Salesforce announced a new offering called Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced (Salesforce RCA) that combines many of the core functionality that growing companies need in one clever package.
What is Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced (RCA)
Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced, formerly known as Salesforce Revenue Lifecycle Management (RLM), is an offering that combines the functionality of product catalogs, price management, transactions, product configurator, contract lifecycle management, omnistudio, and more under one Salesforce umbrella. This product suite was born by the technology built in-house by Salesforce for revops teams, as well as the technology Salesforce acquired through SteelBrick and Vlocity. The platform works best for companies looking to run their entire revenue life cycle out of Salesforce, rather than tapping into other system capabilities from NetSuite or Stripe or otherwise to handle some of these tasks.
What’s Included in Salesforce RCA
The best way to think about Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced is not as a new distinct product from Salesforce, but rather as a collection of offerings that are being packaged together to meet the needs of a wide spectrum of its’ customers across the entire revenue lifecycle.
- Salesforce CPQ: Pricing management, product catalogs, contract renewals and amendments built within Salesforce. The primary difference with RCA and Salesforce CPQ is that RCA is built leveraging Salesforce Core (standard) objects rather than a managed package, which is how CPQ is traditionally structured.
- Salesforce Contracts: No longer will you need to implement Nintex or Conga for your contract document generation, redlining, or approval and change management process. With Salesforce Contracts, these actions come out of the box built on the Einstein 1 Platform.
- Salesforce Billing: Automate your recurring billing on Salesforce across any channel which you operate. This works across any frequency with Salesforce’s built-in invoice scheduler. Accept any payment method through any gateway, whether that’s Salesforce’s native payment gateway or any partner on the AppExchange.
- Revenue Lifecycle Management: Built natively on Einstein 1, Revenue Lifecycle Management unifies data across an enterprise, regardless of how that data is structured, by seamlessly mapping it to the Salesforce metadata framework.
The major consideration called out in a few of the bullets above is the fact that Salesforce RCA offerings are built natively on the Einstein 1 Platform. This enables easier administration leveraging declarative configuration rather than more code-heavy configuration, and doesn’t subject it’s customers to a managed package environment.
Salesforce RCA vs Salesforce CPQ
Salesforce RCA and Salesforce CPQ have some major differences in functionality, which we’ll call out below.
| Function | CPQ | Revenue Cloud Advanced (RCA) |
|---|---|---|
| Object Model | Managed Package | Native on Einstein 1 Platform |
| APIs | Pre-configured APIs | Headless |
| Omnichannel | Customization Required | Included |
| Promotions | Customization Required | Included |
| Pricing Waterfall | Customization Required | Included |
| Usage Based Pricing | Standard in CPQ Plus | Available with Customization |
| Contract Management | Requires Integrations | Included |
| Approvals | Advanced Approvals Optional | Included |
| Order to Cash | Customization/Integrations Required | Included |
To a reader who hasn’t implemented or evaluated CPQ or RCA, these details might be ambiguous. However, the main differences in each system is that RCA boasts native Einstein 1 Platform infrastructure, a headless API for easier convertibility with external systems, better Omnichannel interoperability if you sell across platforms, and contract management functionality out of the box.
Will Salesforce Discontinue CPQ?
In short, not anytime soon.
CPQ is a popular and widely-adopted platform among Salesforce’s customer base for pricing, quoting, and configuration of quotes. While RCA is certainly a powerful offering, it will be a long time until all customers are eventually migrated over to Salesforce RCA. If you have not yet purchased either CPQ or RCA, it would be an easy decision in favor of RCA.
Considerations for Migrating from Salesforce CPQ to Salesforce RCA
We can make it simple for you, based on where you are in your Salesforce journey.
If you are an existing Salesforce CPQ customer with integrations for document management, billing, or order to cash and your system is operating well and as expected, our guidance is to take a very careful approach to moving off of CPQ and replacing with RCA. While this will be an eventuality for all CPQ customers, it’s not something that has to happen today. Salesforce will continue to support their large installed base of current customers on Salesforce CPQ indefinitely, but a majority of their ongoing investment and product innovation budget will be moved over to the RCA side.
If you purchased Salesforce CPQ, but haven’t been able to get it off the ground, then it’s possible that either the solution was not capable to deliver everything your team required in the first place (please refer to our comparison in the upper section of this blog) or your chosen implementation method/partner is not up to the task. In either case, we would welcome the opportunity to review what’s been built so far and crash that against your actual business requirements to make a more solidified recommendation as to the best path forward for you. It’s possible that RCA could solve your problems. Note: Salesforce RCA can be installed in your existing org, even alongside CPQ temporarily while you migrate, so it does not require you to migrate to a new org.
If you have not yet made a decision on Salesforce CPQ or RCA, and are not current customer of either, then you should evaluate how much of your revenue life cycle would be beneficial to capture in Salesforce vs how much is currently done (or should be done) in your ERP or external system. If you do not currently have contract management (redlining, e-signature, contract generation) then it’s possible that RCA could be a great way to combine this, billing, subscriptions, and CPQ in one place: Salesforce! However, not every company requires or is best served by having all of these functionalities in Salesforce, especially if they’re already performing one or more of these other functions in an ERP system successfully.
If none of the above scenarios sound like yours, we’re all ears to hear about what you’re planning so we can help you better understand which direction you should take.
Salesforce RCA vs CPQ: The Verdict
We’re big fans of simplifying the complex here, so without being irresponsible, we can confirm that RCA will be the best future-looking investment for your company today. We can also confirm that you shouldn’t be leaving any functionality behind should you convert over from Salesforce CPQ to Salesforce RCA. Additionally, if your organization is sufficiently supported by contracts management, subscription management, and billing but you’re missing a CPQ, then RCA can still provide your product configurators, price books, approvals, business logic, and end-to-end CPQ.
The good news is that you don’t have to make this decision alone, as our CPQ and RCA experts are standing by and ready to help you make an unbiased decision that can integrate with your ERP platform and help you achieve your revenue goals this year.