A look back at a new strategy
On November 12, 2020, Salesforce, the leader in customer relationship management solutions, announced the rebranding of Salesforce CPQ & Billing. Now called Salesforce Revenue Cloud, it's not part of a trivial name change, but a complete overhaul of its strategy. What does this mean for the companies that use this solution? Here's how.
1. CPQ and Salesforce: a brief history
In 2015, Salesforce acquired two companies:
- Steelbrick, founded in 2009 by Godard Abel, a Salesforce-native CPQ solution
- Invoice IT, founded in 2011, specializes in invoicing
These two solutions were grouped together under the Salesforce Steelbrick name until the effective acquisition of Steelbrick in 2016.
In 2016, the two solutions were marketed separately as Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce Billing. From that moment on, they became an integral part of the Salesforce platform.
Then, during 2019, the two solutions will finally be offered together in the Salesforce CPQ & Billing offering!
The rest you know...
2. Salesforce Revenue Cloud: why the name change?
The promise: create a single income repository
This paradigm shift in Salesforce CPQ is primarily a response to companies' need for sales visibility. The aim is to create a single revenue management repository that simplifies the process and gives the CRO and CFO back control over streams.
Streamline the sales process
To achieve this, Revenue Cloud drives automation, right through to customer asset management and beyond. Salesforce is thus placing a strong emphasis on faster monetization strategies.
It was with this in mind that Salesforce acquired Vlocity in 2020, an entity that offers refined solutions for vertical markets. In the media sector, for example, this concerns advertising inventory management and content syndication.
In addition, Revenue Cloud provides a multi-cloud invoicing solution, opening up a whole range of possibilities on the same platform. As a result, Sales will be able to increase their sales opportunities while enabling unified billing management.
3. What's new in Revenue Cloud
In fact, Revenue Cloud brings together all Salesforce solutions for increasing sales revenue. As part of the Salesforce Customer 360 platform, it brings together CPQ, Billing, Partner Relation Management (PRM) and B2B Commerce in a single offering. Added to this is Multi-cloud Billing, a technology provided by Vlocity, and Asset LifeCycle Management.
Let's take a closer look:
- Revenue Cloud offers a new B2B CPQ connector, enabling companies to personalize their site and promote complex sales with other companies. Automatic price adjustment and personalization lead to a better experience and, consequently, more sales.
- Multi-cloud billing, as mentioned above, is a new feature of Revenue Cloud. This feature gives sales staff more freedom to sell products or services on the spot, and send invoices to a single system.
- Companies can also launch a complete 8-week subscription offer, instead of the usual several months.
- Revenue Cloud's latest innovative tool, Customer Asset Lifecycle Management, provides companies with a simple, intuitive dashboard of customer purchases. It also tracks contract modifications and outstanding balances.
Conclusion
With Revenue Cloud, Salesforce creates a sales cycle framework and adapts its solutions to new revenue models. These have been accelerated by the digitization of businesses, itself driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. This also demonstrates the relevance of the acquisitions made by Salesforce in recent years. In this way, the company has created synergies between its various products to best meet its customers' needs.
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