CPQ Specialist certification

I’ve been playing with CPQ a few years ago and this year attended awesome CPQ Fast Path training for partners. A few busy weeks and I finally found time to attend the certification and … passed it!

You might have heard, that this is one of the most demanding certifications to obtain, but I don’t really agree with this statement. I feel that Service Cloud or Pardot Consultant was harder, maybe not in terms of knowledge but trickinest, as there were some questions where you might disagree with the answers. CPQ cert is purely about knowledge and I feel is pretty black and white.

It took me a while to find the courage to do it and I went to the testing center as we got such recommendation. I did all the other certifications at home and I much prefer it, but here are some calculations for which is better to have a paper, which you aren’t allowed to at home. Well, I got one, but I must admit it was convenient to have the paper for some notes.

Reading materials

There are quite a few of them on the internet, Jan Vandevelde book referenced from everyone, but I found it a bit dry. I also liked the Yelena from SF9to5 blog and Santanu Boral visualised the object model and added links to Trailhead. If you like links to other resources Chris Gardner post might be useful.

But after all I liked the presentation from the Fast Path the best.

Check your vocabulary

Non native speakers might have problems with some questions (you know you can get extra 30 minutes?), in this exam I have to thing hard what „ramped up“ or „escalator opportunity“ might mean. I probably got it right, but it looks like these are some standard wordings in CPQ world, so it is good to understand them.

What you really need to know

Pricing and discounts make 39 % of the exam, so this is the priority. I would say discounts are easy, price waterfall as well, but you really should check price rules, including objects on which they can run. The same applies for product rules and if you know what all the settings in these two are for and what are the possible values there you are good to go.

Expect questions about hiding things on quote documents, twin fields and field sets. A bit about MDQ products. A few questions about configuration attributes.

And good luck. Don’t worry, this exam isn’t tricky, it just tests your knowledge.

And new version of this exam will be roll-out soon, the beta version is just available. Sadly once I passed the exam I wasn’t able to register for the beta to check the content, looks like the division between different areas is a bit more granular, but I’m not sure about the questions as the content looks about the same.

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