Chapter 11
In This Chapter
Defining products and price books
Using products and price books
Creating products
Establishing and updating product schedules
Maintaining product lists and price books
A product, as its name implies, is a product or service that you sell to customers. Products are the individual line items that make up an opportunity. Depending on your goals for Salesforce, you might not need to immediately incorporate Salesforce’s product-type features into your opportunities. But if you sell multiple products and services and you struggle with product-level visibility, Salesforce provides powerful and easy tools to implement solutions for Professional, Enterprise, and Performance Edition users.
Using products in Salesforce benefits sales reps and people in product marketing, management, and development throughout your organization. Sales reps can quickly locate the price of a product and select products to calculate an opportunity’s amount. Marketing, management, or development professionals can get vital sales information to support strategic business planning, new product development, and product life cycle management.
In this chapter, we show sales teams how to use products and price books with opportunities (if your administrator has already set that up). Before setting up products and price books, though, administrators first need to do some advanced planning. We discuss how to create a product catalog, set up schedules, and build price books. We then show you how to maintain products and price books on an ongoing basis to facilitate your sales goals. We conclude this chapter by showing you how to generate quotes that incorporate items from your product catalog so that you can e-mail them to your contacts.
You need to know two key and interrelated terms before you can begin planning your product strategy in Salesforce:
A product can have an associated schedule based on quantity, revenue, or both. If you sell products and break out schedules to forecast revenue recognition or for planning, you can use Salesforce to reflect important schedules for products linked to opportunities.
To access the Products home page, click the Products tab. If you can’t see that, confirm that the Force.com drop-down list in the upper-right corner of the screen is set at Sales (versus something like Call Center). If you still don’t see it, check with your system administrator.
You can associate a price book, add products, and build schedules on an opportunity through the Products related list on an Opportunity detail page.
A product record consists of a number of fields that you use to capture information about a product you sell. If you’re involved in shaping products for your company, most of the standard fields are obvious. If you want specific definitions, click the Help link in the upper-right corner of Salesforce.
Here are a couple of important pointers on understanding the standard product record fields:
Salesforce allows you to customize your pricing based on the way you sell. If you use products in Salesforce, your company has three different options for pricing:
See the following section for details on adding products to opportunities.
Sales reps can add products with specific prices to their opportunities, and Salesforce automatically calculates the Amount field on an opportunity record. If you’re a sales rep selling multiple products and managing multiple opportunities at the same time, you can take the frustration out of remembering what you offered to a customer. If you’re a sales manager, you can segment your pipelines and forecasts by product lines. And if you’re in product management or marketing, products in Salesforce can give you real insight into product demand from your markets.
To take advantage of products, your company must first set up a product catalog as well as one or more price books. See the section “Building the Product Catalog,” later in this chapter, for the how-to details on setting up your products and price books. After this is done, sales reps can add products to an opportunity by going to a specific opportunity and following these steps:
A Choose Price Book page appears. If your company has made only one price book available to you, you can bypass this step and start with Step 2.
The Opportunity detail page appears again. The Products related list now shows the name of the price book in parentheses.
On an opportunity, you can use only one price book at a time.
A Product Selection page appears, as shown in Figure 11-1. This shows all the products in your selected price book.
The page reappears with your search results in a table at the bottom of the page.
An Add Products page appears with your selections and fields for you to provide line item details. The Sales Price field is prefilled with the default sales price from the price book that you selected.
You must, at a minimum, fill in the Quantity and Sales Price fields for each selected product. The Date field is typically used to reflect an expected shipping or delivery date for the product.
Clicking the Save & More button takes you back to the Product Selection page. If you click the Save button, the Opportunity detail page reappears. Notice that the Amount and Quantity fields on the opportunity record have changed based on the total from the products you added.
If you need to change the details on your product selections in the course of the sales cycle, you can do this easily on the Products related list of the opportunity record. For example, if your customer wants to add another product, increase product quantities, or demand a better product discount, you need to know how to modify products.
To modify products on your opportunity, we suggest the following:
If you manage opportunities in which your products or services are delivered over time, you can create schedules for your products by quantity, revenue, or both. By using schedules, you and your users can benefit in multiple ways:
After scheduling is enabled for a product, set up a schedule by going to the Opportunity detail page and following these steps:
An Opportunity Product page appears with a Schedule related list.
An Establish Schedule page appears.
Your fields might vary, depending on whether the product is set up for quantity, revenue, or combined scheduling. When you click Save, a schedule appears based on your choices.
If the revenues or quantities aren’t equal over the periods that you first established, you can type over the values in the schedule.
The Opportunity Product page reappears with the schedule you established.
Over the course of an opportunity, if terms change, you can adjust the schedule on a product by clicking the buttons on the Opportunity Product page. To access an Opportunity Product page, go to the relevant opportunity record, scroll down to the Products related list, and click the desired product link from the Product column. The Opportunity Product page for the selected product appears with a Schedule related list. You can do the following with the schedule:
You can search for specific products easily by using the Find Products search tool on the Products home page.
To search for a product, go to the Products home page and follow these steps:
A Product Search page appears with a list of possible selections, as shown in Figure 11-2.
The list results change based on your criteria.
The Product detail page appears.
If the existing lists don’t provide the views that you want, you can create custom views for products and price lists. You can define your views to see additional standard or custom fields in list form. See Chapter 4 for details on creating custom views.
If you have a vested interest in your product strategy, be aware and take advantage of all the options that Salesforce provides for customizing products and price books. The more you plan ahead, the better you can implement products and price books for how your sales teams sell. As you make products and price books active, your sales reps can start associating products to their opportunities.
For products, consider the characteristics of your products outside the standard realm that you want to analyze. In most companies, the product management or marketing teams own and maintain these records in coordination with finance. You should pull together a cross-functional team made up of sales, marketing, finance, and product management users to decide what you want to achieve from products in Salesforce. Then work with your system administrator to customize the product record to meet your specific needs. For more details on customization, see Chapter 20.
For pricing, consider whether to have set pricing on your products or whether you prefer to keep the pricing simple at the beginning. Many customers of Salesforce, for example, set the prices on their products at $0 or $1 and then depend on their sales reps to fill in the sales prices when they prepare an opportunity. Other companies invest time and effort in creating actual standard or list prices on products to provide guidance to their sales reps.
Before your sales reps can begin linking products to their opportunities, you need to add the products into Salesforce.
To add a product, log in to Salesforce and follow these steps:
A New Product page appears, as shown in Figure 11-3.
Your exact fields might vary, but see the section “Defining standard product fields,” earlier in this chapter, for info on the standard fields.
The Product detail page for your new product appears with related lists for standard prices and price lists.
Over time, marketing or product managers may need to update details about a product. You can make most of your changes to a product from its detail page. Go to a specific product and take a look at this list of actions that you can perform. (You must have “edit” permissions on products to perform these steps. See Chapter 19 for details on granting the right permissions to the right people.)
If your company wants to track annuity streams, stay aware of key shipping dates, or estimate when revenue will be recognized on products, you can also set up schedules on all or some products.
Your administrator first needs to enable schedules before you can add them on specific products.
To set up schedules, follow these steps:
The Schedule Setup page appears, as shown in Figure 11-4.
You can choose to enable schedules based on quantities, revenue, or both. You can also choose to enable schedules for all products.
The Products page reappears.
After schedules have been enabled, you can create default schedules on existing products or while you’re adding new products.
By creating default schedules, you can simplify repetitive tasks for sales reps. With this setting, a default schedule is created when a sales rep adds a product to an opportunity. A sales rep can still reestablish a product schedule on an opportunity. The product date determines the start date for the installments.
To create a default schedule, follow these steps:
A Product page appears in Edit mode. If scheduling is enabled, you see additional fields for quantity and/or revenue scheduling.
Here are some tips on completing the default schedule:
The Product detail page appears.
To update a default product schedule, follow these steps:
See the “Searching for products” section, earlier in this chapter, for specifics. A Product Search page appears.
The Product page appears.
The Product page for your product appears with the updated information.
Some companies require just one universal price book. Many other companies, however, want custom price books based on their unique selling needs. Examples include price books that are based on the following:
If the standard price book meets your objectives, keep it simple. Otherwise, in the following sections, we show you how to set up your price books.
Every time you add a standard price to a product, you automatically associate it to the standard price book. You can do this while you’re creating products, or you can add the standard prices after you’ve built the product records.
The easiest way to add a standard price is while you’re creating products. To use this method, start creating a product record as you normally would; see the section “Building the Product Catalog,” earlier in this chapter. Instead of clicking Save, though, follow these steps:
An Add Standard Price page appears, as shown in Figure 11-5.
The Product detail page appears, and a standard price displays on the Standard Price related list.
You can also create the products first and add prices later. To add or edit a standard price, go to the desired Product detail page and follow these steps:
If standard prices already exist, you can click Edit or Edit All. The result is the same: An Add or Edit Standard Price page appears.
The Product detail page reappears with any changes reflected on the Standard Price related list.
To create a price book, you need to be an administrator or have permission to manage price books.
To create a price book from scratch, go to the Products home page and follow these steps:
A Price Book page appears with related lists for active and inactive price books.
A New Price Book page appears in Edit mode.
Select the Active check box if you want to make the price book available.
The Price Book detail page for your new price book appears with a Products related list.
After the price book has been established, you can add products to it. A product listed on a price book is also referred to as a price book entry. To add products to an existing price book, go to a price book and follow these steps:
A Product Selection page appears with a search tool and a list of products.
The Product Selection page reappears with a list of products based on your search criteria.
An Add List Price page appears.
Select the check boxes in the Use Standard Price column if you want to use the standard price for the list price of a product or just enter a list price. You can select the Active check boxes to make products immediately available in the price book.
After you save the product, the Price Book detail page reappears, and your selected products have been added to the Products related list.
Maintaining accurate and up-to-date product and price lists is challenging, especially if you have an extensive product catalog and/or complex pricing. If you’re responsible for such a daunting task, you can use tools that are located on the Products home page to save time.
At times, you’ll want to make a price book unavailable to sales reps. Maybe you had to raise prices on a family of products or you stopped selling a product line. You probably need to preserve the current price book because existing customers and some prospects are still being associated to those products and prices, but new customers will need to be tied to the new catalog. Rest assured that you can deactivate one or more price books almost instantly so that sales reps won’t be able to tie new opportunities to old information.
To deactivate a price book, go the Products home page and follow these steps:
The Price Book detail page appears with related lists for active and inactive price books.
The Price Book detail page reappears, and the selected price book now appears in the Inactive Price Books related list.
To reactivate price books, you follow a similar process, the difference being that you click the Activate link adjacent to a price book listed in the Inactive Price Books related list.
On occasion, you might want to create a price book that closely resembles an existing price book. Instead of starting from scratch, you can clone from an existing price book and then make changes, as necessary.
To clone a price book, follow these steps:
The Price Book page appears with related lists for active and inactive price books.
A New Price Book page appears.
The new Price Book page appears with a Products related list cloned from the existing price book.
If you still want to delete a price book, follow these steps:
The Price Book detail page appears with related lists for active and inactive price books.
The specific Price Book page appears.
If you select a price book that isn’t associated with opportunities, you return to the Price Book detail page with the lists of price books. If a Deletion Problems page appears, follow the suggestions provided in the preceding bulleted list and on the Deletion Problems page.
Salesforce allows the ability to generate quotes from the product and price book information collected in your opportunities. You can make PDFs of quotes to e-mail to customers, and a complete history of what you’ve created is automatically stored within Salesforce. From the initial creation of a lead, to when you’re sending your prospect a quote for new business, Salesforce helps you all the way. You’ll still need to use your savvy sales skills to get your prospect to agree to what you’re actually quoting, but that’s where the art of sales balances the science.
Quotes use many standard fields that are prepopulated with information already existing in the Account and Opportunity records. This makes quote creation that much more streamlined in Salesforce because you don’t have to spend time retyping a customer’s address, contact information, or what they ordered (unless you want to). Check out all the standard Quote fields by choosing Setup⇒Build⇒Customize⇒Quotes⇒Fields.
To create a custom field for your quote, follow these steps:
The Quote Fields page appears.
The New Custom Field Wizard begins, consistent with what we’ve discussed with other objects. (For example, in Chapter 20, we discuss creating new custom fields.)
You return to the Quote Fields page.
For those of you working on the front lines with prospects and customers, creating a new quote is a cinch.
To create a new quote, follow these steps:
If you don’t see it, ask your administrator to enable quotes.
A New Quote detail page appears, in Edit mode.
The Quote page appears.
As you progress in your negotiation cycle, you may need to modify the information in your quote. This can include modifying the information captured in the quote fields, or it can mean actually changing the prices of what you originally offered.
To revise your quote, follow these steps:
The Quote Edit page appears for that quote.
The Opportunity page reappears.
To modify the actual line items that you quoted, follow these steps:
If you choose to offer an item for below list price, you can edit the information here to record the actual sales price you want to quote.
The Quote Line Item edit page appears.
This spells out the amount of the discount and where it’s being applied.
The Discount field is a percentage (%) discount, and it calculates the equivalent value based on the Subtotal.
The Quote page reappears.
After you have your quote just right, it’s time to send it to the customer. To e-mail (or fax) your quote to your customer, you first need a PDF copy of the quote.
To create a PDF of your quote, follow these steps:
The Quote page appears.
You’re shown a preview of your quote.
This allows you to save the PDF to the Quote record as an attachment for later use (or faxing), or to save the quote and also e-mail it to the contact that you prepared the quote for.