Revenue Lifecycle Management (RLM) – Winter ’25 Release Notes Highlights

The Winter ’25 release notes are live and we’re excited to share our highlights on the latest and greatest for Revenue Lifecycle Management (RLM).

Check out the full Salesforce Winter ’25 Release Notes here and the Revenue Lifecycle Management (RLM) Release Notes here.

As a general note, many of the links containing the full details of the features and how to configure them are not available as of publishing this article.

Key Highlights

Advanced Approvals

One of the best features from Salesforce CPQ, advanced approvals, is now in RLM. Advanced Approvals allows for a complex approval process with multiple steps in series and in parallel, and is driven by Salesforce Flow Builder. Advanced Approvals allows for defining approval criteria such as discount thresholds before closing a transaction (such as a Quote). Read more.

Quoting for Customer Communities

This enables customers to create and configure Quotes and then convert them to Orders, giving your customers the power of CPQ. Read more.

Large Quotes & Orders (Pilot)

This enables having up to 1000 line items. on a Quote or Order. A must have for some industries with products with large bill of materials, or when quoting large bulk multi-site quotes. Note that this is a pilot service so it is not GA, but this likely means support for larger quotes and orders is on the roadmap to become GA in a future release. Read more.

Rate Management aka Usage Based Pricing

Rate Management brings the power of Usage Based Pricing from Industries CPQ over to Revenue Lifecycle Management. This release brings support for this in Product Catalog Management (PCM), Salesforce Pricing, Product Configurator, and Transaction Management. See the below sections for more details.

Salesforce Pricing for Industries CPQ, Salesforce Contracts for Industries CPQ, and Product Catalog Management (PCM) for Energy & Utilities Cloud

See our Communications, Media, and Energy, Omnistudio, Industries CPQ & OM – Winter ’25 Release Notes Highlights post for more details.

Product Catalog Management (PCM)

See full Product Catalog Management (PCM) release notes.

Ramp Segment Types for Price or Volume Changes over Time

In Industries CPQ, we can define Time Plans and Time Policies that allow for having different prices for the same line item over time. In RLM, a similar concept is called “Ramps” which apply to pricing (including discounts) as well as quantity. This is a feature setting that must be enabled. Read more.

Local and Group Cardinality

Cardinalities behave exactly the same way in RLM as they do in Industries CPQ – you can define the default, minimum, and maximum cardinality (quantity) for a given child product, or within a group, to define the minimum and maximum number of children within that group. The only difference with Industries CPQ is that “Virtual Products” are now “Groups.” This enhancement allows for creating nested groups under the root groups and defining group cardinality on them. Read more.

Product Discovery aka Guided Product Selection

A similar concept to guided selling in Industries CPQ, Product Discovery allows for defining Omnistudio components which will allow for users to browse catalogs, categories, and products in a more user-friendly way than the out of box Product Configurator, for example to allow customers using Experience Cloud guest users on a public site. Read more.

Other Product Catalog Management (PCM) Items

• Easily Create Qualification Decision Tables by Using Templates

• Show Only Eligible and Available Categories

• Improve Search Results by Indexing Your Product Catalog

• New and Changed Objects For Product Catalog Management

Salesforce Pricing

See full Salesforce Pricing release notes.

Price Tracking History

Users will be able to see the history behind a product’s price. In Industries CPQ, the UI will only show you the current price list entry’s price, and whatever the calculated price is when the pricing runs (with the price waterfall). However, the help documents are not available currently, so it is unclear whether this is from a design-time perspective meant for product managers or from a run-time perspective for sales reps and customers. Read more.

Price Adjustment Batch Jobs

These are bulk jobs that will enable bulk updates of pricing. Again, it’s not clear whether this is from a design-time perspective meant for product managers or from a run-time perspective for sales reps and customers. Read more.

Other Salesforce Pricing Items

• Streamline Pricing Procedure Requirements with Procedure Plan Definitions

• Salesforce Pricing Now Integrated with Commerce Cloud

• Turn Off Price Waterfall for Selected Pricing Elements

• Configure Proration Settings to Calculate Product Prices

• Calculate the Aggregate Price of a Product Bundle

• Simulate Pricing Procedures with Different Context Mappings

• Derived Pricing Enhancements

• Operations Console is Now Pricing Operations Console

• New Objects in Salesforce Pricing

Rate Management

Rate Management is a new module that is meant for usage-based services, though it seems more of an extension to other modules enabling a new type of pricing (usage) rather than a completely new stand-alone module. For example, your utilities company charges you based on the water and electricity you used last month, or your telco charges you for roaming based on the number of MB of roaming data you used.

Similar to one time pricing or recurring pricing, you can define in Price Books and Price Book Entries, you define Rate Cards and Rate Card Entries for your usage-based prices, you can define discounts on top of those usage prices via Rate Adjustments, define the business logic in the Rating Procedure Builder, and see the calculation in the Rating Waterfall. Effectively the setup and approach follows the same pattern as other pricing.

See full Rate Management release notes.

Rate Management Items

• Bill Customers Based on Consumption of a Usage Resource

• Manage Discounts with Rate Adjustments

• Calculate Net Unit Rates By Using Predefined Rating Elements

• Make Better Rating Decisions By Using Rating Waterfall

• New Objects in Rate Management

• New Invocable Actions

Product Configurator

See full Product Configurator release notes.

Configuration Rule Validation

Advanced Rules and Context Rules in Industries CPQ were powerful, but very painful to debug when they aren’t working as expected. RLM alleviates this pain point by introduction a check before activating rules to ensure they are valid and won’t cause run-time issues. Read more.

Ramped Deals

In Product Catalog Management (PCM), we covered the design-time side of this. This covers the run-time side to be able to apply ramps at run-time. Read more.

Rate Management / Usage Pricing at Run-Time

Similarly, this is the run-time support for Rate Management in CPQ at run-time. Read more.

Other Product Configurator Items

• Easily Create Diverse Configuration Rules

• Validate Products at Transaction Level

• Get an Enhanced View of Derived Prices

• View Nested Options Group for Product Bundles

Transaction Management

See full Transaction Management release notes.

Advanced Approvals

See Key Highlights above.

Quoting for Customer Communities

See Key Highlights above.

Large Quotes & Orders (Pilot)

See Key Highlights above.

Other Transaction Management Items

• Give Your Customers More Flexibility with Usage Selling

• Gain Insight into Asset Usage Rates and Tier Pricing

• Use Ramp Deals for Time-Based Price and Quantity Changes 

• Organize Your Transactions with Groups

• Streamline the Quoting and Ordering Process for Derived Products

• Effortlessly Build Quotes and Orders with Add Assets Action

• Fast-Track Adding Products to Transactions 

• Track Order Creation Efficiently with Timely Notifications

• New and Changed Objects in Transaction Management

• Changed Connect REST API Request Bodies

• CommerceOrders Namespace

• PlaceQuote Namespace

Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator

The Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator (DRO) enhancements bring performance improvements, and port over functionality from Industries Order Management (OM).

See full Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator (DRO) release notes.

Decomposition by Product Classification

When defining decomposition relationships, you can perform this at the per-product level. Often, we will have multiple products that are decomposed the same way. This enhancement allows for defining decomposition against Product Classifications, which then are inherited at run-time by the Products under those classifications. This is the same as the ability to define decomposition against Product Specifications (or Product Classes) in Industries OM. Read more.

Fallout Management

Fallout Management, or the ability to automatically retry callouts based on a specific time interval or up to a maximum number of retries, is now available in RLM’s DRO. This is the same as the Fallout Management and Retry Policies functionality from Industries OM. Read more.

Other Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator (DRO) Items

• Interface and Performance Enhancements

• Manual Task Assignment Rules

• Partially Load Decomposition Plans

• Skip a Fulfillment Branch

• Support for Decomposition by Product Classification

• Define How Failed Callouts are Retried

• Enhance Your Search and View in the Decomposition Viewer

• Changed Objects in Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator

Invoice Management

Invoice Management is a new module to handle billing your customers for the services they’ve purchased in the CPQ and that we’ve fulfilled in Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator (DRO). This allows for defining extensions to your product catalog related to invoicing, taxes, and invoicing settings. You can bill in advance or in arrears (after the fact), automatically calculate tax based on different legal entities in different jurisdictions, automatically create credit invoices, and manage balances.

In the Industries CPQ world, there is no equivalent, though historically it was possible for customers to integrate Industries CPQ and Industries Order Management with Salesforce Billing, but this was not a common occurrence on projects. This is quite exciting as Revenue Cloud is expanding beyond the Sales + Fulfillment scope into Billing.

See full Invoice Management release notes.

Invoice Management Items

• Define Criteria for Invoicing Products

• Simplify your Billing Configuration by Using Guided Setup

• Billing in Advance and Arrears

• Configure Multiple Legal Entities for a Seller

• Ensure Accurate Tax Calculation by Customizing Tax Addresses

• Schedule Automatic Invoice Generation for Billing Schedules

• Automate Conversion of Negative Invoice Lines to Credit Memo Lines

• Issue Credits to Settle Balances of Invoices or Invoice Lines

• Settle Invoices Faster by Auto-Applying Credit Balances

• Optimize User Experience for Partner Communities

• New Objects for Invoice Management

• New Platform Events for Invoice Management

Salesforce Contracts

See full Salesforce Contracts release notes.

Increased Limits and Performance with Single Point Requests (SPR)

This feature promises to increase file size limits and document generation performance with a new approach called Single Point Requests (SPR). Unfortunately it is not clear exactly what this means technically or what the limits are increased to, but we assume this will be a new approach to do document generation deeper inside the platform, getting around the API limits on file size. Read more.

Contract Version Comparison

Similar to Vlocity CLM, Salesforce Contracts allows for comparing two DOCX Contract file versions and highlighting the difference between, to help with offline contract redlining review. Read more.

Other Salesforce Contracts Items 

• Control Edit Access to Protect Essential Contract Sections

• Define and Test Instructions for Better Extraction Results

• Streamline Your Internal Review Processes with Automated Checkout 

Closing Thoughts

In general, the Winter ’25 release brings a lot of new features to the various Revenue Lifecycle Management (RLM) modules. We see performance and scalability improvements, great features ported over from Industries CPQ and Industries OM, and some net new modules like Invoice Management. Unfortunately, most of the detailed setup documentation for the new functionality is not yet available, so we aren’t able to get hands on yet, but are looking forward to do so in the coming weeks!

Our top highlight is Advanced Approvals – one of the best features of Salesforce CPQ (and other CPQs like Conga CPQ, formerly Apttus), that never made its way to Industries CPQ but is now available in RLM. As expected, we see a lot of innovation around Revenue Lifecycle Management and this shows Salesforce’s commitment to the latest CPQ (and much more!) solution.

See you in a few months for the Spring ’25 release!