Driving predictable and scalable revenue growth is no easy feat, as numerous processes, teams, and tools work in tandem to make the magic happen. What if everything your sales, RevOps, finance, and billing teams need to get the job done could exist seamlessly in one place?
In this post, we’ll take a deep dive into how Revenue Cloud can supercharge your end-to-end Quote-to-Cash process while tailoring it to your business needs.
A Brief History of Revenue Cloud
Let’s start with the beginning! Before Revenue Cloud became the offering that it is today, there were a couple of changes to note, which explain why you may see the initial name still in the online space.
Revenue Lifecycle Management was launched in the Spring ‘24 release as the new core offering for Revenue Cloud. It was then renamed to Revenue Cloud Advanced at Dreamforce ‘24, and today can be referred to as RCA, Revenue Cloud Advanced, or Revenue Cloud.
Currently, there are two SKUs available for Salesforce customers: Revenue Cloud Advanced and Revenue Cloud Billing. While there don’t seem to be any plans for a new edition, keep in mind that “Advanced” is just the name of the edition, and more often than not, the product is referred to as RCA.
Revenue Cloud and Salesforce CPQ
It’s no secret that Salesforce’s CPQ offering has been a topic of interest in the Salesforce community recently, with the company confirming the end of sale for the Salesforce CPQ product, which was shipped as a managed package. The end of sale shouldn’t be confused with the end of life, as current Salesforce customers using the product will still receive support and can renew as usual.
Revenue Cloud Advanced is not just CPQ – its functionality is actually part of the offering, alongside many other features we’ll cover later in the article, with added advantages over the legacy product. Perhaps the most impactful point to note is that, unlike Salesforce CPQ, Revenue Cloud Advanced is fully built on the core Salesforce platform. This offers unmatched flexibility and integration capabilities that promote scalability – moving away from the compromises Salesforce customers may have faced with the managed package limitations. It will also be the focus of Salesforce’s investment and innovation going forward.
What’s in It for You?
The main advantage of Revenue Cloud offering is that it is fully built on the Salesforce platform and is API-first, allowing customers to support any revenue model and sales channel as they scale, innovate, and create unique end-to-end experiences regardless of their choice of UI. API-first doesn’t mean API-only by any means, as Salesforce has also accounted for a powerful UI right within the platform. Moreover, the API-first approach doesn’t simply refer to the ease of integration – the business logic behind every part of the revenue process, be it quoting, pricing, ordering, and more, is exposed as modular APIs, allowing you to leverage Revenue Cloud capabilities across any system or channel where revenue-related actions occur.
Even without custom development to extend its functionality, this complete revenue platform is designed to help businesses make the entire revenue lifecycle more efficient, with built-in features that can be easily adapted with point-and-click. This approach ensures smooth reporting, with all data in one place at your team’s fingertips right from the start.
Salesforce’s enterprise-level security and trust layer ensures that your now-connected data is always protected, while the native integration of the single platform removes the need to maintain multiple integrations to point, allowing you to simplify the overall implementation.
Revenue Cloud Advanced
From defining your product and pricing strategy to easy quoting, contract, and order management, the Revenue Cloud Advanced (RCA) functionality can support your business processes every step of the way – let’s take a closer look at some of the core features!
Product Catalog
Product and pricing stakeholders who need to define products, design bundles, and account for dependencies are in for a treat with Revenue Cloud Advanced! Since these functions were not fully accounted for in Salesforce CPQ, RCA has made it a priority to offer an intuitive UI for easy catalog management, which facilitates bundle creation and introduces templates – transforming the introduction of new products from a cumbersome exercise into a smooth experience.
At the same time, the use of dynamic attributes removes the need to create individual SKUs for product variations – for example, when it comes to different types, promotions, or editions of the same core product.
In addition to the configuration aspects, RCA introduces the possibility of a single catalog for all B2B channels, enriched with guided product selection to help users find the right products, and a semantic index-based search that allows users to search by any product attribute, including dynamic attributes.
Granular Control on Discounting and Promotions
Managing pricing across various channels and a mix of revenue models can be quite the lift, but RCA aims to make your pricing strategy implementation a breeze with Pricing Procedures. Regardless of how simple or complex the use cases are, the added flexibility and the new declarative designer with an intuitive UI are bound to make implementation much more efficient, offering multiple pricing elements to choose from. Calculations can be simulated directly within the Pricing Procedure Builder before activation to ensure that they work as expected – similar to debugging a Flow in Flow Builder or testing a prompt in Prompt Builder.
In RCA, not only is the actual setup easier when it comes to translating pricing into Salesforce, but the calculation details will also be available for all considerations to be quickly understood alongside the entire price waterfall – directly at the quote line level when hovering over the price. Overall, the readily available pricing engine is fully transparent, offering the option to adjust pricing logic as needed, as well as full control over the execution of any pricing operation.
Configure, Price, and Quote
The CPQ experience in RCA is reimagined with several significant changes from the managed package, starting with the configurator, which Salesforce continues to invest in and enhance. AEs can configure complex solutions and bundles, with support for everything from nested configurations to attributes and options.
On top of the overall refreshed UI, the summary of the configuration is displayed on screen and updated in real time as more items are added to reflect pricing changes. Keep in mind that this is actually a Screen Flow; therefore, the idea of customers adapting the experience to their needs – starting from a template – was considered from the very beginning. Both out-of-the-box and custom components can be added as needed. Different product configuration flows can be assigned to different products, so regardless of the scenario, this feature has you covered.
Salesforce continues to invest in the configurator, and the Summer ‘25 release will also bring Revenue Cloud customers the new Constraint Builder (Generally Available). The functionality is live in sandboxes as of now, unlocking the capability to support even larger transactions and, if needed, complex rules to tailor a highly intuitive and responsive experience for their teams.
As reps start entering inputs on the configuration screen, the constraint engine running behind the scenes will provide the best possible match for the customer’s needs or a user-friendly message if any inputs are not aligned or compatible with the offering at hand. Not every scenario has to be complex, and to support the various needs, Salesforce allows both rule engines to be used simultaneously – either the standard rules engine or the Constraint Builder – while also giving your reps the option to decide which one to use on a case-by-case basis.
Remember the Quote Line Editor in Salesforce CPQ? In RCA, that changes as well, evolving into a more robust, Excel-like experience that empowers admins to have even more control over its look and feel through Lightning App Builder. The Transaction Line Editor allows you to freeze columns, sort, and filter as needed, as well as add products simply by searching for them or add assets if the customer has already purchased a specific product. There is also no limit for the number of columns that can be added, but adding just the right information to avoid unnecessary scrolling is still ideal, even though freezing can be used.
Advanced Approvals
This capability was launched as part of the Winter ‘25 release and is comparable to the Advanced Approvals managed package, which was complementary to CPQ. When it comes to quote approvals, changes are organizations will need both parallel and sequential capabilities, as well as customization options to support even more specific scenarios or exceptions.
While Flow Approval Orchestration was made available to Sales Cloud customers in the Spring ‘25 release, Revenue Cloud customers have already been able to use this new capability by leveraging Salesforce Flow and Flow Orchestration directly to design their approval processes. Whereas with the legacy CPQ offering customers had to purchase Advanced Approvals separately and incur an additional cost, with Revenue Cloud this capability is included from the get-go.
Contract Lifecycle Management
A persona’s function which was not accounted for with Salesforce CPQ is legal operations – more specifically, all the tasks associated with contract management, for which Salesforce customers had to either purchase an extra SKU or explore third-party solutions. This changes with RCA, as CLM is included and fully integrated into the product to improve the overall experience for sell-side contracts and truly accelerate deal closure while reducing the number of errors.
Legal teams can seamlessly manage contract templates, maintain clause libraries, and even tap into generative AI for clause generation, while sales teams can create contracts at any point during the lifecycle and collaborate on redlining directly within the CRM. Obligation management is also included, empowering teams to easily track compliance following contract activation.
Order and Subscription Management and Orchestration
Once the order is generated and activated, fulfillment is the next part of the process which, if not executed efficiently, can lead to significant delays and, of course, impact the customer experience. Within RCA, this pain point is addressed with Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator (DRO), as well as the ability for order managers to create change orders as needed to supplement the initial one – especially during lengthy fulfillment cycles.
Similar to Salesforce CPQ, the information from the quote is passed onto the order; however, the new Transaction Line Editor is also available at this level to allow order managers to make configuration changes if needed and provide a cohesive experience.
As soon as an order is activated, the Fulfilment tab will showcase the decomposition of Order Products into Fulfilment Order Products, as the relationship may be one-to-many, especially for more complex products that require additional technical steps. This mapping is generated based on pre-configured rules that the admin would have to set up beforehand. Based on the decomposition, DRO will dynamically generate a fulfillment plan, which is ultimately a task breakdown for order managers to easily follow the process and any associated dependencies.
The Fulfillment Plan may include a combination of manual and automated steps, depending on the predefined rules, and will empower the order manager to follow the process every step of the way in the swimlanes, with the ability to review execution information in case of errors or manually complete steps as needed to advance fulfillment.
When it comes to subscription management in RCA, there has been a significant simplification involved in the data model, first of all, as all records are stored as assets, which can be amended, renewed, or cancelled at any point during the lifecycle. When the order is activated, a contract is generated, and the order products are assetized accordingly. Once again, the experience remains on par with the quote and the order, within the same Transaction Line Editor view, which can be further customized.
Within this view, sellers also have the ability to amend individual assets as needed, instead of the entire contract. Once the new order is fulfilled following an amendment, the change becomes visible in the Asset Lifecycle tab on the individual asset, offering a complete historical view of the changes.
Consumption Management
With many companies having consumption-based products even before generative AI came into play, Revenue Cloud Advanced now supports usage selling to facilitate consumption monitoring, reporting, and invoicing – with the goal of enabling billing on platform or not. The entire Usage Management functionality became generally available in Spring ‘25, including the ability to accurately monitor consumption, generate summaries and forecast usage, and defining rollover policies for unused grants, to name a few.
Augment Your Team with Agentforce
Considering that all necessary tools are available through the interface, your team could manually go about their day, but in the age of Agentforce supercharging the entire platform, why would they have to?
As of Spring ’25, the new Agentforce skill for quoting based on natural language input is available in pilot (with more to follow!), and what could take several minutes or even hours to set up can become a matter of seconds for your AEs.
The agent has one topic and a few custom agent actions to support this task and executes in user context to either create a quote or apply discounts. You could also extend the agent’s capabilities with additional actions – for example, having it create the opportunity as well before creating the quote and quote lines – and continue tailoring it to your organization’s needs.
While the quoting agent is an out-of-the-box option, there’s nothing stopping you from creating any type of agent you need across the entire platform, with readily available invocable actions that you can use – such as the one that triggers the creation of an order from a quote once it exists. More invocable actions are provided with each release, so if you’re already an RCA customer, make sure to keep an eye out for the newest ones that can help you automate even more.
Leading by example, Salesforce shared at TDX a few examples of use cases that Agentforce supports internally to maximize the productivity of internal teams with digital labor. By leveraging Revenue Cloud APIs to fully support these actions, both development teams and solution consumers can become more efficient by directly interacting with specialized agents – all while ensuring a great customer experience during the sales cycle.
Insightful Analytics
The Summer ‘25 release will enrich Revenue Cloud with four Tableau Next-powered dashboards, out of the box and at no additional cost. The built-in analytics will provide your team with clear insights into subscription revenue, pricing, order fulfillment, and billing operations by bringing together critical data across the entire revenue lifecycle.
These will empower your team to quickly monitor subscription trends to drive growth, identify bottlenecks in fulfillment to reduce fallout, analyze pricing strategy performance on margins, and gain real-time visibility into customer accounts to speed up collections – all helping to drive efficiency across your revenue lifecycle.
Note that while the dashboards are included in Revenue Cloud, a Salesforce Foundations Viewer license and a Tableau Next Creator license are required to customize them.
Revenue Cloud Billing
A separate SKU complements Revenue Cloud Advanced with capabilities tailored to support the entire billing process – from invoice generation and management, tax calculations, and consumption management to more – while also offering the possibility to further streamline the experience with Agentforce.
Regardless of the revenue models your organization employs – be it subscriptions, one-time purchases, or consumption-based – all related needs, including billing frequency, proration calculation, cancellations, resumes, and customizable billing structures, are natively supported, with the ability to pass information on to an ERP if needed.
Basic invoicing capabilities are included in Revenue Cloud Advanced, but with Salesforce Billing, invoicing can be as tailored as needed and generated from an account, order, or list of billing schedules using native document generation functionality. Revenue Cloud Billing is also optimized for dual-entry accounting activities, becoming a general ledger for which you can establish the corporate structure, configure your data, and have all financial transactions logged directly within the platform.
Summary
Salesforce Revenue Cloud is evolving rapidly – not only creating parity with previous offerings but also introducing new functionality across all key features. Flexibility is ensured not just by the product being built on the core Salesforce platform, but also by its API-first design and built-in customization capabilities.
From straightforward product and pricing management to Agentforce-powered quote generation and fully integrated billing and invoicing capabilities, Salesforce has truly invested in a complete revenue platform – with surely more enhancements to come.
Have you already explored Salesforce Revenue Cloud? Let us know in the comments below!
