You may have some products that should only be quoted or sold to a subset of your accounts, so to avoid having users adding them to quotes to be sent to customers and prospects would be a good thing.

One way of accomplishing this would be with multiple price books. You could have one for distributors, one for partners, and a third for customers. But managing multiple pricebooks, especially if you’re already managing multi-currency, is an admin headache that’s best avoided if possible.

Let’s say we have customers, distributors and partners, and some products we sell only to partners, some only to distributors and partners, and then then some we sell to all three.

Custom Actions & CPQ’s Search Filter

The buttons we see within quote lines aren’t your everyday Salesforce button. Each is actually a custom action record, and like most records easily accessible from the object’s tab.

We’re going to want to find the one for Add Products. and then create a new Search Filter which we can do from the related lists on the action.

So the key things here:

1. Target Object and Target Field are going to point to the field on product you want to filter by.
2. This is value of the filter, so I have a formula field on quotes that simply looks to the related account’s type field.
3. Finally, we’re going to hide this filter so our end users can’t change it.
   So here’s what we see when we select Add products for a distributor.