Your company is unique. You face your own specific set of business challenges as a result of your particular industry, region, and size. That’s why you chose Salesforce! Salesforce is the ideal platform for customization. It lets you create custom fields and objects so you can tailor its solutions to fit your needs.

In the Quote-to-Cash space, many companies went the custom route when they created their Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) and billing applications. They custom built their products instead of leveraging the existing Salesforce architecture and power of the platform. As a result, they end up writing more custom code when it comes time for their customers to implement or make updates and changes.

Yes, the Salesforce platform allows you to create your own objects and even your own user interface (UI) if you want to. At the same time, it’s important to understand the implications of over customization and the business challenges that result from it—and it’s important to us that our products minimize the need for custom code.

When you choose the Salesforce CPQ solution, you can still develop its functionality beyond what you get out-of-the-box. Our product is easily customized and extended with Salesforce tools to meet the majority of use cases. Most of our customers don’t need custom code to get our CPQ app working for them the way that they want it to.

We believe that you get a massive amount of value when you use common Salesforce functionality instead of replacing it. You can always customize, but you shouldn’t start from scratch.

Why?

1. To get the benefit of Salesforce innovation

Salesforce Research and Development is focused on optimizing our shared UI and common functionality. When your application is designed to take advantage of these, you can simply turn on new features as they are released and automatically benefit from the advancements. If you use a product that relies on custom objects or custom code, that same innovation may not be available to you (or at least not right away).

As a Salesforce customer, you should be able to utilize all the platform updates that result from the user feedback we collect. We put so many resources into delivering the most requested features that it would be a shame for unnecessary customization to keep you from using them! Salesforce Quote-to-Cash products (Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce Billing) make the most out of the common Salesforce data model and as a result, we are constantly expanding and improving along with the platform.

2. To maximize the value of the AppExchange

Salesforce has many successful partnerships with AppExchange vendors. It is easy for other applications such as Conga to integrate with Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce Billing products because we are using the common Salesforce data model, so our partners have practice connecting with our integration points in the same way every time.

You can add a lot of value to your business by tapping into the AppExchange and choosing solutions that make it easier to work with Salesforce partners.   

3. To optimize initial and ongoing implementation investment

Products that use the common Salesforce data model are faster and simpler to deploy. Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce Billing are each delivered in one managed package, saving you from of having to install a series of packages. We pride ourselves on repeatable implementation, which means we know what it will take to get you to launch and we have knowledgeable partners who are experts in that exact process.

A less complicated implementation means you free up time and budget and that you can focus your attention on optimising the solution to cater to your user and match your business needs. You might even be able to include more in the initial scope of your project instead of pushing out to future phases. Quick and easy go-lives bring value forward and drive goals; they encourage adoption, productivity, and satisfaction.

4. To save time and money on training and staffing

Your Salesforce admin is a valuable resource that is used to working with common functionality. You want to take advantage of their expertise and make it easy for them to do their jobs.  Instead of having them deal with custom objects that don’t always talk to each other nicely and will require them to write more code when they make adjustments, you can unlock their time and energy by simplifying your applications.

A Quote-to-Cash solution that is built with the common Salesforce data model allows admins to be more productive, customize the product quickly, and change the way things work by clicking and dragging (such as in the case of creating a new automatic workflow).

5. To get value from the community and give back

All of our customers are a part of the Salesforce family and culture. As part of that, our Quote-to-Cash products have their own Success Community for users to participate in. With communities, customers can connect and help each other.

Users understand each other better when they share the same functionality and product experience. With a solution that is built on the common Salesforce data model and does not require extra custom code, we are able to get all of our customers on the same page. That way, they are able to learn better from each other and get the most possible value out of shared resources.

Our Success Community also allows customers to log cases and access the Quote-to-Cash team. Through our interactions with community, we are able to listen to our customers and drive innovation by building key feature requests into our products. We believe in improving our tools by productizing feature enhancements and releasing them to our entire customer base, not by building unrepeatable custom functionality for individual use cases.

You want to get the most out of Salesforce. Maximise your investment by choosing a Quote-to-Cash solution that leverages the full power of our platform, our innovation, our partners, and our customers.

Salesforce offers a complete Quote-to-Cash solution with a common customer experience, where everything is connected and living in the same system—from starting the sales cycle with a new lead to running collections. All of this information is accessible to the same users, and everybody has a unified view of the customer.

Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce Billing are easy to maintain, native to the Salesforce platform, and pre built for success. We can still customize our CPQ solution programmatically to meet unique customer needs, but we choose to focus on delivering a robust and flexible product that we can offer to all of our users. That way, our customers only need to worry about configuring our tool to work perfectly for them—not building anything from scratch.

Why do we use the common Salesforce data model?

We believe in putting in more thought and less work.