RLM Pricing Procedures
In highly complex selling environments, creative pricing strategies are often where companies can create a competitive advantage. However, modeling and maintaining complex pricing strategies can be a challenge that often result in:
- Overly complex customization in legacy CPQ systems that is difficult to maintain
- Pricing calculations for different product sets spread across disparate specialized pricing mechanisms eliminating a single source of truth for pricing data
- Reliance on spreadsheets for pricing calculations
For these issues, RLM Pricing Procedures are the solution.
Pricing procedures are customizable, ordered stacks of pricing elements used to calculate the final net price of a product with the Pricing Procedure Builder. Designed to be robust yet flexible, Pricing Procedures can handle almost any pricing strategy for any industry.
Creating pricing procedures in Salesforce involves several prerequisites and steps to ensure your pricing strategy is robust and accurate.
Price Procedure Benefits
- Pricing Designer – a drag and drop interface allowing admins to build, test, and orchestrate pricing elements
- Pricing Rules – Configurable rules that allow users to model pricing strategies such as volume or tiered discounts
- Pricing Waterfall – A visual representation of Pricing Procedures that allow admins to know when and how pricing calculations take place in a way that is transparent and easy to understand
- API First Architecture – Allows RLM pricing procedures to be called and leveraged by third party applications such as a customer self-service portal
Pricing Procedure Setup
Predefined Lookup Tables:
Lookup tables are crucial in matching your input values with the rows in a decision matrix or decision table. The table then returns the matching row's output to the pricing procedure or pricing element. You can use predefined tables in the Salesforce Pricing solution or create custom lookup tables. Here’s how to map these variables:
- Input Rule Variables: Inputs from the selected lookup table.
- Output Rule Variables: Outputs from the selected lookup table.
- Input Variables: Inputs provided by the pricing element.
- Output Variables: Outputs generated from the pricing element.
- Additional Variables: Custom output variables that reflect a pricing change. These values can be added using Advanced mode (JSON) during the simulation and are visible in the waterfall view.
Context Definitions
Context definitions contain all the necessary information to run the pricing process. They include the relationship between nodes and their structure, attributes, context tags, and mapping. Mapping updates the nodes and attributes with the correct input data from Salesforce objects. The pricing procedure runs with the associated tags and writes back the results to the context definition that the tags belong to.
Creating a Constant Resource
For variables that don’t have context tags, you can create a constant resource. Constants act as placeholders for fixed values in pricing procedures for inputs, outputs, and other values passed from a pricing element. Here's an example of how to create a constant for the `VolumeBasedAdjustment` input variable:
1. Create a pricing procedure, and on the Pricing Procedure page, click the necessary icon.2. In the Resource Manager panel, click Add Resource.
3. Specify the resource type, name, data type, and default values.
4. Save your changes.
Configuring Your Pricing Procedure
Pricing procedures use preconfigured pricing policies to calculate discounts and the final net price for your products. Follow these steps to create and configure your pricing procedure:
1. From App Launcher, find and select Pricing Procedures.2. Click New and specify the details:
3. Enter a name and press Tab to auto-populate the API Name.
4. Select Pricing as the usage type.
5. Associate the pricing procedure with a context definition.
6. Save your changes.
7. On the Details tab, in the Pricing Procedure Versions section, click the pricing procedure version you want to work on.
8. You will open the Pricing Procedure Builder as a new tab.
9. On the record pages of your new pricing procedure, on the Versions tab, click the necessary icon next to the pricing procedure version and select Open in Pricing Procedure Builder.
10. Click the appropriate icon and select a pricing element from the list. You can also drag the pricing element from the Pricing Elements panel to the builder canvas.
11. In the Lookup Table Details field, select the lookup table and enter the values.
12. Set profile-level access by selecting the profiles that can see the pricing information in Waterfall view after simulation.
13. Save your procedure.
Note: In some cases, to see the Simulate button, users need to deactivate, save, and reactivate procedures that include List Price or Price Adjustment Matrix elements.
Simulate and Activate Your Pricing Procedure:
Before activating your pricing procedure, run simulations to test if the variables entered are accurate. Here’s how:
1. Open a pricing procedure in the Pricing Procedure builder.
2. Add your elements, map them to the appropriate tags, choose a rank, enable the option to include the output, and then save your pricing procedure.
3. Click Simulate.
4. Select an input mode to pass simulation data to the pricing procedure:
5. Simplified: Enter values for the variables defined in the pricing procedure.
6. Advanced: Enter the values for the variables in JSON format in the JSON Input box. Modify the values directly or download the JSON input file, modify its values, and paste it back in the box.
7. If you make more edits, click Simulate again.
The Waterfall View shows every step of the pricing calculation from the list price, the discounts applied, and the changes or taxes on the product to arrive at its final net price. If you’ve set up profile access, only the profiles you selected at the element level can see the pricing information displayed.
When you’re happy with the simulation result, click Activate.