Top Salesforce CPQ Interview Questions for 2024

Top Salesforce CPQ (formerly Steelbrick CPQ) Interview Questions and Answers for 2024.

Q1. What is CPQ?

CPQ stands for Configure, Price, Quote.

• Configure – configure Product Bundles, Eligibility, Availability
• Price – perform automatic Price Calculations, apply discounts, perform approvals
• Quote – manage Quote Lifecycle, create proposal documents, convert Quote to Orders

Q2. What are Product Rules in Salesforce CPQ?

Product Rules in Salesforce CPQ ensures that the correct Product is displayed to the user. There are four kinds of Product Rules:

• Validation Rules – Confirms that a quote’s product combinations or quote line field values match predetermined conditions
• Selection Rules – Automatically adds, removes, hides, enables, or disables options in a bundle
• Filter Rules – Prefilters the products available to add to a bundle
• Alert Rules – Guides and informs through messages during configuration or pricing

Q3. What are Price Rules in Salesforce CPQ?

Price rules in Salesforce CPQ automate price calculations and update the quote line fields. Price Rules contain price conditions to calculate accurate price during the Quoting process.

Price rules inject a static value, field value, or summary variable into a quote or quote line field. For example, create a price rule so that the quantity of maintenance kits in your quote is always twice the quantity of that quote’s printers. When a customer changes the printer quantity and saves the quote, Salesforce CPQ activates the price rule and updates the maintenance kit quantity.

Price rules can target the configurator or the quote line editor’s calculator. If you target the calculator, you can set the Calculator Evaluation Event field to apply the price rule:

• Before calculation
• After calculation
• During calculation
• Or during any combination of the above three

Q4. What are Product Bundles in Salesforce CPQ?

Product bundles are products with optional features or components that you want to include on a single quote line.

A bundle product contains several records.

• A bundle parent: The parent product is the bundle itself.
• Options: These products in the bundle contribute to the bundle price. You can consider these children of the bundle parent. An option doesn’t contribute to the bundle price if you select its Bundled checkbox.
• Features: A feature is a group of options. You can use the Min Options and Max Options fields to define selection restrictions for objects in the same feature, such as “pick one or more” or “pick 3 of 5.”
• Option constraints: Use constraints to control how users select options together.
• Configuration attribute: A field and picklist shown above or below the list of product options. This field targets all options containing the same field and applies its value to all those fields.

First, choose a product to represent your parent, and at least one product to represent a bundle option. After you create your options, features, and constraints, associate them to the parent via related lists on the parent product record.

Q5. What are Product Options in Salesforce CPQ?

Product options are individual products that users can select from when configuring Product bundles.

Salesforce CPQ Interview Questions and Answers

Q6. What are Product Selection Rules in Salesforce CPQ?

Product Selection rules perform an action in a bundle allowing automation of a bundle configuration. They contain a set of conditions and a set of actions. They can be used to automatically select or deselect product options of a bundle, or enable or disable them, or show or hide them.

Q7. What are Product Validation Rules in Salesforce CPQ?

Product Validation Rules ensure that the data a user selects meets certain standards. These contain a condition to be met, and an error message; they can be used to ensure that the configured bundle is valid. Summary variables can be used to see if conditions are met. These rules can target either quote lines, or product options in a bundle.

Q8. What are Product Pricing Methods?

Product Pricing Methods allow you to apply various discounts or markups to customize pricing on your products.

Q9. What are Price Actions?

When your price rule meets its conditions, the rule applies its price actions to a target field. A price action sources the value from a summary variable, formula, user-defined value, or other quote line field and sends that value to your target field. A price rule must have at least one action. You can have several actions that target the same field, or several actions that each target a different field.

Q10. What is Guided Selling?

Guided Selling recommends products to users based on answers provided by the users during the Guided Selling Process. A guided-selling process contains these components:

• Quote Process: This object defines how the prompt appears and how it adds items based on user input
• The quote process record contains a related list for process inputs. These records are the questions and possible answers that the guided selling prompt shows. Each process input represents one question
• The process input record contains a related list for process input conditions. You can define process input conditions so that the guided selling prompt only shows the process input only in response to the values of other process inputs. This feature is useful if you want to create a complex guided selling prompt that guides users down several paths based on their needs. It also keeps your guided selling prompt organized by showing only required questions

Salesforce CPQ Interview Questions and Answers

Q11. What are Multi-Dimensional Quoting (MDQ) Products?

Using multi-directional quoting you 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.

Q12. What are Subscription Products?

Subscription products are services that run for a set period, such as a year-long support service. Salesforce CPQ automates pricing, prorating, and co terminating subscriptions on contracts and renewals.

Q13. What are 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.

Q14. List some of the Pricing Methods available in Salesforce CPQ.

• Block Pricing – You can price a product based on several different quantity ranges, called block prices. When a sales rep adds that product to a quote, Salesforce CPQ checks where it falls in the quantity ranges and prices the quote line accordingly.
• Cost-and-Markup Pricing – Set a price based on its cost plus a markup amount, rather than list price and discount.
• Batch Pricing – Price component and accessory bundle product options by static amounts based on quantity ranges.
• Contracted Pricing – When sales reps create a contract, they can use quote line prices from their original quote on future quotes within that contract’s account. This process, known as contracted pricing, is useful when your sales reps have negotiated a price for a product and want to continue using that price after making a contract. Salesforce CPQ uses the negotiated price on new quotes, renewal quotes, and amendment quotes.

Q15. What are Summary Variables?

Summary Variables (Sum, Average, Min , Max, Count ) summarize number field information about products into a single object called a summary variable. You can reference a summary variable in price conditions, price actions, product rule error conditions, quote term conditions, and other summary variables.

Summary variables can be referenced in:

• Price Rules – Use a summary variable as a tested variable or filter variable in a price condition.Use a summary variable as a price action’s source variable to update quote and quote line fields.
• Product Rules – Use a summary variable as a tested variable or filter variable.
• Quote Terms – Use a summary variable as a tested variable.
• Summary Variable – Reference a summary variable in another summary variable’s Variable Element field. You can take the results of your aggregate function and perform another operation on them using the composite operator and the variable element.

Salesforce CPQ Interview Questions & Answers

Q16. What are Custom Actions in Quote Line Editor?

Custom actions are buttons that sales reps can click to perform an action in the quote line editor, configurator, or several other detail pages. For example, sales reps can select to show a filtered section of your price book or to direct users to an internal or external URL.

Salesforce CPQ ships with several custom actions you can enable in the quote line editor:

• Add Products
• Add Favorites
• Add Recommendations
• Save
• Quick Save
• Reset Discounts
• Delete Lines
• Add Groups
• Optional: All

Q17. What are Discount Schedules?

Discount schedules are to create volume discounts based on quantity or terms for quote lines. Discounts can be applied based on Range or Slab:

• Range – Products are discounted at the rate of whatever tier applies to the quoted quantity. Let’s say you ordered 50 products under the discount schedule in the first two paragraphs. All 50 units receive a 50% discount. Only range-type discount schedules can be term discount schedules.
• Slab -Units within a certain bound receive discounts equal to their tier’s discount value. Let’s say you ordered 30 products under the discount schedule in the first two paragraphs. Units 1 through 9 receive a 20% discount, units 10 through 19 receive a 30% discount, and units 20 through 30 receive a 50% discount. Slab discount products aren’t allowed on partial orders.

The Discount Unit field defines the type of discount applied to your quote line:

• Percent: Applies the discount as a percentage of your quote line’s list price.
• Amount: Applies the discount as an amount taken off of your quote line’s list price. This value is useful when you want to arrive at an exact discounted price without calculating discount percentages that could contain many decimals.

A discount tier represents a single discount level for a discount schedule. For example, 1 through 20 products receive a 40% discount. You can create a tier in your discount schedule’s Discount Tiers related list.

Q18. What is Pricing Guidance?

Pricing guidance uses Salesforce Analytics to create recommended discounts based on historical pricing trends. You can then assign pricing guidance to your products. When a sales rep adds a product with pricing guidance to their quote, they can see the target, norm, and floor discount recommendations in the quote line editor.

Q19. What is Salesforce CPQ Price Waterfall?

Salesforce CPQ uses a multi-step pricing process to derive a net price from a list price when using ‘List’ as the pricing method.

The pricing waterfall by default flows as follows:

List Price	Price pulled from the quote’s associated Price Book
System Discounts and adjustments	Includes contracted prices, discount schedules, proration, and Special Price if a value exists for Special Price Type
Regular Price	Prorated list price after system discounts or the Special Price if a Special Price Type is specified
Additional Discounts	Value entered by sales users or pricing guidance
Customer Price	Regular Price minus Additional Discount
Partner Discount	Discount given to selling partner, entered by sales user
Partner Price	Customer Price minus Partner Discount
Distributor Discount	Discount given to distributor, entered by sales user
Net Price	Partner Price minus Distributor Discount, final price for the line

Q20. Explain Salesforce CPQ Advanced Approvals (AA).

Salesforce CPQ offers Advanced Approvals (AA) which offers additional features not available with Salesforce Standard Approvals Process. Advanced approvals enable sales, operations, and legal teams to work better together to ensure there are appropriate checks and balances. Some of the key features of Advanced Approvals are:

• Smart Approvals – If an approver or approval group has already approved a quote and it gets rejected in a higher tier, the same approver or approval group isn’t required to reapprove when the quote is resubmitted. Salesforce CPQ remembers the sequence
• Requiring Approvals – Reps have complete visibility into what approvals they’ll need to obtain as they work on their quotes, so there are no surprises when they submit for approval
• Delegated Approvals – Used for assigning an approver to take over for someone while they are out of the office
• Replacing Approvals – If a certain approver is no longer required to approve quotes, they can be replaced with clicks. This eliminates the need to delve into every single approval process the old approver was a part of to manually replace them

Salesforce CPQ Interview Questions and Answers

Q21. Explain Salesforce CPQ Advanced Order Management (AOM).

Salesforce CPQ offers Advanced Order Management (AOM) split orders to create multiple orders from a single quote which can help send products to multiple locations or at different times for customers who need to place multiple orders for a single Quote. Advanced Order Management helps post-sales teams (services teams and partners) deliver as expected and on time. Some of the key features for Advanced Order Management are:

• Fulfill Orders Faster – Seamlessly generate orders from quotes to quickly get products and services delivered to your customers
• Flexible for Evolving Customer Needs – Split quotes into multiple orders, manage future dated orders, and modify with point- and-click
• 360-Degree View of the Customer – Quickly generate contracts with all contract term, pricing, asset, and subscription details
• Connect to Back Office – Sync order details to ERP for order fulfillment

Q22. What is Revenue Cloud?

Revenue Cloud is a part of the Salesforce Customer 360 platform and includes Salesforce CPQ and Billing. It serves as the bridge between front and back office, unifying sales and finance teams. Revenue Cloud is an end to end revenue management tool and can be used to configure deals, negotiate pricing, generate quotes, fulfill sales orders, send invoices, and collect payments — all on the Salesforce platform. Revenue Cloud also acts as a single source of truth for product, pricing, order, contract, and asset data.

Q23. Explain key features of Service Cloud for Salesforce CPQ Integration Package.

Service Cloud for Salesforce CPQ is a managed package that provides Sales Contract features to Service Cloud users. Once enabled it replaces Contracts with Service Contracts and Subscriptions with Service Contract Line Items. This package can be installed on top of Salesforce CPQ to provide a bridge for the Sales to Service handoff using Service Contracts. As soon as the Service Contract is generated, entitlements are generated and a process is kicked off to create the Work Order.  This allows the service contract to become a point of entry for Service Cloud users. 

Q24. Explain the use of Visualize Product Hierarchy package level setting.

Setting Visualize Product Hierarchy package level setting to True indents the product names in quote lines that represent options, so that you can easily see that they’re related to the lead product. Checking this setting makes bundles easier to distinguish in the Quote Line Editor.

Q25. Explain the use of the Product Family picklist.

Product Family picklist is used to categorize products. For example, if a Financial Company sells both Home Loans and Auto Loans, you can create two product families: Home Loan and Auto Loan. If the above mentioned Insurance Company uses forecasting, users can have a different quota for Home Loan sales and Auto Loan sales. Users can also view forecasts for opportunities with Home Loan products separate from opportunities that include Auto Loan products.

Salesforce CPQ Interview Questions and Answers

Q26. Explain the use of Search Filters.

Quote Line Editor’s search filter is used to filter products, assets, or subscriptions by their field values. Select Add Products in the quote line editor, and then select the filter icon to show the search filter box. You can search by Product Code, Product Name, Product Family, and Product Description by default. You can also add and remove standard or custom fields to any search filter by editing the product object’s search filter field set.

Q27. What are Configuration Attributes?

Configuration attributes are used to set the value of multiple shared product option fields simultaneously. You can have up to three configuration attributes in a row. When you set a configuration attribute’s value, Salesforce CPQ applies it across all matching fields in your bundle. Salesforce CPQ then considers all configurator-scoped product rules and price rules with parameters that match the changed values. Configuration attributes can inherit their default values from a quote or quote group.

Q28. What is the Quote to Cash process?

The Quote to Cash process covers the end to end functions related to sales activity of a company. The key steps in Quote to Cash process are:

• Create Opportunity
• Create Quote (Salesforce CPQ)
• Create Contract
• Create Order
• Fulfill Order
• Create Invoice
• Process Payment

Q29. What are Salesforce CPQ Plugins?

Salesforce CPQ plugins let you add customized functionality to features within the Salesforce CPQ package. Some of the commonly used plugins are:

• Javascript Quote Calculator Plugin (QCP) – Add extra functionality to the quote line editor in Salesforce CPQ with custom JavaScript code. Seven available methods allow you to change how calculations are performed and manage page-level security such as field visibility.
• External Configurator Plugins – Developers can set up links to third-party web applications from within the configurator or quote line calculator. You can open links through custom actions or with an automatic launch through a pluggable configurator.
• Legacy Quote Calculator Plugin – Use Apex code to perform calculations within the CPQ quote line editor. To use the Legacy Page Security Plugin, first create an Apex class. Then enter the Apex class name in the Legacy Page Security Plugin setting in the Salesforce CPQ package settings. You can call only one Apex class at a time in the Legacy Page Security Plugin.
• Product Configuration Intializer for Guided Selling – The product configuration initializer uses a custom user-provided APEX page to select options and set field values based on the results of guided selling prompts. It works only for standard product option fields and not for configuration attributes or custom product option fields.
• Product Search Plugin – You can use the Product Search plugin to modify or add specificity to product filter searches and guided selling searches.
• Salesforce CPQ Electronic Signature Plugin – An electronic signature plugin lets developers add electronic signature functionality to their orgs. This is useful for organizations who wish to streamline processes involving signatures, such as finalizing purchases and contracts.

Q30. What are Twin Fields in Salesforce CPQ?

Twin fields in Salesforce CPQ are used to pass custom field values from one object to another when the second object is created. Twin fields will pass values only if the custom fields are editable, have matching field types, and have matching API names.

One-Way Mapping

• To map one field to another, you need Read access on the source field and Edit access on the target field.
• Standard fields can’t be mapped between objects.
• Remembering quote line twin field values for bundle parents or standalone products isn’t supported. However, if twin fields exist between the product and quote line, Salesforce CPQ copies the Product field value to the quote line when you add the favorite to a quote.

Objects in Column 1 of this table pass field values to custom fields with matching types and API names from the objects in column 2.

COLUMN 1	COLUMN 2
Contract	Opportunities
Service Contract	Opportunities
Opportunity Products	Quote Line
Product	Quote Line
Product Option	Quote Line
Quote	Order
Quote Line	Order Product
Quote Line	Opportunity Product
Quote Line	Subscription
Quote Line	Assets
Quote Line	Contract Line Item
Subscriptions	Quote Line
Contract Line Item	Quote Line
Order Product	Invoice Line
Asset	Quote Line

Salesforce CPQ Interview Questions and Answers

Q31. What is Quote Template?

A quote template is a combination of predetermined formatting elements for the arrangement of quote data for presentation, typically in PDF format. Similar to Salesforce email templates, a quote template contains the design, content, and layout of your generated quote documents. Some content can be dynamic, such as the Expiration Date, while other content can be static, like the Company Address or Slogan. You can define dynamic content using merge fields as you would elsewhere in Salesforce.

Q32. What is Template Content?

Template content is an element of the quote template where the content is stored and is used to display the varying portions of the template. Administrators can create and modify these records using the supplied rich text editor, or by modifying the underlying HTML and inline CSS directly.

Q33. What is Template Section?

Template Section contains the template content you want displayed and where to display it vertically on the quote document. Template sections represent the structure of the content throughout the quote template.

Additional Resources

• Salesforce CPQ Product Documentation

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