Hello everyone, today we're going to take a look at what's next for CPQ on the Salesforce platform through revenue lifecycle management. So first we'll look at what is revenue lifecycle management, then we're going to take a look at the different pillars that make up revenue lifecycle management, and we're going to go through an eye-level demo for every one of those. All right, what is revenue lifecycle management? According to Salesforce, a composable revenue management platform for unified product to cash, allowing for omni-channel buying and selling. What does that mean for us?
well it's on platform so it's going to allow us to take advantage of the platform features automations eventually ai all of that stuff because it's entirely on platform we're going to be able to leverage then it's api first so that should mean easier automation easier integration through your existing solutions e-commerce apps whatever it is you're going to be able to use those apis to leverage that solution even off platform And it gives you and your team a unified tool for product to cash, again, on platform. So let's look at the different pillars that make up revenue lifecycle management. So you have the composable product catalog and pricing, which gives you a centralized model for all your products and your pricing methods.
So again, you're going to manage all of that on the platform, and then you can use the different APIs that they offer to leverage that from any external platform and also, obviously, on platform. transaction management in CPQ. So it now offers a new line editor, a new transaction line editor that you can leverage for your internal users to build quotes, build orders, and from there, that's going to lead to the asset creation.
There's also a new contract lifecycle management tool that comes along with this. The tool will also be available for different products that you can buy, but it comes included with revenue lifecycle management. So you can do your sales CLM entirely on platform with that new tool that they're offering. Then asset and subscription management. So as you create quotes and orders, either on-platform or off-platform, you're also going to be able to create your assets from that and track their lifecycle and then track their amendments, renewals, cancellation on there from all the new features.
And again, it's API-first, so you can do all of those operations off-platform as well by calling the different APIs. And what's coming up in the future for revenue lifecycle management? So in the next couple of releases, we should see...
dynamic revenue orchestration coming up that should be summer 24 and eventually no dates yet but a new billing solution should come along with this for the invoicing portion that's coming on revenue lifecycle management. All right so let's first look at product catalog management. What are the key features for product catalog management?
So a new concept that you didn't have the traditional Salesforce CPQ, if that's what you're used to, product catalogs. So you're going to be able to organize and manage all your products and the structure that catalogs offer along with categories. We're going to take a look at what that looks like in Salesforce. And then you can ensure that only the people that should be seeing products that belong to a certain catalog when they should, depending on how you qualify those different products and catalogs.
You're going to be able to create product attributes. that you're going to assign for those that know Salesforce CPQ that would be similar to configuration attribute that you're used to. So you're going to be able to define the characteristics of your products and then those are going to be able to have an impact on pricing and everything downstream as well. Product classifications are going to be essentially templates that you can create for your products. So if you create a product classification, then you're going to be able to reuse that to create products and pull along all the configuration that comes on that template product.
so you can already obviously create simple products through product catalog management bundle product there's a new interface where you can build your product structure it offers rules management where you can have qualification rules and qualification procedures to qualify which products should show up depending on where you're selling them right is it e-commerce is it your app is it on platform depending on account characteristics you're going to be able to define if a product is qualified to be sold to a given customer And then product lifecycle management, well, you're going to be able to manage your products across all sales channels, if they're available or not on the different sales channels. All right, so what does that look like in Salesforce? Let's jump over to Salesforce and have a look.
All right, let's first look at a product in revenue lifecycle management, right? So this is your standard product object, the one you're used to. So everything that you see on there is the same object that you've been working with before if you've worked on Salesforce. Now, you can have a couple different things, a couple new fields that you're going to see on there. Does it create assets?
Yes, no. is it a bundle or not in this case it is a bundle can it be configured this one again is allowed and based on is going to be your product classification right so this one is based on a template for a car and then if you go to the attributes tab you're going to see the different attributes that are available for this specific product this one is a tesla model tree so you can select the paint color when you're configuring it and finally the structure tab is going to show you your bundle details right so my model tree is a bundle so you see the different product that are available as an option the different groups so what was in salesforce cpq product features is now a product group so you've got wheels autopilot charging accessories and the different products that are available within every one of these groups and you're going to be able to determine if a product is required or not as you configure this how many components can be selected in a group if you click through on one of those You can determine minimum quantity, max quantity, the default quantity, and if it's included in the component. We have a video where we go through the entire configuration of a bundle. We'll put the link in there if you're curious.
Now, what does a product catalog look like, right? So this is our 2024 Tesla catalog. It's created. And then if we look at the categories tab, we can see the different categories that have been created.
So you see the full hierarchy of categories within that bundle. Now within this catalog, 2024 Tesla, right, it's already created, it's got a name, can have different types, when is it effective from, end date, if it was relevant. And then if I look at the different categories, we'll see the different categories available within that catalog, along with their hierarchy and the sort order, which is how they're going to show up as you're building, adding products to a quote. Now, if you look at one of those categories, then we can see. well first does it have any subcategories this one does not but it has a parent category vehicles and then on the related tab you can see what products belong to that category only one in this case the model tree all right so that was product catalog management let's now have a look at salesforce pricing what are the key features here so customizable pricing procedures your pricing procedures is going to be the price waterfall so you're going to have total control on how this one is built out how it calculates what the order of operations is Also offers you a couple different price adjustment methods so far.
So you're going to have price adjustment tiers. So volume tier based pricing, attribute based adjustments. So within product catalog management, as I said, we can build different attributes on your products.
Now those attributes can also drive pricing either up or down, depending on how you build those. You also have bundle based adjustments. So is a product included within a bundle for free? Is it?
you adjust it is there a discount if it's sold within a bundle all of that is controllable and finally contract pricing which you're used to if you've used salesforce cp cube that's also going to be available there and again all of that is available through the api so that gives you centralized pricing management that you can call from any one of your platforms so you can leverage what you're building on the platform on all your external tools let's have a look at salesforce pricing in salesforce all right so salesforce pricing so i've got a quote already built out i have a product added to it so i've got the pricing that pulled in list price i've got a discount and then we see our net unit price on here 31 654 so a cool feature that comes with revenue lifecycle measurement is you can see your price waterfall and now we get to that final price on the product so if i hover over the net unit price the calculation details show up showing me what the different inputs were into that price waterfall. So I have my price book entry, which is the list price initially. Then I have an attribute discount entry, which raises the price by $12.50. So my paint selection affects pricing. Then nothing for a bundle base, volume discount, or tier discounts.
And then a manual discount that was added by the user at 15% removes $5,500. And that's our final price, $31,654. What does that pricing procedure look like in Salesforce? so this is our pricing procedure that's the one that's already built out so we're not going to go in and modify this right now but we can see the different order of operations that we add on there right so we have our price book entries then we have the input price for different category of pricing then we see attribute discount bundle base volume discount every step that we add on our price waterfall is showing up on there for this finally the manual discount it was calculated so again this is fully editable you can customize it you can have more than one price waterfall as well available more than one pricing you can add steps elements within that pricing waterfall so you've got a lot of control And we're going to dive deeper into this and see how we can customize this in a different video.
But this is what it looks like. All right. So this was Salesforce pricing.
Next, let's have a look at Salesforce product configurator. What are the key features here? So the product configurator is a screen flow that's, again, entirely customizable. So it comes along with some predefined components that you can use.
And then you can leverage. It's a standard screen flow. So you can add more to it. And you can build your flow. as you want to add more context, add more detail to your screen flow if you want to.
And so you really are in control of what that looks like and what your end user experience is going to be. And you can also build configuration rules on top of that to allow for automatic selection or to tell the user what they can select or what they can't select within that screen. So what does the product configurator look like in Salesforce?
Let's have a look. All right, so same code we were looking at previously for the price waterfall. So if I look at my product, on the right-hand side, I hit the down arrow. It configured. That's going to bring up my screen flow for configuration.
And this is the standard flow without any modification, the one that's provided by Salesforce out of the box. So we see our product. We see the list price show up on there.
On the right-hand side, we have the components that were selected, the attribute selection, and the pricing. We can also enable instant pricing if we want to see that. update as we make different selections so I could change the paint color and we see that the pricing has changed because that paint is included whereas the other color was not.
Again we go through those attribute creation in different videos we're going to put a link to that if you're interested in seeing details on how that all works and then on the left hand side you can scroll down and make all the different selections that you want if you select more. that's going to get added to your selection on the right hand side and you're going to see the pricing reflect us once you're done you can save and exit if we take a look at the flow and what it looks like on the flow editor all right so this is again our standard flow so it comes with a bunch of different components that are available through rlm automatically they come along with the package and this is entirely customizable so you can move data around if you want so you can move those around if you want the messages to be somewhere else it lets you do that you can also add more to this if you want so if i want to display something on there i can add more right so configure the model tree right so you can add that in there and that's going to be visible and then what you can do is you can have multiple screen flows for configuration and then you can assign those to either a specific product or specific product classifications. All right, so this was the product configurator. Let's now have a look at the quote and our order capture screen. So this is the new line editor, and we've had a quick look at it through the different other features.
So we've seen what the quote looks like. But again, this is the new transaction line editor where you're going to be able to edit quote lines and order products. So that custom transaction line editor is available on both quotes and orders.
and again the quote and order capture is available through the apis so you can create quotes and orders easily through the api by calling it from external systems all right let's have a look at quote and order capture in salesforce all right so this is the same quote we were on earlier so again we can modify look at what i've already got on there we can modify quantities we can modify discounts and then save to get our updates we see the calculation is loading at the top of the screen pricing gets updated total price based on quantity and net unit price based on discount if we want to add more products we're going to want to go to browse catalogs top right then we select the catalog we'd like to look at let's look at tesla hit next by default it's going to show you all products that are available within that catalog so i can scroll through can select the quantity and add more products if i want to or i can go on the left hand side and select categories that i like to look at so if i look at cars suv then it shows me the different options that are available so i can select the product i can add it to my quote safe quote that takes me back to the capture quote quote line editor where i can see the product added on there with the default options added to it And again, that same screen is going to be available for orders as well. All right, so that was the quote and order capture screen. So now I have a look at Salesforce Asset Lifecycle.
What are the key features here? So Asset Lifecycle is going to give you a new screen on accounts where you can amend, cancel, and renew your assets. It's also going to give you more details on current historical MRR for a given asset. We're going to have a look at that. And then all of those assets are created automatically through, again, through a flow that's available out of the box, which normally happens on order activation, but it could happen at any step because you control that flow.
So they're created automatically when that flow gets triggered. And again, all of this is available through the business API. So you could offer, you know, any customer on a different platform, they could control their own assets.
by calling the business api through your you know the available system whether it's an app or it's a website it's an e-commerce platform whatever it is let's have a look at asset lifecycle in salesforce all right so i'm on an account now if i look at the assets tab on there i have the managed assets component already added to this so this is the standard component that comes with revenue lifecycle management i can see all the assets that the customer owns what the start date was for all of those if it's a subscription or with an end date i'm going to see that and date as well on there so i can look if it's a bundle i can see all the options that were added to that bundle even if it's a nested bundle if i click true on any one of those then i'll get the asset detail page and from there i have a new dashboard where i can see the evolution of quantity right so true amendments you know whether they be positive or negative and the mr evolution as well so i can see that initially that customer bought 10. then added 20 added 10 more added 10 more so we see that full change and all the mr changes as well that track along with all our different amendments and if we go back to our account screen then any one of those assets can be selected for either amendment renewal and cancellation by default that screen is going to create a new quote to handle those amendments and renewals or cancellations but they could be sent directly to orders as well if you wanted to process them without going through anything sales related. All right, so this was asset lifecycle management and revenue lifecycle. All right, thanks for watching.
Hopefully that was an helpful intro to revenue lifecycle management. Please subscribe if you haven't on any platform, LinkedIn, YouTube, for more content that's going to be coming along in the next couple of weeks. Thanks.