Salesforce CPQ is entering an “End of Sale” Phase… What’s next?
What is happening to Salesforce CPQ?
Salesforce has confirmed that its product Salesforce CPQ has entered an “End of Sale” phase. It’s clear that Salesforce’s focus has shifted to its new Revenue Cloud as the strategic future of its CPQ and billing offerings, effectively positioning it as the successor to the legacy Salesforce CPQ product. If your company is currently using Salesforce CPQ, you might ask yourself what that means and how to be prepared.
To clarify, “end of sale” (EOS) is not the same as “end of life” (EOL). Although Salesforce won’t sell the legacy CPQ (aka Steelbrick) anymore, current customers are not being forced to stop using it. However, no new features will be added, and while Salesforce has not announced any sunset date or retirement plans, strong signals indicate that eventually the CPQ product may be retired.
What is the new Salesforce Revenue Cloud (RCA)?
The new Salesforce Revenue Cloud offering manages the entire quote-to-cash process, including product catalog, quote, order, fulfillment, contract, and billing. It is mainly divided into two areas: RCA (Revenue Cloud Advanced) and RCB (Revenue Cloud Billing). In this post, we will focus more on RCA, some concepts apply to the entire suite (stay tuned for future posts on RCB).
If you had heard the term Salesforce RLM last year, Salesforce was using the term RLM (Revenue Lifecycle Management) for this new ‘in core’ offering, but changed the name to ‘Revenue Cloud Advanced’ (RCA) around Dreamforce in the fall of 2024.
Revenue Cloud is built natively on Salesforce’s core platform in standard objects. Unlike CPQ, it is not a managed package (the Salesforce CPQ product is a managed package that was acquired from Steelbrick in 2015).
The new Revenue Cloud objects are standard (aka ‘in core’) objects, which allows for leveraging Salesforce’s AI capabilities, latest architecture, scalability, and native seamless UI. Also, it was designed to manage large volumes, complex pricing models that can vary by different factors, and it was created with an API-first approach, facilitating integrations. This last one is critical in omni-channel environments to ensure consistency.
Overview diagram of the new Salesforce Revenue Cloud – Source: Salesforce
Why should I consider RCA?
If you’re a Salesforce CPQ customer, and your organization is using or planning to use AI/Agentforce capabilities, Revenue Cloud fits nicely and is the current focus for Salesforce investment.
But this alone is not enough. Other factors to consider include:
- Technical debt: Current CPQ implementations facing performance issues due to extensive automation or large use of pricing rules can benefit from RCA. RCA has been built to manage large transactions and a complex pricing model.
- Need to handle multiple pricing models: Salesforce CPQ was limited in the way that the pricing waterfall can be configured. RCA introduces the use of Pricing Procedures, allowing for the handling of different pricing logic based on product line, geography, or virtually any other relevant attribute.
- Potential Time Constraints: Although some objects overlap between CPQ and RCA (think products and price books), most of the elements are different and require a thorough analysis (e.g. product options might become attributes in a bundle, or price rules will end up in a pricing procedure).
- Also, moving to RCA opens up the possibility to revisit outdated processes, customizations, or unnecessary automations, leveraging out-of-the-box and best practices as much as possible. In essence, this means that the CPQ to RCA migration is a full project and not a simple mapping exercise. Organizations waiting until the CPQ end of life might find themselves in an unnecessary time constraint.
- Complex order fulfillment process: RCA allows for decomposing sold products into fulfillment products and offers a workspace to orchestrate the fulfillment process using what’s called the Salesforce Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator (DRO). This provides full transparency and integrates nicely with downstream processes. Organizations with heavy fulfillment processes, or with multiple actors/dependencies involved, will highly benefit from this functionality.
- Subscription models with a high volume of ARCs (amendments, renewals, cancellations): Organizations facing challenges in the process of managing amendments, renewals, and cancellations can immediately benefit from RCA’s redesigned asset data model by automating processes, reducing manual work, and potential errors in handling subscription changes.
- Rev Ops is being revisited: Revenue Cloud is not just about CPQ. Revenue Cloud Billing brings an end-to-end solution to the quote-to-cash process by facilitating invoice generation, including milestone billing and usage-based products. It can be used as a sub-ledger, integrating nicely into the org’s GL. If your organization is evaluating billing solutions or streamlining the quote-to-cash process and/or consolidating quoting, order mgmt & billing platforms, Revenue Cloud is worth evaluating.
How can CLD help?
Any decision about a strategic IT investment around how companies sell is going to be made in a deliberate way. The first step to determine whether any move from CPQ to RCA has to start from the standpoint of whether RCA can, at a minimum, do what you do today, identifying any gaps that may exist between what you have and what you’d get with RCA.
At CLD, we developed a comprehensive CPQ to RCA pre-migration assessment process that evaluates your current CPQ implementation, objects, fields, approvals, automations, and integrations to help your organization get ahead and start evaluating RCA’s feasibility in your particular environment.
Even if an RCA migration is not imminent for you, we at CLD think that every organization should start getting ready. Interesting in learning more about our RCA pre-migration assessment, or a quick convo about what CPQ end of sale means for your organization, let’s chat.
