A few years back, Salesforce unveiled Salesforce Community Cloud, its solution for customers to easily construct their own online portals and communities. Since the Community Cloud was released, thousands of Salesforce customers have built various solutions to handle customer and partner relations faster than ever before.

Then, in 2016, Salesforce upped the ante again with the release of Lightning Bolt—the most convenient and cost-effective community configuration ever. Lightning Bolt allows Salesforce designers and architects to build customizable configurations and templates, making it easier to launch a next-gen portal or community site quickly. Many companies such as Deloitte and Accenture have developed their own Bolt solutions to augment various Salesforce.com components to better mesh with partner portals and communities. And now, Simplus has stepped into the Lightning Bolt ring with the launch of the first-ever Manufacturing CPQ Bolt!

Here at Simplus, we are one of the leading experts in the world of Configure, Price, Quote. We are also proud of our experience with implementing, advising, and managing CPQ environments for numerous businesses in the manufacturing industry. As such, we decided to build our own framework to accelerate time-to-value for our manufacturing partners. So, what can the Simplus Manufacturing Bolt do to help you jumpstart your journey to a better community portal?

The Manufacturing Bolt brings CPQ to Community Cloud

Anyone in the manufacturing world knows that it is perhaps just as complex to sell your products as it is to make them. There are likely endless combinations and configurations of your offerings, and facilitating all of this through a community or partner portal only complicates the process further. This is a pain point that Simplus recognizes and aims to relieve with our Manufacturing Bolt.

The Simplus Manufacturing Bolt is a branded, easy-to-use portal for manufacturing channel partners. The solution simplifies the process of exposing CPQ to the channel to allow for easy self-service transactions across distributors, resellers and, channel partners. Through providing more templatized and pre-built accelerators and packages to integrate CPQ into your partner portals.

Manufacturing Bolt key features

Our Bolt solution has all of the capabilities and functionality that you have come to know from Salesforce CPQ and Community Cloud, now all rolled into one. This means you are cutting out the middleman and are less reliant on the back-and-forth between sellers and partners.

Custom Lightning components: Just like in Salesforce CPQ, channel partners will have access to all of the Lightning components that are pertinent to your sales process. This includes things such as special offers, opportunities, quotes, orders, and cases, all within your portal.

Simplified quote process: You and your partners can now easily create quotes within the partner portal utilizing a simple quoting interface. You can then see that the quote is automatically imported into your CPQ instance.

Metrics and reports: Gaining insight into partner’s sales actions in your portal or community are integral in driving future business strategy. With the Simplus’ Manufacturing Bolt, you are able to easily see metrics such as partner sales, leads by status, and open pipeline.

What does this mean for your manufacturing sales?

The Simplus Manufacturing Bolt is the ultimate solution for out-of-the-box integration between your Salesforce CPQ and Community Cloud instances. It’s simple for your partners to use, cost- and time-effective to implement, and is your quickest avenue to increased ROI for your community and partner portal investment.

Automate order to opportunity process: Cut out the steps that it takes to bring an order from your portal through the opportunity and fulfillment phases.

Quotes in minutes vs. weeks: Reduce platform swivel for yourself and partners and enable more self-service capabilities for users.

Greater revenue and forecasting ability: You can view and analyze key portal metrics all in one place to drive more informed business decisions.

Are you ready to see what our new Manufacturing Bolt can do for your sales and partner portal processes? Contact us to learn more!