Everything You Need To Know About Migrating Legacy Data To Salesforce CPQ

Salesforce CPQ is one of the most commonly used Salesforce offerings when it comes to sending quotes to clients. It allows users to price their products according to their configuration, create suitable quotes, and send the same to the clients through suitable platforms.

Salesforce CPQ applications take into consideration a range of customizations, discounts, quantities, and optional features to help the user quote prices in a quick and accurate manner.

Owing to the modern and automated functionality of Salesforce CPQ, companies across the globe are shifting from their old legacy ERP systems to the new CRM applications. However, making such a shift and adapting to the new platform is not easy. In order to move your legacy data into Salesforce CPQ, it is important to take into consideration aspects such as data migration, configuration, business logic, and much more.

Why Should You Migrate Your Legacy Data To Salesforce CPQ?

Conducting Smarter Sales

Moving your legacy data into Salesforce CPQ allows the modern application to follow a strategic approach in accessing your customer database. Salesforce CPQ helps you guide your sales reps in all their tasks to ensure smart and successful sales.

Increased Automation

Salesforce CPQ allows you to automate a number of sales processes, including the generation of suitable quotes by understanding the requirements of your clients.

Increased Accuracy

With Salesforce CPQ, your sales reps can undertake their processes quickly without worrying about their accuracy. The platform guarantees about setting the exact and desired level of pricing according to your requirements. Moreover, the platform allows you to automate approvals to streamline precise transactions.

Better Assessment Of Profitability

Salesforce CPQ provides users with tools and features for analyzing sales structures, making sales forecasts, undertaking deal-making analysis, and much more. This helps your sales reps and management to improve the assessment of profitability.

Reducing Sales Cycle

Moving your legacy data to Salesforce CPQ allows you to shorten your sales cycle to a great extent. As the platform automates the process of generating quotes and delivering them to the clients, it cuts down the time taken by your sales reps to nurture the leads captured. This helps your sales team to generate more leads in a shorter span of time.

Increased Productivity

Salesforce CPQ guarantees users about minimizing errors in pricing and generating quotes with lower lead time. This allows your sales reps to optimize their resources and make the most of the automated tools provided by the Salesforce offering, leading to higher productivity.

Getting Started With Data Migration

While migrating data from legacy ERP systems to Salesforce CPQ, you need to consider specific prerequisites to ensure that all the dependencies are migrated effectively along with your database. For example, if you are migrating a contract into Salesforce CPQ, you need to ensure that you migrate its associations to the concerned account and the opportunity as well. This makes for complete migration.

However, if the concerned account already exists in your Salesforce database, you need to map the relevant properties of the account to the respective Salesforce objects for auto-populating the fields when you migrate the contract.

Another important prerequisite for migrating data into Salesforce CPQ is to clearly define the type of data you need to migrate – historical and new data or historical data only. This provides you with a sense of direction and sets the base for the migration process.

The Use Of Data Migration Tools And Execution Sequence

There are several Salesforce data migration tools that would help you move your legacy database to Salesforce CPQ. However, it is important to remember that the migration process would be implemented in a set sequence of stages. Irrespective of the data migration tool you use, every stage holds equal importance and needs to be completed before reaching the next one.

Here are some of the most commonly used tools/methods for migrating your data to Salesforce:

  • Data Loader – Salesforce data loader is a tool offered by Salesforce to its users for bulk importing and exporting data. As you migrate your data using Data Loader, the tool reads, extracts, and loads information into your system from CSV files or a database.
  • ETL Tools – ETL tools the tools dedicated to extracting, transforming, and loading your data. A simple Google search would provide you with a range of ETL tools to choose from.
  • API Integration – This is the method of migrating your database to Salesforce by integrating two applications using REST or SOAP APIs.
  • Third-Party Tools – These are the tools designed exclusively for Salesforce data migration. You can implement these tools based on your specific needs and preferences for moving your data to Salesforce CPQ.

Stages Of Migrating Legacy Data To Salesforce CPQ

While you are selecting an ideal tool to migrate your legacy data to Salesforce CPQ, the most important aspects to consider are the different CPQ stages involved in migrating every record.

At every stage, the data values remain the same. On migration, Salesforce CPQ would process your records and match them with the assigned “To Be” stage. Every CPQ migration stage is guaranteed against the creation of duplicate records when CPQ processes are running. This is achieved by making use of the “Upsert” capability of Salesforce. Salesforce CPQ allows users to undertake concurrent processing of their database to reduce the overall stage execution time.

Here are the stages involved in migrating your legacy data to Salesforce CPQ:

  • Account Stage
  • Contact Stage
  • Pricebooks
  • Product2
  • Pricebook Entry Stage
  • Opportunity Stage
  • Quote Stage (As Is, To Be, and Sync)
  • Quote Line Item Stage (As Is, To Be, and Sync)
  • CPQ Pricing Engine Stage
  • Contract Migration Stage
  • Renewal Opportunity Stage
  • Billing Migration Stage
  • Post Migration Cleanup Stage

Validating Your Data And Processes

One of the key concerns while migrating your data to Salesforce CPQ is to ensure its integrity and accuracy. Ignoring the quality of the data migrated would end up affecting all your business processes carried out using the concerned records.

Here are some of the key aspects to consider to ensure the integrity of your database in the process of its migration:

Being Aware Of Potential Discrepancies

In order to maintain the integrity of your database, it is important to be aware of the discrepancies that are likely to hamper the quality of your data. These issues can occur in any of the following fields:

  • Migration stages
  • Amendments in pricing
  • Amendments in contracts
  • Amendments in renewals
  • Term and subscription
  • Product nesting
  • Quotation transformation

Also, make sure that you avoid making any assumptions regarding the business-related data stored within your system.

Using An Automated Accelerator

Using an automated accelerator or script can help you validate your data in a faster and more effective manner. However, before you run the automated accelerator, it is important to decide whether your data migration process needs “Configuration” or “No Configuration”. Keeping this in mind, manipulate the stages for your CPQ objects.

“Configuration” stands for migrating your legacy data into Quote or Proposal and the object of Product Configuration along with accompanying data into the object of CPQ line item. Here, the data will appear in a cart which can be updated manually at a later stage.

“No Configuration” stands for migrating your legacy data into the line item objects of Quote and Proposal. To ensure the accuracy of your quote finalization, you need to recreate the rules and logic into Salesforce CPQ to trigger the same when your data is migrated. Also, it is important to note that when you migrate your legacy historical data with no configuration, you do not need to run any business logic during the migration process. This is to prevent your old data to get overridden.

The use of automated accelerators or scripts can also help users match their business processes in a more accurate manner.

Reporting On Discrepancy Or Redundancy

The reporting on discrepancy and redundancy is a process that is commonly performed during the Order Migration stage. A successful Salesforce CPQ migration is defined on the existing as well as the new reconciliations giving zero discrepancies.

Some of the most common sources of data discrepancy include:

  • Rounding errors and decimal point resolution
  • Omitting one-time charges, discounts, shipping charges, or taxes during the process of data migration

If you encounter discrepancy or redundancy of data, here are two important ways in which you can resolve the issue:

  • Avoid manual reconciling of migrated orders. This would break the integrity of the entire data migration process.
  • Always make sure that the stages feeding into the CPQ pricing calculation engine match the business logic for triggering events.

Moreover, you can get rid of discrepancies by performing sample runs of customer invoices and comparing the same to ensure their consistency.

The Final Word

This is all you need to know to get started with the process of migrating your legacy data to Salesforce CPQ. If you are new to Salesforce, it is always advisable to take the help of experts and Salesforce professionals to guide you throughout the process.

 

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