Posted by Michelle Knoll, Senior Consultant
Should you use Native Salesforce Approvals or SteelBrick Advanced Approvals with your SteelBrick implementation? When implementing SteelBrick, it is important to determine what possible approvals you will need on a quote. You can utilize either the Native Salesforce Approvals, or purchase SteelBrick’s Advanced Approvals.
Both Native and Advanced Approvals work in a similar way. There is a rule with one or many conditions that need to evaluate to true in order for the approval to be required.
We’ll review the functionality of both below, and the additional benefits you receive by using Advanced Approvals.
Native Salesforce Approvals
Advanced Approvals
Approval Chains
Approval chains allow you to create multiple independent approval flows that occur within the same approval process. This allows for multiple parallel approvals that have different approvals steps, conditions and approvers.
In the below example, the quote is submitted to finance and the sales manager on the first step, in two different approval chains. In one chain, once the sales manager approves it, the next step assigns it to the sales director for approval. In the other chain, it gets sent to finance for approval, then to legal. The whole quote does not get approved until all parties have approved the quote.
Dynamic Approvers
This allows the system to dynamically assign an approver to a rule based upon a specific set of rules or parameters.
An example of this would be a sales representative submitting a quote for a U.S. opportunity and the business rule requires that it be sent to a U.S. sales manager for approval. If they had submitted one in another country, it would need approval from the international sales manager instead.
Smart Approvals
When this feature is configured, if an approval is submitted, and subsequently denied by one of the approvers, resubmitting the quote will bypass any approvers who previously approved the quote. If different conditions are met upon resubmitting the approval, smart approvals do not work.
In the below example, legal denied the quote. If the conditions remain the same in the rest of the quote, and the quote is resubmitted, it will go directly back to legal for approval. It doesn’t need to go back to finance, sales manager or sales director because those parties already approved the quote.
Functionality you receive with both Native and Advanced Approvals
- Assign approval to a public group.
- Email alerts for Requesting Approval, Approval Received and Approval Rejected.
- Reply to any approval request email with some form of “approve” or “deny” and the system will update the approval accordingly.
- Apply a watermark to all quote templates when the quote has not been approved.