Revenue Cloud (formerly Revenue Lifecycle Management or RLM) is the latest and greatest Configure Price Quote (CPQ) solution from Salesforce. In this blog post series, we will deep dive into Revenue Cloud and compare features to the capabilities of Industries CPQ and Industries OM.
Start with our earlier posts before jumping into this post. See all the posts in this series below:
Salesforce Pricing
Salesforce Pricing is a robust, user-friendly solution designed to streamline pricing processes and ensure accurate pricing for your products and services. This comprehensive offering allows users to create customized price adjustment methods, define precise pricing procedures, and maintain complete visibility into the pricing calculation process.
Centralized Pricing Management
Salesforce Pricing enables efficient management of all pricing processes from a single location. From creating products to calculating and applying discounts, the app provides a seamless and intuitive experience through its range of predefined objects, lookup tables, and pricing recipes.
Predefined Objects
Here are the key objects used in Salesforce Pricing, along with their descriptions:
Products: Any item or service sold to your customer.
Product Classifications: A template for creating similar products, with inherited attributes.
Attribute Definitions: Characteristics or properties of products used to determine or calculate pricing.
Product Selling Model: Defines how products are sold, whether one-time or through subscription plans.
Contract: A business agreement associated with an account.
Contract Item Price: Displays the price of a product on a contract.
Decision Tables
Decision Tables are complex lookup tables that read business rules with multiple inputs and return multiple outputs, making pricing decisions more efficient and accurate. Decision Tables or Lookup Tables are the Business Rules Engine (BRE) equivalent of Vlocity Calculation Matrices – but do note that Industries EPC and CPQ also support pricing via Decision Tables.
Price Waterfall
The Price Waterfall feature captures logs for pricing procedures, making it easy to explain and check pricing calculations at each step, and to see how we arrived at the final price. This is particularly useful for tracking volume discounts and other tiered pricing structures.
Cost Books & Price Books
Salesforce Pricing allows you to track expenses associated with products in cost books and record product prices in price books. The app supports creating multiple price books and cost books, including a predefined standard price book and custom price books for different market segments.
This does away with the Industries EPC concept of Price Lists and Price List Entries and instead folds it into Price Books and Price Book Entries, simplifying initial setup and maintenance.
Price Adjustment Schedules
These schedules categorize price adjustments used to calculate product prices based on various factors such as product configuration, quantity, and bundle combinations. There are three types of price adjustment schedules:
Price Adjustment Tiers: Define a product’s price based on the quantity sold.
Attribute-Based Adjustments: Define a product’s price based on its attributes.
Bundle-Based Adjustments: Define a product’s price when sold as part of a bundle.
Different from Industries EPC’s Attribute Based Pricing, Salesforce Pricing brings Attribute Based Adjustments where you can mark Product Attribute as “Is Price Impacting”, then creating Attribute Based Adjustments to apply an override, percentage discount, or amount discount on top of a product based on its attribute values.
Pricing Discount Calendar
The Pricing Discount Calendar provides a visual representation of the various discounts associated with a product over different dates, allowing pricing analysts to easily understand and manage these discounts.
This provides a big improvement over Industries EPC where users would need to look between the Product and Calculation Matrixes to see the latest pricing.
Pricing Procedures
Pricing Procedures are configurable stacks of pricing elements used to calculate the final net price of a product. These procedures can be transformed from all established pricing policies within your business.
Pricing Procedures are a much more visual equivalent to the Pricing Plans, Pricing Plan Steps, and Calculation Procedures in Industries EPC. They allow for complex pricing calculations that would typically done via complex Calculation Procedures and custom Pricing Plan Step Apex code in Industries CPQ, now fully declarative.
Pricing Action Parameters
To calculate product prices directly from any object's record page, use the "Calculate Price" button. Pricing actions are associated with context definitions and pricing procedures, storing processed pricing data directly in Salesforce objects.
There are two types of pricing actions:
Standard Pricing Actions: Available for objects like Quote, Order, Contract, Case, and Opportunity.
Custom Pricing Actions: Available to all objects within your org by adding the Lightning component.
Flows
Salesforce provides the capability to invoke pricing via flows, allowing you to create pricing actions and supply context instance IDs, pricing procedure names, and discovery procedures as inputs. This feature includes invoking Salesforce Pricing and Salesforce Headless Pricing in flows to run pricing for specified context instances.
This is similar to invoking the Cart APIs with price = true in Industries CPQ.
Salesforce Pricing Limits
As with anything in Salesforce, there are limits, and here are the ones that stick out to us:
Related to performance: “A pricing procedure can remain active for at least 1 millisecond, and up to 1 minute. By default, the time a pricing procedure can remain active is set to 10 seconds.”
Related to number of price impacting attributes: “A pricing procedure can remain active for at least 1 millisecond, and up to 1 minute. By default, the time a pricing procedure can remain active is set to 10 seconds.”
See more details on Salesforce Help.
Closing Thoughts
The Product Catalog Management (PCM) module has some similarities to Industries CPQ's Enterprise Product Catalog (EPC) pricing functionality, but with a LOT of new features and a lot more power to do complex pricing that previously required significant custom code. Salesforce Pricing tackles a lot of pain points and gaps with EPC's pricing functionality - we are particularly excited about getting our hands dirty with this module!
We look forward to deep diving with you into the Product Configurator and Configure Price Quote (CPQ) in our next post.
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