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Writer's pictureAnuj Vaishampayan

Revenue Lifecycle Management: Part 7 - Summary & Closing Thoughts


Revenue Lifecycle Management (RLM) is the latest and greatest Configure Price Quote (CPQ) solution from Salesforce. In this blog post series, we will deep dive into RLM and compare features to the capabilities of Industries CPQ and Industries OM.


Start with our earlier posts before jumping into this post


Summary & Closing Thoughts

 


Revenue Lifecycle Management (RLM) from Salesforce offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed to streamline and optimize the entire revenue process, from product configuration and pricing to order fulfilment. By leveraging the robust Salesforce platform, RLM ensures unparalleled flexibility, performance, and scalability, making it a powerful solution for businesses across various industries.


Key Features of RLM


  • Product Catalog Management: Efficiently organize and manage products, attributes, and catalogs, simplifying the complexity of product offerings.

  • Salesforce Pricing: Create customized pricing strategies with precision, leveraging predefined objects, lookup tables, and pricing recipes for a seamless pricing experience.

  • Product Configurator: Present complex product offerings in an intuitive manner, facilitating real-time pricing updates, configuration validation, and efficient customization of product attributes.

  • Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator (DRO): Decompose and orchestrate intricate order processes with ease, ensuring tailored fulfillment plans and efficient automation.

  • Salesforce Contracts: Manage the end-to-end lifecycle of contracts with a comprehensive solution that allows customers to streamline the creation and management of all types of contracts, including transactional agreements tied to sales processes and standalone contracts like non-disclosure agreements or partner agreements, with document generation and e-signature.


The Core Platform Advantage


One of the most significant advantages of RLM is its integration into the core Salesforce platform. This integration offers:

  • Extensibility: The ability to add custom fields, context mapping, UI templates, and configuration rules to meet diverse business needs.

  • Performance: A high-performance and scalable engine that supports complex configurations and large volumes of data.

  • Unified Experience: A cohesive and consistent user experience across various Salesforce tools and applications.


Industry Agnostic Solution


RLM’s industry-agnostic nature allows Salesforce to serve multiple industries with the same product, providing:

  • Versatility: The capability to adapt to different industry requirements without the need for extensive customization.

  • Consistency: Uniformity in managing revenue processes across various sectors, from telecommunications to retail, manufacturing, and beyond.


A Look Back


Product Catalog Management (PCM) & Salesforce Pricing – RLM’s EPC



Similar to Industries CPQ’s Enterprise Product Catalog (EPC), Product Catalog Management (PCM) brings back a lot of familiar concepts such as simple and bundled products, attributes, qualification rules, and more, though is missing some industry-specific features such as Product Spec. Salesforce Pricing has some parallels to EPC, but brings a lot more declarative capabilities, reducing the need to build complex pricing logic with CPQ Hooks and custom Pricing Plan code.



Product Configurator and Quote and Order Capture & Asset Lifecycle – RLM’s CPQ



The Product Configurator’s frontend diverges a bit away from Industries CPQ’s LWC Cart which leveraged OmniStudio FlexCards and Custom LWCs, and rather moves to a Flow and Custom LWC, and provides a snappier, cleaner user experience and interface. The Configuration Rules engine is very similar to EPC’s advanced rules, though the administration experience is revamped. MACDs are now ARC (Amend, Renew, Cancel), but the approach is quite similar.


Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator (DRO) – RLM’s OM



Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator takes significant inspiration from Industries OM, with many of the same features around Decomposition and Orchestration, but with the data model moved into core Standard objects, and with a cleaned up UI/UX.


Salesforce Contracts – RLM’s CLM



Salesforce Contracts draws many parallels with Vlocity CLM, with many of the same features around Contract Lifecycle Management and Document Generation, with a refreshed UI/UX, and many enhancements across the board and leveraging the power of AI.


What Does the Future Hold?


Revenue Lifecycle Management brings a lot of the great features and capabilities over from Industries CPQ and Industries OM, cleans them up, makes them more performant with the move deeper into the core platform, and brings a lot of net-new capabilities to the table. We see a lot of excitement and investment in the product, and are excited to see what the next few releases and years bring for RLM.


What does RLM mean for Industries CPQ/OM (formerly Vlocity) Professionals?



At a high level, we see significant overlap with Industries CPQ and OM so those coming from those formerly Vlocity products will have a small ramp up. The biggest differences are the new capabilities in Salesforce Pricing, data models moving into the core Standard data model, and the look-and-feel, especially with the Configurator. Overall, the same general concepts and approaches apply across both sets of products.


What does RLM mean for Salesforce CPQ (formerly Steelbrick) Professionals?



Compared to Industries CPQ, Salesforce CPQ experts will have a much bigger ramp up. Ultimately, both RLM and Salesforce CPQ are CPQ products, so there are a lot of shared concepts, but the approaches and features differ in some respects. For example, in Salesforce CPQ, customers would often do pricing and rule customizations in the Quote Calculator Plugin (QCP), which has no equivalent in RLM, and instead RLM provides more declarative capabilities in the rules and pricing engines. Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator will be a net-new module for you with no equivalent on the Salesforce CPQ side, though if you have had exposure to Salesforce Order Management, you will have a leg up.


Although there will be a bigger ramp up for formerly Steelbrick professionals, don’t fret as Salesforce and the whole ecosystem (including us!) are producing a lot of enablement content to help you get up to speed.


How can I get hands-on with Revenue Lifecycle Management?


If you are a Salesforce Partner or Salesforce employee, on Partner Learning Camp you can create an Simple Demo Org (SDO) which has RLM available, but mostly is not configured, so you will need to go through the Salesforce Help documentation to create products and attributes, enable and configure Salesforce Pricing, and so on.


Optionally, you can use the Trialforce ID to spin up an org that has a lot of the setup already completed - see the RLM Partner Pocket Guide on Partner Community.


If you are not a partner or employee, unfortunately as of writing this article, we are not aware of any options for you to get hands on.


Conclusion


Revenue Lifecycle Management is the most exciting thing to happen to the world of CPQ in the Salesforce ecosystem since the acquisition of Vlocity in 2020. We hope you found this series insightful and look forward to bringing further thought leadership to the Salesforce ecosystem around Revenue Lifecycle Management.


But there’s one more thing…


Stay tuned for one last article with a special surprise in store.

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