[Parent-Child Quoting Part 1] Building a Parent-Child Quoting Solution in Salesforce CPQ

Part 2: Creating Child Quotes in CPQ Using Custom Application

Part 3: Choosing the Right Contracting Model

Overview

Let’s suppose you are selling equipment and services to a franchise company with hundreds of sites across the country. You are signing a contract with the parent company that will set the same price for all the sites, but when it comes to billing, you need to bill each site individually. You are excited to close this deal and want to quote and order for this opportunity using Salesforce CPQ.

Since the same products and services are sold at the same price, you want to handle this sale with one opportunity and a single quote. However, if you want to bill each site in Salesforce CPQ, you need to create an order for each of the locations. You quickly realize that creating multiple orders from a single quote in CPQ has many limitations, and to effectively handle the process at the enterprise level you will need customization.

A bigger challenge awaits once you have onboarded this customer: now you need to maintain the contract. The customer may open new sites, make changes to the existing order, or your company may update the offering that needs to be applied across the sites. To make these changes within the context of amendment and renewal in CPQ, you realize that yet another customization is also required on the contracting side.

There are many aspects of the quote-to-cash process that need to be thought through when creating a custom solution for the above use cases. The Quote-to-Cash team at Slalom has encountered this use case multiple times, and in this series?of articles I will be discussing the design options for parent-child quoting solutions in Salesforce CPQ.

Specifically, I would like to suggest that in fact two separate functionalities should be built to support this use case – one for splitting quotes, and one for consolidating subscriptions – and introduce how those customizations can be built by using Valorx Fusion, which is a Microsoft Excel-based plugin that can manipulate Salesforce data in a custom application. The two applications will work together to support parent-child quoting use cases throughout the quote-to-cash lifecycle of initial quoting, ordering and billing, contracting and amending, and renewal.

Key Design Considerations

User Experience

The user experience of configuring hundreds of child quotes or orders is usually the pain point to solve here given how time-consuming and error-prone the process is. A tabular view using a spreadsheet is naturally a much better user interface for this purpose, where the rows represent the quoted products, and the columns correspond to each site. From there, you can either import the spreadsheet to create the line records or even use a custom application such as Valorx? to automate the process.

Contracting

This is where the rubber meets the road for the parent-child quoting solution; the process and the user experience created for splitting a net new quote should also support the amendment and renewal quoting processes as well. In addition, you should also consider how many subscription records will be created throughout the lifecycle of the contract – including the ones from multiple amendments – and make sure that a large number of records can still be processed without performance issues.

Billing

When setting up the products, you will need to consider which products are billed to the parent vs. billed to the child accounts. Further, splitting the quantity should work with special products such as usage or percent-of-total, whose quantity may be fixed at 1 when quoting in Salesforce CPQ.

Also, it is common to have different implementation dates among sites when you are quoting for hundreds of locations. In such a case, you should enable the user interface to enter a start date for each site and adjust the billing start date accordingly.

What’s Next

In the following articles, I will review the quoting and ordering process in CPQ and the objects involved (and why the custom solution should create child quotes instead of orders). Then I will introduce the two applications and examine the user experience and workflow of creating child quotes and managing subscriptions.

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