SteelBrick: Spring is Here!
SteelBrick released their newest version – Spring ’16 – just a few months after their largest release to date. With over 20 features, they continue to focus on fine-tuning their Lightning-ready UI and improving the functionality of their Quote Line Editor. Here are 5 of the new exciting features:
Auto-Generated Contract Prices
Contracted pricing is a pre-exiting feature which allows you to set a negotiated price for specific Accounts that automatically take precedence over the default Price Book price. With Spring ’16 you can have the contracted price auto-generate when an Opportunity is contracted. An admin can select to either auto-generate a contracted price from a product or from a Quote Line. (Also see: How to Generate a Customer Contracted Price with Salesforce CPQ)
Email Notification if Contracting Fails
It happens to the best of us, your Opportunity is contracted and the Contract fails to generate. What went wrong? An admin can quickly troubleshoot to pinpoint the error: i.e. missing start date or missing subscription Product. However, for most users, this can cause a lot of frustration. SteelBrick released a new feature that will notify the user when a Contract fails to generate. It will provide them with the reason why the Contract failed and the corrective steps for the user or the admin to take corrective action.
Non-Consecutive Segments in MDQ
Multi-Dimensional Quoting (MDQ) debuted in Spring ’15. It permits users to adjust pricing, quantity, and discounts for a Product so that one Quote can be divided into multiple consecutive years. With the new MDQ feature, you can have non-consecutive custom segments for custom Price Dimensions. To allow the user to set non-consecutive days on the Quote Line Editor, the admin will have to turn on the feature from SteelBrick’s general settings and setup a custom Price Dimension on the Product.
Quote Line Target Customer Amount
Goal Seek allows the user to set a target amount on the Quote based on the customer’s budget, and SteelBrick will allocate a proportional discount to all the Quote Line Items. In Winter ’16, SteelBrick introduced Target Customer Amount at the group level. Now in Spring ’16, the Goal Seek feature has been applied to the Quote Line. A user can now easily set a target amount without having to calculate the exact discount required to reach that value. An admin will have to add two new values to the Additional Discount Unit picklist field (Unit Override, or Total Override) which will determine how to apply the discount to the selected Quote Line.
Amend Contract from Opportunity
The Amend button is currently found on the Contract object which many sales reps do not have access to or it’s not a natural place for them to interact with Salesforce. In Spring ’16 the button can now be found on the Opportunity, with the Amendment functionality remaining the same. Although it’s a minor change, the process is now more efficient for the sales rep.
The Spring ’16 release includes great new features, improves existing features, and improves the user experience. You will find that most of these new features offer a solution to a use case which you may have encountered. The reason is that most of these features were requested by SteelBrick customers. Currently, there is no roadmap available for future releases, but you can always visit the Ideas board on the SteelBrick Community to see which Ideas have been marked for the roadmap.
