Hello everyone!

We are happy to present to you, some of the latest features introduced in Zoho CRM's in-built CPQ system.

As you may already be aware, CPQ offers a bespoke quote management facility right inside Zoho CRM. You can set up product configurations and price rules in order to automate line items on a quote, based on your business needs. This will greatly help sales reps to streamline and accelerate quote creation. Delivering customized, accurate quotes is made hassle-free, all within just a few mouse clicks. If you are new to CPQ for Zoho CRM, learn more from this article.

In an effort to improve the usage experience for our customers, we have introduced a few enhancements to the existing capabilities of the CPQ system, and they are as follows:

Let's understand each of these enhancements in further detail.

Whether it's the product configurator or price rules, you can now use an easy-to-use filter and search interface to make the selection of specific products easier. Earlier, you had just a search button to narrow down on a primary or associated product. This required you to remember the name of the product.

Now, however, you can filter and search for products just like how you would do on a list view page using advanced filters. Search for products based on product names, record owners, price, regions sold in, and various other such related fields. This makes it extremely easy to filter products, even if you do not remember their names or codes.

One of the most awaited possibilities in Zoho CRM's CPQ system has been the ability to offer a secondary product for free upon the purchase of a primary product.

You were only able to achieve this with the help of a far-off workaround where you had to create a price rule with a 100% discount for the secondary product and add it along with the primary product in the quote manually.

But that workaround is now history!

We are elated to inform you that today, you have a direct option to add a free product to the product configurator. All you need to do today to get this done, is to enable a checkbox called "Set this Product as free" when you add or suggest a product in the product configurator in a single rule. 

When multiple products are sold together, regardless of whether the secondary products are for free or come with a price tag, you need to define how many units of the secondary product need to go with the primary product. If you sell a laptop, how many chargers or ear pods need to go along with it, in its box? If you are selling a dishwasher, how many packs of detergent tablets need to be sold along with the primary product? Is it equal to the primary product's quantity, or twice that number? How do you define this dynamic quantity, is there a static absolute number or is there a dynamic value? That is what CPQ now helps you with.

Let's understand this better with an example.

Consider the case of Zylker Watches, which sells wall clocks, and a variety of wrist watches. In order to boost sales, they often introduce interesting offers and schemes, where customers get free products if they purchase more items. For instance, on the purchase of every Zylker Heritage Wall clock, one couple watch set comes for free.

To configure this requirement, you would,

The quantity of added/suggested items needs to be adjusted dynamically based on the primary items. This could be equal to the primary items, or twice/thrice the primary item's quantity. Or this number could also be indicated by another Quantity field in the primary item.

Consider another example of Zylker Tech, a software company. For the purchase of every business application, they need to offer training tickets. The number of training tickets is dictated not by the order quantity but the number of licenses purchased in a single order. So in this case, the formula is Quantity * Number of licenses.

So what you really need is to define whether the quantity of associated items is an Absolute number or a Dynamic value.

— In case of absolute number, enter the number.

— In case of a dynamic value, what determines this value.

Whether it is the primary item's order quantity. If so, what's the formula? Is it equal to, plus or divided by the primary product's quantity?

Or is it equal to, plus or divided by an absolute number?

Or is it based on another quantity field in the primary product record?

You get to define all these parameters to clearly define how the quantity of the associated items change based on the primary product parameters. Whether the associated products need to be sold at a price, or free of cost, this dynamic quantity computation can be configured.

To sum up, you can now search and filter products easily based on multiple fields of the record in product and price rules. You can mark a secondary product as free, upon the purchase of a primary product. You can also dynamically update the quantity of the secondary products.

Here is a quick video that demonstrates the addition of free products as well as dynamic quantity update in the context of Zylker Watches. 

We trust that these enhancements are helpful for your CPQ journey with Zoho CRM. To learn more, visit this article. Do let us know your thoughts about these enhancements by commenting below.