Smarter Product Selection in Salesforce with the GSP Product Manager
At a Glance:
Adding products to Salesforce opportunities or quotes is often slow and prone to errors, especially with large or complex product catalogs. The GSP Product Manager takes the hassle out of this process, giving sales teams a faster, more intuitive way to add individual products, bundles, and product groups directly within Salesforce.
The Product Manager works as an independent tool or alongside the GSP Volume Pricing and GSP Subscription Manager apps, making it a flexible and efficient alternative to traditional CPQ solutions. By simplifying product selection and providing real-time pricing visibility, the Product Manager enables sales reps to close deals faster and minimizes fulfillment errors. It's a faster, clearer, and more user-friendly experience for organizations struggling with Salesforce's standard product interface.
Adding products to opportunities in Salesforce can be time-consuming and error-prone, especially when dealing with an extensive product catalog. That’s why we built the Product Manager, which makes it quick and easy for sales teams to add standalone products, product bundles, and product groups to opportunities and quotes in Salesforce.
Whether used as a standalone module within Salesforce or combined with other GSP apps as an alternative to CPQ - including the GSP Volume Pricing and GSP Subscription Manager app - the Product Manager provides a comprehensive solution for salespeople.
It's especially valuable if you have a sizeable product range and find navigating the standard Salesforce interface for adding products particularly challenging. The Product Manager is also ideal if it is critical to enable salespeople to quickly select product bundles and product groups for opportunities.
The Limitations of Salesforce’s ‘Add Products’ Interface
If you’re using the standard Salesforce, you’ve probably run into at least one of these issues:
- Slow, frustrating product selection: Salespeople often waste valuable time scrolling through long, unstructured product lists and then struggle to add the right items for opportunities.
- Frequent fulfilment errors: Without proper guidance during product selection, reps can easily overlook essential items, leading to fulfilment problems and the risk of heavily discounted or even free products after the customer has approved the quote.
- Missed revenue opportunities: When product selection is clunky, opportunities to find additional products are often missed.
We built the Product Manager to solve these challenges.
Why Salesforce Users Struggle with Product Selection
At the root of all these issues is a common bottleneck: Salesforce’s standard Add Products interface.
It isn’t built for speed or scale. When salespeople work with an extensive product catalog, they’re instead forced to scroll through long lists that make it challenging or impossible to:
- Find what they need.
- Get an objective or complete view of the products that need adding to an opportunity.
- Add product bundles or product groups to opportunities, which isn’t possible with the standard interface.
This process slows everything down, frustrates your team, and leaves opportunities part-finished or incomplete.
In addition, manual workarounds are often needed as there’s no built-in way to add product bundles or product groups. This often means missing out on valuable product combinations altogether.
Here’s a quick video showing what that looks like in practice:
A Smarter Way to Add Products in Salesforce
The Product Manager replaces Salesforce’s default layout with a clear, organized tree structure that makes it easier for reps to find products that need to be added to an opportunity.
Instead of scrolling through endless lists, salespeople can browse by category. You can even have nested categories when there is a considerable number of products.
Salespeople can also use the search function to find products.
Clicking the ‘+’ icon adds the product to the opportunity. As products are added, the Product Manager displays their total running value. This feature is handy when reps work to a target price or specific customer budget.
In short, the Product Manager makes it significantly easier for salespeople to add products to opportunities or quotes than the standard layout in Salesforce. It’s faster, clearer, and far more flexible. Take a look for yourself in the video below!
Built-In Support for Product Bundles and Groups
Admins can set up product bundles and product groups in minutes – no CPQ needed.
Here’s the difference between product bundles and product groups:
- Product bundles: A bundle contains a selection of products you offer for a specified price. This price may be higher or lower than the sum of the cost of the products that make up the bundle.
- Product groups: The price of a product group is the sum of its constituent parts. Because the price of a product group is always the sum of the parts, you can allow salespeople more flexibility to adjust products at the opportunity level compared to bundles.
I've written a comprehensive guide explaining how to set up Product Bundles and Product Groups. You can read it here:
How to Create Product Bundles and Groups in Salesforce Without CPQ
If you’d rather see it in action, here’s a short video that shows how easy it is for salespeople to add product bundles and product groups to opportunities with the Product Manager:
Product Manager Customer Success Story
"The GSP Product Manager is the perfect bridge between a full-blown CPQ system and Salesforce's standard functionality!" says Heidi Whisman, Martech and Salesforce professional at W Energy.
Core Features of the Product Manager
Here’s a quick overview of the core features of the Product Manager:
- Tree structure product display: Products are grouped and presented by category in a tree structure. You can use the standard Product Family or any custom picklist(s) on the product object. As a result, it's quick, straightforward, and easy for salespeople to locate products.
- Intelligent search: The dynamic search feature enables salespeople to quickly find products based on a few keystrokes.
- Product Bundles: System administrators can create product bundles (fixed sets of products offered at a specific price) in Salesforce using the Product Manager.
- Product Groups: System administrators can create product groups (multiple products where the final price is the sum of the constituent components within the product group) in Salesforce using the Product Manager.
- Real-time pricing visibility: Prices automatically update as you add products to the opportunity. This feature helps salespeople hit a specific opportunity value or stay within target pricing.
- Compatibility with the GSP Volume Pricing app: The Product Manager works with the GSP Volume Pricing app making it easy to create volume-based bands and tiers for products and choose whether this pricing applies to standalone products or within groups.
- Compatibility with the GSP Subscription Manager app: The Product Manager also works with the GSP Subscription Manager, providing an end-to-end solution for managing renewal and evergreen products in Salesforce.
Commonly Asked Questions
Explore your Options for Smarter Product Selection
Here are three simple steps you can take today to address your product selection challenges:
1. Contact us for a Product Manager walkthrough: Want to see it in action? Use the contact form below to get in touch with any questions or arrange a walkthrough of the app.
2. Arrange a proof-of-concept: Want to give the Product Manager a spin? Complete the contact form below to get in touch, and we’ll set you up with a no-cost sandbox environment to explore hassle-free.
3. Explore CPQ Alternatives: If you’re looking to avoid the costs and risks associated with CPQ, the blog post below is a great starting point. The blog explains how GSP apps provide the same benefits without the complexities: The Low-Risk Alternative to CPQ in Salesforce and Revenue Cloud
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You can download the entire “Your Sales Forecast Is Probably Wrong” eBook for free by completing the form below!
Interested in the Product Manager?