If your sales team is still building quotes in Excel spreadsheets, you're leaving money on the table. Salesforce CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) automates complex quoting for manufacturers—and it can transform how you sell.
What Is Salesforce CPQ?
CPQ stands for Configure, Price, Quote. It's a Salesforce product that automates the quoting process for companies with complex product configurations, variable pricing, and custom bundling needs.
For manufacturers, this means sales reps can quickly configure products with the right options, apply the correct pricing rules, and generate professional quotes—all without leaving Salesforce.
Why Manufacturers Need CPQ
Complex Product Configurations
Manufacturing products often have dozens of options, variants, and dependencies. CPQ ensures reps can only configure valid combinations, eliminating order errors before they happen.
Dynamic Pricing Rules
Volume discounts, customer-specific pricing, promotional offers, cost-plus margins—CPQ handles all of this automatically based on rules you define.
Faster Quote Turnaround
What used to take days of back-and-forth with engineering can happen in minutes. Sales reps become self-sufficient, and customers get quotes faster.
Approval Workflows
Discounts beyond a certain threshold? Non-standard terms? CPQ routes quotes through the right approval chain automatically.
CPQ Implementation Best Practices
- Start with your highest-volume products, not the most complex ones
- Document all pricing rules before implementation begins
- Get sales team input early—they know the edge cases
- Plan for integration with ERP for order handoff
- Build approval workflows based on actual business rules
- Test extensively with real quotes before go-live
CPQ + Rootstock: The Complete Picture
When CPQ integrates with Rootstock ERP, you get end-to-end automation. Quotes convert to sales orders automatically. Inventory is checked in real-time. Production orders are triggered without manual intervention.
This is where manufacturers see the biggest ROI—eliminating the manual handoffs between sales and operations.
Key Takeaways
- CPQ eliminates quote errors from invalid configurations
- Automated pricing rules ensure margin protection
- Quote turnaround drops from days to minutes
- Integration with ERP creates end-to-end automation
- Start simple and expand complexity over time