In previous blogs, we discussed how you can create a brand new Price Book in Salesforce as well as how you can add Price Book Entries to those Price Books.  These Price Books are central to ensuring that your sales team is set up in the best possible way to structure deals per business requirements.  In turn, this means that as administrators, there will be work and decisions required to both maintain and update these Price Books.  In this blog, we will discuss a few fundamental topics as well as some considerations to make when planning and building your Price Books.

 

Standard and Custom Price Books

The first thing to note is that there is a Standard Price Book that comes with your instance of Salesforce.  This is a Price Book that is created and stamped as the Standard Price Book by Salesforce once you create Products.  This Price Book will have the standard prices for the products that you have created.

Secondarily, you have the ability to create a custom price book (or multiple price books) to house custom pricing details for your products.  Often times these custom Price Books will include specific subsets of products and prices.  Some common examples would be segmented by market or by industry. However, you can segment your Price Books however makes sense for your business.

In the above example, you can see that there are segmented Price Books by market.  This is a common use case for how companies may segment their Price Books.

 

Considerations

When working on building and maintaining your Price Books there are a few considerations to be aware of:

• When building a quote in Salesforce CPQ you are unable to select multiple Price Books for a single quote. This means that if someone were to often sell across multiple Price Books, you will need to add the Products to both Price Books to ensure they can sell properly.
• When you delete a product from the Standard Price book it will still be available at the custom price in the other Price Books, so make sure that you are editing the custom Price Books as well if you need to delete or sunset a product.

To summarize, make sure that when you are building out and adding to Price Books that there is input from the business to ensure that selling motions are accounted for and that consistency is applied across the Price Books.

 

Additional Resources

• Salesforce Price Book Entry Fields
• Salesforce Help: Price Books

Cover Photo by Angèle Kamp on Unsplash