Salesforce.com is great for managing your pipeline, but sometimes you need a little help to get the customer a quote. One of the challenges is volume discounts (see customer requests here and here). To mimic volume discount functionality in salesforce.com, many companies end up creating multiple copies of products with different list prices. For example:
- Widget_0_thru_9: $100
- Widget_10_thru_49: $90
- Widget_50_thru_99: $80
- Widget_100_plus: $70
Of course, this is a bit cumbersome for users, administrators, and customers.
Here’s a solution. Using Mimiran, you can maintain volume discounts, so you only need one product record in salesforce.com. When you edit your salesforce.com opportunity, you call out to Mimiran to select the products, which are sync’d automatically from SFDC. As a bonus, the Mimiran product picker saves you time, too, with as-you-type-search, and the ability to add bundles of multiple products at a time. Click save and the line item (or Opportunity Product, in SFDC lingo) data is sync’d back to salesforce, along with the appropriate pricing and discounting data.
There are other apps that provide volume discounting functionality, but as far as I know, this is the simplest and most cost-effective. Setup on a standard instance should take less than a day. (If you’ve customized things, naturally it’s going to depend.)
To find out more, take the Tour, or check out the listing on the AppExchange.