Products in Salesforce CPQ

What is a Product in Salesforce?

Product creation is very first step for implementing CPQ-based Salesforce. This blog post will help you understand the what is product and types of products

A standalone product can be a service, a software license or a physical product that is sold as a one-time fee. The customer pays for such product up-front and is authorized to use it indefinitely.

• To find/select the right product for customer needs, Product need to be Well–Defined. Means a complete, usually alphabetical list of Products with notes giving details (Description, Pics), resources of a library containing details of items for sale​​

• Products should be well described with: ​
  • Name​
  • Unique Product Code, ​
  • Product Family​
  • Categories ​
  • Related Attributes (Help to properly Organized)​

Product Types​

The following are the Types of products.

1. Non-Subscription/ One-Time/Stand alone
2. Subscription
3. Usage Based
4. MDQ products
5. Bundles
6. Perpetual Products

1. Non-Subscription based Products

In simple words Non-subscription products are one-time products, Customers will come and buy in same time. During contract creation, non-subscription products can convert to an Asset depending on the option chosen in the Asset Conversion field (One per unit, One per quote line, or None). Assets are the records of non-subscription products that were quoted or actually sold to customers.

2. Subscription-based Products

A subscription product is a product that has some recurring payment element to it, whether it be a monthly payment or an annual subscription.

If you want to think more about it in terms of hardware, software, and support – hardware would be your one-time purchasable product, software, could either be one time with a license key or a subscription (Office365), and then support, which is almost always a subscription. subscription is any product that you can cancel based on the frequency of the subscription.

• Price is always prorated according to the Quote Term Length​
• Example: Home Appliances on Rent varies depends on the Duration.​
• Products can be renewable ​
• In CPQ: Upon Contracting, these products become a subscription associated with the Contract

3. Usage-based Products

Quote and price your products based on predefined rates for future consumption of the product or service you’re selling. The price scales alongside usage, reducing initial purchase barriers and driving higher revenue. You can configure your units of usage and setup different pricing rates based on usage volume.

• Like Internet or Post Paid Mobile connection​
• Prices are constant for these kinds of products even when renewal time.

4. MDQ (Multi Dimension Quote) Products

We can show a fixed-price subscription product in the quote line editor as one quote line broken into segments. Each segment represents a unit of time (quarter, month, year, or custom) and has pricing and a quantity independent of the line’s other segments. We call these products multi-dimensional quoting (MDQ) products. They’re useful if you want your sales reps to have detailed control over pricing specific units of time within one subscription.

5. Bundle Products

A Product Bundle is a combination of different products and services that are sold to consumers as one combined product or service package.

6. Perpetual Products

These products are like EMI based or One-time contract based, once contract or EMI’s over these becomes as Assets.​ Price is not prorated

The major difference is perpetual product can become one-time or several payments can become Asset at last. Perpetual products is part of Non-subscription which we can say.