I wrote a post on how to setup a sales catalog in Sales Cloud last year. Browsing the sales catalog has made adding products to opportunities a lot easier. What I did not mention back then was that browsing the sales catalog also allows us to learn more about the products before picking them. It allows us to select the right product for the right reasons. This post is all about how to create such a enriched sales catalog.
Simple Product Definitions
Most often we use the simplified version of the product creation process to add products to the sales catalog.
After having added the products to the sales catalog, users can choose these products by browsing the sales catalog and adding them to their opportunities. But notice how the product names in the image below are actually links. When clicking on a product name, you end up in the product detail screen where you can see amongst others the image that uploaded when the product was defined in Sales Cloud as shown in the image above.
Enriched Sales Catalog
As you can see in the screenshot below, a lot of other product related information can be made available to users here, from more detailed product specifications, to included warranty, accessories, …
Here are some more examples of what types of information can be added to the sales catalog:
Similar product can be added to opportunities also instead of the product that was opened
Related services included with the product can be discovered
Included warranties with the product can be found
Additional up-sell potential through accessories can be discovered and added to the opportunity also.
This is off course all optional. If you do want to use this but you do not want all these tabs, you can hide them using Page Composer.
How to enrich the sales catalog
As you might have noticed, most of this extra product information cannot be specified when using the simplified product creation process as shown above. Once products have been created, some extra tasks need to be completed to add this additional information.
There are 3 different types of information to add:
- Rich-text formatted longer description
- Product specifications
- Related products that are included (maintenance and warranty) or that can be added to your opportunities also (similar products and accessories)
In order to add these you have to use the Product Hub that is embedded in Sales Cloud. This is a common shared component for some of the Oracle cloud application like Oracle ERP Cloud and Oracle SCM Cloud.
Choose ‘Product Information Management’ from the Sales Cloud navigator. From right sidetab search panel, search for the product you want to add details to.
Adding a longer description
Adding a long rich-text description is the easiest of the extra product details to add. On the overview page, you can add using a rich text editor you can edit the formatted description.
Adding product details and specifications
Adding details and specifications is a more elaborate process as you might want to add different types of product specifications to different types of products. You would not want add a height, width and depth to an insurance product 😉 .
Adding product details and specifications is done by added adding user-defined product attribute groups to products as described here. Eventually, on the second tab under specifications, you can find these extra specifications that are then are being displayed in the sales catalog. In the screenshot below, the dimension attributes and the weight attributes are the ones I defined for this test.
Adding related products
Adding related products is done through the ‘Relationships’ tab. Once you have defined the related products as actual products in Sales Cloud, you can choose the products as:
- Similar Products: Add a related product with a relation of type ‘Substitute’
- Service Products: Add a related product with a relation of type ‘Service’
- Included Warranty: Add a related product with a relation of type ‘Warranty’
- Accessories: Add a related product with a relation of type ‘Accessories’
That is all there is to it ! Have fun making your sales catalog look good !
