In our previous blog, we introduced you to Salesforce's Revenue Lifecycle Management (RLM), a unified product-to-cash suite designed to streamline your sales lifecycle and enhance revenue processes. Now, let’s dive deeper into Saltbox Mgmt’s perspective on this exciting new tool and explore its key capabilities and our strategic outlook.

RLM Capabilities Recap

Salesforce RLM is built to address the complexities of modern sales processes. Here’s a recap of its newly available and upcoming capabilities:

1. Composable Enterprise Product Catalog & Pricing: A unified, central product catalog with headless component APIs that can be delivered to any customer engagement channel.
2. Transaction Management & CPQ: Enables configuration, quoting, and order capture across direct, indirect/partner, and commerce channels for both one-time and recurring products.
3. Contract Lifecycle Management: Facilitates one-click contract generation with pre-approved terms and conditions, obligation management, and reporting.
4. Ordering & Decomposition: Automates order decomposition, orchestration, and fulfillment or provisioning.
5. Billing & Invoicing (Coming Soon): Automates rating, billing, and invoicing for one-time and recurring revenue models, and manages payments and collections for any method.

The Saltbox Perspective

From our vantage point at Saltbox Mgmt, RLM represents the next evolution of Salesforce CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote), offering a modern, scalable solution that integrates deeply within the Salesforce ecosystem, and opening the door to CPQ(O). Here are the pillars of our perspective on RLM:

RLM = CPQ+‍

Think of RLM as a new, modern CPQ built directly on the Salesforce platform. While traditional CPQ solutions have struggled with integration and complexity, RLM is designed to overcome these challenges, offering a more robust and flexible solution. Additional capability added to the setup of Products makes this already a major leap forward just from a usability perspective, driving major value even as more features are being planned and added. 

Parallels to B2B Commerce Evolution‍

The transition from CloudCraze to B2B Lightning mirrors what we can expect from CPQ to RLM. The initial release provides a good foundation, and RLM’s innovation roadmap promises significant advancements.

API-First Approach‍

RLM’s API-first approach allows for greater extensibility and broader cross-cloud capabilities, making it easier to integrate with other Salesforce Clouds and third-party systems. The eventual goal of providing global and centralized Pricing, Product, Order API Services that can be leveraged across all Salesforce and even externally is a very promising future. 

Room to Fill Gaps‍

Although RLM is a phenomenal first step toward an enterprise-grade CPQ, there will be areas for partners to provide solutions that fill in missing pieces. That’s where Saltbox will be focused initially.

Better Ties to Industries‍

The RLM Product team obviously had an eye on making this easy to use and deploy whether customers were using Sales Cloud or any of the Industry Clouds (which was a well-known complication in the legacy CPQ world). The end result of easier integration with Industry Clouds like Manufacturing, Consumer Goods, Financial Services, and Communications, should be music to many customers’ ears. Parts of RLM are even built using Omni-Studio tools (formerly Vlocity), adding a really interesting wrinkle of usability to the platform.

Strategic Outlook

While RLM is not yet a complete solution, its innovation roadmap is heavily focused on delivering new features with each release. This continuous improvement approach means that businesses adopting RLM now will benefit from a steady stream of enhancements and new capabilities.

In the long term, RLM aims to align closely with B2B commerce, making it more central to the Salesforce platform and shared services. This includes surfacing RLM data through all Salesforce Clouds, ensuring a seamless, integrated experience for users.

Conclusion

Salesforce Revenue Lifecycle Management is poised to revolutionize the way businesses manage their sales and revenue processes. While it represents a significant step forward, its true potential will unfold as Salesforce continues to innovate and expand its capabilities. At Saltbox Mgmt, we’re excited to help our clients navigate this journey and unlock new growth opportunities with RLM.

Stay tuned for our next blog, where we’ll spotlight one of RLM’s standout features: the Product Catalog Configurator.

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