Product Management
Product Management is a collection of records in Salesforce that enable associating products/services to the Opportunity lifecycle.
Aspects of Product Management
Products
Products are the building blocks for which an Organization can build out their offerings for their customers. You can create products in varying currencies, families, types, sku’s etc. to fully capture your product offerings and associate them to opportunities in Salesforce.
PriceBooks
Salesforce allows the build out of PriceBooks which are collections of Products that can then be associated against Opportunities and Sellers. Utilizing PriceBooks ensures the correct Products are being sold to the appropriate customer groups.
PriceBookEntries
PriceBookEntries are the junction of Products and PriceBooks, allowing companies to associate the same Product to multiple PriceBooks and reducing the need for duplicative data entry.
How to Utilize Products in Salesforce
To begin defining your Product offering, you must first create (manually or through import) your Product records. Salesforce offers a variety of fields to help classify products and define groupings, but does allow for custom field creation on the object as needed.
When considering importing products, admins and management should fully understand the architecture of Product Management in Salesforce, as they have the opportunity to simplify their offering structure upon creation. If utilizing multiple currencies, you can define a base currency here and then expand upon it as you begin to associate the Product with other PriceBooks.
PriceBooks should also be created as needed to further enable Product filtering. Salesforce provides a Standard PriceBook to which all products must be added. If you have no need for custom PriceBooks, utilizing the Standard is perfectly acceptable.
For companies that have varying offerings across regions, states, countries etc., you can further define PriceBooks to only allow sellers to choose from applicable offerings for their Opportunities.
PriceBookEntries can then be created to associate Products to the applicable PriceBooks. Because PriceBookEntries are “junction object” records, meaning you associate the Product to the PriceBook in the record itself, you have the ability to associate one product to multiple PriceBooks, reducing the need for duplicative Product creation.
PriceBookEntries are what appear in the Opportunity Line Item selection screen when sellers are associating Products to their Opportunity. PriceBookEntries allow you to define pricing and discounting at the base level and further refine upon it at the Opportunity level.
Who is Impacted?
Admins
Admins are responsible for their Orgs Product structure and should use all features to help alleviate duplication and complication in Product offerings.
Sellers
People responsible for generating Opportunities, be it sellers or service agents who can expand a customer product allocation, should utilize the Product structure to appropriately define the products their customers are purchasing.
Management
Management should utilize the offerings of Product Management in Salesforce to consolidate products where necessary and remove complications in Product listings and pricing.