According to Salesforce, the CPQ 211 course is for:  “1) Administrators who will have experience implementing Salesforce CPQ solutions in a customer-facing role, 2) Solution Architects, Implementation Consultants, Developers seeking to understand full capabilities in order to formulate technical solutions within Salesforce CPQ. This course will help one prepare for the Salesforce CPQ Specialist Certification. “

CPQ Practice Questions are now available!

This course is conducted in person over a 4-day period, each day lasting 8 hours. Each day there were a couple breaks throughout the day, an hour for lunch, and breakfast is provided in the morning.

The topics covered throughout the 4 days included:

• Products, Options, Features, Product Rules, Error constraints
• Package Settings
• Quote Line Editor
• Option Constraints
• Price Rules, Pricing Waterfall, Discount Schedules, MDQ
• Contracts, Renewal Opps, and Amendments
• Quotes, Quote terms, Multi-currency, and Localization

The learning was done through both a provided printed exercise book and a set of slides that are received at the end of the 4 days. Throughout the week there were a couple of opportunities provided to work in small groups on short exercises. About 90-95% of the class time is spent going through the exercises.

On a side note, I was surprised to learn that SteelBrick CPQ is not currently considered to be integrated with Salesforce and it is unknown right now when a full integration will happen. When it does, it will no longer be an installed/managed package. Due to the lack of integration, CPQ has some very clunky and rather manual kinks about it that admin, developers, and consultants alike should watch out for. An example would be the need to create a custom field and then copy the API name into another SBQQ field.

My 2 cents

Despite the course description, I felt that the class failed to meet its own set expectations. Questions or requests to discuss possible implementations or how things worked from a high level were turned down as being outside the scope of the class.  On the last day of the course, however, there was some improvement made, in which the teacher noted which objects relate to which during a particular topic.

I think that there are some items that are missing from this course that would significantly make it better.

First, I would have loved if this class was offered online similar to the Admin 211 to save those of us who don’t mind online learning from dealing with a commute.

Second, I feel that if high-level conceptual descriptions of the objects and how they were connected to each other were mentioned before diving right into creating a bunch of fields this would have helped provide some much-needed glue.

Third, it would have been great to have been provided with some real business use cases of when to use something and why. It was quite difficult to understand when it would be appropriate or in fact inappropriate to use a specific type of field or rule.

Lastly, I felt as though too much time was spent on unnecessary clicking. For example, we had to enter over 30 actual records manually instead of having an excel file to just import them.

Overall, I think that this course, in its given state, can only be utilized to its full potential by someone who is only looking for some basic step-by-step of how to create certain elements (like a price rule) without the why. I do, however, hope and expect in the future that this will be improved as Salesforce and Steelbrick become more integrated.

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