In fast-paced sales organizations, managing complex pricing and packaging rules often requires intricate spreadsheets that account for contract duration, customer segments, and other variables. With PandaDoc CPQ, you can automate and streamline this process using our guide - the New Business Workflow, designed specifically to replace those manual calculations.
This workflow empowers sales representatives by automatically adding products, applying tailored discounts, and managing subscriptions — all while ensuring consistency across deals.
Workflow objectives
The workflow aims to automate product selection, pricing, and discounts based on key inputs such as contract terms, customer segmentation, and payment preferences.
End user: Sales representatives or account executives dealing with first-time customers.
Key workflow features:
Automates product selection and pricing rules, replicating what’s typically done manually in Excel.
Applies automatic discounts based on deal conditions, such as prepaid payments or multi-year subscriptions.
Ensures accuracy by limiting combined discounts to a maximum of 20%.
Simplifies product catalog setup with clearly defined subscription models and payment options.
How the workflow functions
The sales representative fills out a form capturing key details, such as:
Product plan: Choose from predefined subscription models (e.g., Essential, Business, Pro).
Contract duration: Specify the length of the customer agreement.
Subscription term: Define whether payments are monthly, quarterly, or annually.
Payment type: Choose upfront (prepaid) or recurring (postpaid).
Add-ons: Select additional services or features based on customer needs.
Result:
The system automatically populates the quote with the appropriate products and adjusts pricing, payment schedules, and discounts accordingly. For instance, a multi-year prepaid subscription would trigger an automatic discount, but discounts are capped to ensure they never exceed 20%.
Catalog setup
First, create separate catalog items for each subscription model to accommodate different payment terms. If you have three subscription plans (Essential, Business, and Pro) and three billing cycles (monthly, quarterly, and annually), set up the following nine products:
Essential Monthly
Essential Quarterly
Essential Annually
Business Monthly
Business Quarterly
Business Annually
Pro Monthly
Pro Quarterly
Pro Annually
Content Library items
The next step is to create content library items containing pages with a description of each Plan (Essential, Pro, Business) and a description of add-ons you may need to include (API, Cloud Storage, Pro service, Business service, etc.). These content library items will be used in the conditional rules of your template.
Setting up your template
In your template, besides the main content, you will need to add and set up:
A Quote builder block
Two conditional Smart content blocks
How to set up conditional smart content block
Create [plan] and [add-on] variables that will be auto-populated with a corresponding plan and add-on data field that you’ll create later when setting up quote step in your workflow.
To create a plan variable go to the Variables section and select +Add custom variable to create a new variable. Enter the desired name - plan - and select Add variable. Do the same for [add-on] variable.
Add a Smart content block for the plan details. This block will be based on [plan] variable and will display the relevant content library item about the plan when selected by sales reps in the workflow form. Don’t forget to hit the Save rule once done.
You can learn more about conditional smart content here.
Do the same for the Add-on details smart content block based on [add-on] variable.
Workflow
Once your template is set up, you can move to the Workflows tab in the main left navigation and create a New Business Workflow.
The Workflow includes four steps:
Pull data from integration
Create form data
Create a quote
Generate a document
Form
In the form step, set up the following questions:
Select product plan (radio button type of question - single choice)
Subscription type - single choice
Additional services - checkboxes, it’s possible to select several items or none of them
Subscription duration - number
Quote
Set up the following quote data fields, corresponding to the form questions:
plan
type
services
Duration
Configure rules to:
Add products. Create nine rules for each product variant (e.g., Essential Monthly, Business Quarterly).
Add Services. Create rules for each add-on selected.
Set the duration for the added products
Set discounts. Set rules for three discount types (one for upfront payments, two for different contract terms).
Document
In the document step:
Map Contacts from HubSpot to document roles,
Map the Quote from the quote step to its placeholder in the document,
Map Organization Data (name, address) from the integration step into designated document fields.
Finally, map any variables used for Smart Content to ensure all conditional content rules are correctly applied in the document.