How to Automate Salesforce CPQ Testing?
No matter what industry you belong to, achieving your sales targets would invariably be a top business priority. But wait, what? How does this relate to Salesforce CPQ testing tool?
Many organizations end up with below-par sales figures, because of the over-reliance on siloed tools, on-premises systems, and rigid processes. To overcome this challenge, it is important to embrace a tool like Salesforce CPQ. This can open doors to accurate pricing, necessary customizations, and added discounts. All such aspects allow sales reps to quote prices and close deals quickly.
What is Salesforce CPQ?
Salesforce CPQ is one of the best sales optimization platforms available in the market today. It empowers sales teams with the features and capabilities they need to speed up the sales process.
By generating quick and accurate price quotes for different orders and integrating seamlessly with essential enterprise systems, CPQ Salesforce has the power to impact business processes as a whole. This is regardless of whether those processes are directly or indirectly related to sales.
Because the platform lives in the cloud, different teams can access it easily on the go, on any device. So now you can work on it no matter where you are. Offering a direct link with the in-house CRM and ERP systems, Salesforce CPQ aids in making timely and impactful sales decisions. It improves productivity and efficiency and also reduces wasted time.
For making the most of the Salesforce CPQ tool means you have to constantly test it to ensure it aligns with the needs of your business while also meeting necessary quality and compliance requirements.
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What are the benefits of Salesforce CPQ?
Implementing Salesforce CPQ is a great way to quickly streamline and standardize the sales process and meet customer needs.
According to a study conducted by Salesforce, CPQ enables 10x faster quote generation and 2x faster quote to cash. It, thereby, brings down the approval time by a whopping 95%!
That said, here are the top benefits of using Salesforce CPQ:
- It enables better cross-departmental collaboration between sales teams, SMEs, and customer service agents.
- It allows accurate and timely generation of sales quotes that accelerate the sales cycle and also improve customer satisfaction.
- Salesforce CPQ reduces the margin of error and enables quicker approvals using automated workflows.
- With Salesforce CPQ, organizations and stakeholders can make quicker decisions using proven and measurable data.
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Why is Salesforce CPQ testing necessary?
Although Salesforce CPQ speeds up the sales process, insufficient platform testing can act as a double-edged sword. Because CPQ is highly customizable, many organizations end up over-customizing the platform, leading to unfavorable outcomes.
Therefore, the Salesforce CPQ test is vital to:
- Ensure the urgency to generate a quote doesn’t affect its accuracy
- Avoid misrepresentation of pricing models
- Make sure companies that offer service bundles have accounted for all necessary data
- Streamline the processes for sales teams and not make them more difficult
- Enable and ensure proper integration of the CPQ platform with other business systems in the IT ecosystem
- Ensure that the data that CPQ uses across customer information or price calculation is updated, relevant, and reliable
How to automate Salesforce CPQ testing?
Salesforce constantly launches new CPQ versions and features. Therefore automating the testing process is a far better way of ensuring the platform pays the right dividends.
Test automation can verify if your Salesforce CPQ platform operates seamlessly with other applications within your IT ecosystem. It can also aid in generating predictable and repeatable assessments.
Steps to automate Salesforce CPQ testing:
- Instead of running full integration tests that are easy to conceptualize but hard to run, test your CPQ platform at different layers – based on your requirement. For instance, if you just want to test how users will interact with the platform, automate only UI tests instead of creating comprehensive automated tests.
- Write automated tests using the Salesforce CPQ API. Using this, you can test quote calculation functionality, quote calculator plugins, etc. You can also test other applications that connect to the platform via APIs and process information related to quotes.
- Limit assertions per test to a minimum to ensure that each test suite is only being used to evaluate the performance or quality of a particular function. This will help cut down on overall testing costs and will limit the time needed to set up or run different automated tests.
- Run automated tests not just on CPQ’s inherent functionalities, but also on the different customizations. Since almost every organization ends up tailoring the platform to suit unique business requirements, your testing team would need to look beyond native functionalities and automate tests across unique configurations and customizations.
- Make sure to curate Apex tests before and after every upgrade. It is necessary to validate different functionalities and flows across contracting, ordering, amendment, and renewal. The Apex framework will allow you to write different unit tests, so you can run them effectively, check results, and ensure maximum code coverage.
Closing thoughts:
The Salesforce CPQ platform equips sales teams with all the capabilities to close deals faster and meet customer demands with speed and accuracy. However, given the fact that organizations tend to over-customize the platform to fit specific business scenarios, testing the platform is necessary.
To successfully automate Salesforce CPQ testing, make sure to test at different layers, limit assertions, and verify every customization. Leverage CPQ API tests, Selenium framework, and Apex tests to enhance code coverage. Better still, opt for a no-code test automation platform like ACCELQ to enable quick and end-to-end Salesforce process validations and testing.
The right approach to automated testing is the only way to have your Salesforce platform operate efficiently within the business, enable clear cross-departmental communication, and ensure seamless and timely data transfer.
GEOSLEY ANDRADES
Geosley is a Test Automation Evangelist and Community builder at ACCELQ. Being passionate about continuous learning, Geosley helps ACCELQ with innovative solutions to transform test automation to be simpler, more reliable, and sustainable for the real world.
