How To Make Salesforce Billing More Effective With Chargent

Salesforce is continually expanding its offering, allowing businesses to engage and serve their customers more effectively. In recent months, the Salesforce CPQ & Billing products have become rising stars among their suite of solutions. Today, many Chargent users are leveraging CPQ & Billing in addition to our software to deliver the most robust invoicing and payment options to their customers. 

If you’re unsure about how Salesforce CPQ & Billing differs from Chargent, there’s a simple answer; and in this post, we’ll cover that and much more. 

What is Salesforce CPQ & Billing?

CPQ is an acronym for “Configure, Price, Quote.” This flexible Salesforce add-on allows companies to provide accurate pricing for products or services across any configuration scenario. More specifically, Salesforce CPQ makes it easier for sales representatives to deliver quotes to customers while considering the pricing impact of optional features, discounts, multiple quantities, and more. 

According to Salesforce, CPQ is a “means for the entire company to streamline bulky sales processes into lean, productive systems.” In other words, with Salesforce CPQ, sales teams can create an efficient transactional process that is quick, reliable, and consistent across the organization. 

CPQ is available in four different package levels – CPQ, CPQ Plus, CPQ & Billing Growth, and CPQ & Billing Plus. Salesforce’s CPQ & Billing packages give clients access to all the core features of the tool, along with an integrated billing system. 

Is Chargent a Salesforce CPQ & Billing Competitor?

Clients often ask, “Since Chargent is a billing application, doesn’t that mean it competes with Salesforce Billing?” While both solutions provide billing solutions, they are not in competition with one another. 

On the contrary, Chargent and Salesforce CPQ & Billing are complementary products that, when used together, provide an all-encompassing invoicing, quoting, and automated billing system. 

As shown below, Chargent offers numerous features that enrich the Salesforce billing process – granting new freedoms and abilities that CPQ & Billing does not provide when used independently. 

When operating in conjunction with CPQ & Billing, Chargent makes payments more accessible, safer, and quicker. 

Unlike Salesforce CPQ, Chargent fully supports subscription and SaaS businesses, granting you the ability to automate recurring payments on a regular monthly basis throughout the entire customer lifecycle. For retailers, the solution provides a POS (point-of-sale) system that integrates seamlessly with its software. 

While CPQ & Billing is ideal for quoting and invoicing payment, Chargent modernizes payment automation and provides a hassle-free solution that can support any business model or sales process – no matter how complex. 

How Does Chargent Help Salesforce CPQ Customers?

If you’re already a Salesforce CPQ customer, Chargent can provide additional features to benefit your business and strengthen your sales, payment, and collection processes. 

One significant benefit of using Chargent is gaining access to over 30 payment integrations. Although Salesforce CPQ & Billing can integrate with popular gateways like Paypal’s Payflow Pro, Cybersource, and Authorize.net, Chargent supports over two dozen other portals, including Vantiv, Stripe, Barclay Card, and Braintree. 

Over the years, we’ve received many requests from implementers, customers, and eventually, the Salesforce Product Team – asking us to build a connector to our merchant partners. Clients with an existing payment gateway wanted to continue using the merchants that they were already familiar with.

In 2019, we announced our latest product, Chargent Gateways Connector for Salesforce Billing. Our team worked closely with the brilliant minds at Salesforce to ensure that we could offer the most useful tools with easy and quick integration. With this add-on, you can integrate any of Chargent’s 30+ supported payment gateways in five minutes or less. 

Additionally, Chargent empowers businesses to manage their recurring and subscription payments better, handling everything from payment requests to automated collections. These features allow CPQ users to collect money with less delay and fewer issues. With Chargent’s Automated Collections add-on, organizations can set up systems to automatically and proactively contact customers who have missed a payment, prompting them to update their payment details and resolve failed transactions. 

Combining Chargent and Salesforce Billing

Depending on your specific needs, there are three ways to add Chargent products to your Salesforce CPQ & Billing sales operation. 

The first approach is by adding the Chargent Gateway Connector for Salesforce Billing. With this solution, you can integrate with your preferred gateway while using all of the Salesforce Billing user interfaces that you use today. 

If your business requires additional features, consider Chargent Orders as a solution. Flexible and extendable, this product allows you to configure any process and enable payments on any object inside Salesforce. If you have call center employees that take payments and other employees that need to access the data in real-time, for example, Chargent Orders will empower your organization to manage payments across all channels easily. 

For organizations that accept in-person payments, Chargent Terminal is the optimal product. This solution enables your business to take payments in person – whether at a retail store or during an event. 

Chargent Connector and Orders are both solutions built for e-commerce or “card-not-present” situations, while Chargent Terminal is ideal for sales environments where a card is present. 

No matter how your business operates, Chargent is here to help you collect cash faster and gain more control over your payments. 

More Payments, Less Hassle

When it comes to transacting, payment should be painless and effortless. Chargent and Salesforce both offer products to create a dynamic but straightforward payment system – even if you have a complex business model. 

While CPQ & Billing and Chargent are extremely powerful on their own, combining the two solutions allows you to manage your entire payment process from invoicing to automated payment processing. 

Is Chargent the right solution for your business? It’s easy to find out – sign-up for a 30-day trial and experience the many benefits for yourself!