Revenue Cloud – Quick Start Guide
- Georgii Saveliev
- Mar 26
- 5 min read
The news is out - Salesforce CPQ officially reaches "End of Sale" which means that Salesforce CPQ (formerly Steelbrick) will not longer be sold to new customers, but existing customers can continue to use their existing Salesforce CPQ implementations. Note that this does not mean the Salesforce CPQ has reached "End of Life" or that Salesforce CPQ is no longer supported by the support and engineering teams - it is indeed still supported! See this Salesforce Ben article for the full details.
This announcement has caused a lot of buzz in the ecosystem, and we see Trailblazers across customers, partners, and Salesforce employees rushing to deep dive into Revenue Cloud, the new CPQ + more solution from Salesforce. This post will walk you through a quick summary of Revenue Cloud, some links to learn more, and share how to get hands on!
Important Note for Industry Cloud Customers and Partners: Before we dive into Revenue Cloud, please note that Industries CPQ (formerly Vlocity), part of Industry Clouds such as Communications Cloud, Media Cloud, and Energy & Utilities Cloud, is a separate product from Salesforce CPQ (formerly Steelbrick). This End of Sale announcement only applies to Salesforce CPQ, not Industries CPQ. Industries Cloud customers can leverage modules within Revenue Cloud such as Salesforce Pricing, Salesforce Contracts, Standard Omnistudio, Business Rules Engine (BRE), and more!
Revenue Cloud? Revenue Cloud Advanced? RCA? Revenue Lifecycle Management? RLM?
As with many Salesforce products, Revenue Cloud has gone through several rebrands. What was formerly Revenue Lifecycle Management, or RLM, is now Revenue Cloud. You may see some in the ecosystem refer to Revenue Cloud as "Revenue Cloud Advanced" - Revenue Cloud Advanced or RCA is the name of the SKU you would see on a customer's Order Form with Salesforce, whereas Revenue Cloud is the name of the new CPQ solution from Salesforce. In short, the new name is just "Revenue Cloud", though you may see "Revenue Cloud Advanced" or "RCA" used interchangeably.
Revenue Cloud
Revenue Cloud is a suite of products, including Revenue Cloud itself, as well as related products such as Revenue Cloud Billing.
Revenue Cloud is made up of the following modules:
Foundation: Revenue Cloud is built on the Salesforce platform, includes Omnistudio, a digital automation platform, Business Rules Engine, a powerful way to build declarative business rules used within Omnistudio and other Revenue Cloud modules, and leverages and extends the functionalities of Sales Cloud (primarily) and Service Cloud.
Product Catalog Management (PCM): The product and attribute side of the Product Catalog, allowing you to define which products you sell, and what attributes make them up. For example, you sell a specific model of laptop (a product) with a configurable amount of RAM, either 16GB or 32GB (an attribute)
Salesforce Pricing: The pricing side of the Product Catalog. This defines the prices and pricing logic for products and attributes defined in PCM. For example, the laptop model with 16GB of RAM will be 1200$ whereas with 32GB it will be 1400$.
Product Configurator: The CPQ UI or Cart that sales reps, partners, and customers can use to configure quotes and orders.
Quote and Order Capture & Asset Lifecycle (QOCAL) aka Transaction Management: The sales process that uses the Product Configurator and typically starts from Opportunity to Quote to Order to Asset, and can convert Assets back to Quotes or Orders as part of Amend, Renew, Cancel (ARC) aka MACD.
Salesforce Contracts: The Contract Lifecycle Management module which also includes document generation, redlining, clauses, and more.
Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator (DRO): The Order Management module which allows for decomposing simple commercial orders into more complex technical orders to be sent to downstream systems such as service fulfillment, field service, and billing as part of order orchestration or fulfillment.
In the above diagram, we can see the layering of the different modules. Effectively Product Catalog Management (PCM), Salesforce Pricing, Business Rules Engine (BRE), and the design-time side of Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator (DRO) make up the design-time side of the product catalog, and the other modules (Product Configurator, Quote & Order Capture & Asset Lifecycle (QOCAL), Salesforce Contracts, and Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator (DRO)) make up the run-time side of the CPQ.
In the above diagram, we see the connections between the different modules as we go through Revenue Cloud end to end. The design-time modules feed the run-time of the CPQ to allow users to configure product and attributes in the Product Configurator and as part of QOCAL and see the resulting prices. Once we have a configured order, this is decomposed and orchestrated in DRO based on the design-time definitions. Once an order is fulfilled, then it can go back to the CPQ process for amendments, renewals, cancellations, and more as part of ARC, to create a quote or order out of asset(s) and the process repeats.
Videos
Prefer to learn via videos and demos? Check out our three part Apex Hours series which goes through all of these modules in more details:
Blog Posts
Don't like videos? Last year we put together an 8-part blog post series covering all the key modules of Revenue Cloud. Take a look below for deep dives into each module:
Getting Hands On
Enough with the theory - let's get hands on! There are two options for getting hands on:
If you are not a Salesforce Partner, go the Developer Free Trial page, choose Communications Cloud, and click Sign Up under Communications Cloud Free Trial (not Base Trial). This has Product Catalog Management (PCM) and Salesforce Pricing with some sample products. DRO and SF Contracts are available but need to be enabled and configured
If you are a Salesforce Partner or Salesforce Employee, go to Partner Community > Learn Tab > Partner Learning Camp > Demo Org tab > RLM-PDE. This has PCM, Pricing, DRO, and Salesforce Contracts, all with sample data (except SF Contracts). Make sure to extend expiration via a Partner Support Case so it doesn’t expire after 1 month!
Check out this post for more options.
Closing Thoughts
There's a lot to learn, but luckily for Industries CPQ and OM folks, you'll have a much shorter ramp up time on Revenue Cloud due to the significant similarities. Salesforce CPQ folks will have a bit of a longer ramp due to the new concepts. As with any new Salesforce Product, deep dive into the theory, get your hands dirty in a demo org, and you'll be on track to getting the basics of Revenue Cloud down!
If you are looking for help with Revenue Cloud, we are happy to share our insights from our Revenue Cloud project experience so far - please message Georgii Saveliev or our Salesforce Industries & Revenue Cloud Expert Services team at Stratus Carta and we'll be happy to help.
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