configured by the CPQ Specialist to address this requirement?

Solution: Configure Product Rules.

Reason: The CPQ Specialist can configure a Validation type Product Rule for this product that covers the Healthcare Industry by specifying the error conditions. When the rule is active and meets the criteria for evaluation, the reps receive an error when they break the rule.

Use Case 2

A software company has a catalog where several products have US and EUR versions. The business has asked the CPQ Specialist to set up the CPQ quoting process, where sales reps can choose which region’s products are displayed. Which features should be configured to meet this specific requirement?

Solution: Configuration Attribute and Selection Product Rule.

Reason: Configuration Attribute will be set up to allow users to select which version of the product they are selling, US or EUR. This value will be used in the Error Conditions of two Product Rule with the Type set to Selection. Two Product Actions will be set up on each rule, Action 1 will show the US products, and Action 2 will hide EUR products, whereas for the second product rule, create an action that shows all EUR products and an action that hides all US products.

Conclusion

As we wrap up our exploration of Salesforce CPQ product rules, it’s clear that mastering these tools is essential for optimizing sales processes and ensuring your team offers the most relevant and compliant product combinations. The strategic application of product rules not only simplifies complex sales scenarios but also empowers your sales reps to make informed decisions with confidence.

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