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The RevOps Roundtable is a discussion-based podcast on Revenue Operations hosted by John Garvens, a prominent Salesforce architect and the owner of Garvens Consulting.
The show, known for its "Hot Takes" and candid insights, features a panel of other experts, including architects from various consultancies and notable executives in the RevOps ecosystem, to provide a comprehensive and balanced view of the commercial, operational, and technical challenges facing Revenue Operations teams.
Above all, the show aims to provide open, honest, and practical conversations, guidance, and direction to RevOps professionals worldwide.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the first of what will hopefully become an ongoing series of Revenue Cloud roundtable sessions where I get together some of my Revenue Cloud friends and some of the best architects in this whole space in the Salesforce industry, and we talk about what's going on with Revenue Cloud. What's the state of it today? What's going on in the partner ecosystem in general as it relates to Revenue Cloud? And in this very first roundtable, we're going to talk about three big things. Number one, we're going to talk about Salesforce Revenue Cloud at Dreamforce twenty twenty four.
John Garvens:There were a lot of exciting updates that happened. I found myself very excited in the roadmap session about the Winter 'twenty five release, the Spring 'twenty five release, and even the future roadmap of the product as it starts to coalesce and form a more comprehensive solution. And it looks as if Revenue Cloud, the new one, is going to be far more robust than CPQ and billing was or would have become, which is an exciting thing. And we'll get into that. We'll also talk about the Winter 'twenty five release.
John Garvens:And maybe JM can lead part of the discussion there since he already wrote a blog post about it, isolating the Revenue Cloud specific stuff. Questions come my way recently about Salesforce Revenue Cloud careers and what the future looks like for those. We've got a new product launching. We still have 6,007 customers on the old products. We've got Logic.
John Garvens:We've got other solutions that are out there in the world. What do I do with my career? And we're gonna get into that after this. So let's do a quick round of introductions around the round table. That's a mouthful.
John Garvens:And introduce ourselves, give a quick TLDR biography of yourself and then we'll get started. I'll begin. For those who don't know me, my name is John Garvins. I got my start in the Salesforce ecosystem as an administrator. I joined the dark side and became a consultant focusing on Salesforce CPQ, which is what I've been doing ever since 2017.
John Garvens:And I was even doing CPQ before that as a Salesforce administrator, Salesforce consulting partners. I worked at Salesforce for a little bit, and now I'm out on my own as a solo revenue cloud architect at Garvens Consulting, company I started back in January 2023. So it's hard to believe him. He's almost two years old. JM, you wanna go next?
Jean-Michel Tremblay:All right. Hello, everyone. JM for short, Jean Michel for the French inclined people watching in the Salesforce space for eight years. Actually started in presales, interestingly enough, which was I think, know, looking back a great way to start to get exposed to a lot of different stuff on platform very quickly. Then moved on to another gig, another consulting partner where I was doing more consulting implementation projects.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:And then at that partner, I also did pre sales again. And, in 2020, COVID, decided to go out on my own. So, it's been four years now. Having fun, mostly in the Quilted Cash base, but I've done extended beyond CPQ and billing and done also revenue recognition with FinancialForce or Sutenia now mainly. So, yeah, thanks for having me.
John Garvens:I didn't know you've been in business that long. Yeah, I'm glad to have you here, especially with all the cool videos you've been putting out about Revenue Cloud. Be sure that you subscribe to the Cloud Update on YouTube. If you feel so inclined, subscribe to my channel as well. Subscribe to my shit.
John Garvens:That's going be my catchphrase. Wayne, you wanna go next?
Wayne Salazar:Sure. Well, I'm old and I've had a lot of careers. I started out in the nonprofit space with Salesforce. This happened about eleven years ago.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:I was fundraising nonprofit I worked at had Salesforce and didn't really know what they were doing with it. I had done some various kind of database projects before that.
Wayne Salazar:And so I volunteered and I got really into it. And the more I got into it, the more I wanted to do it and the more they wanted me to just shut up already and get back to fundraising. So I decided to make the leap into full time Salesforce and have not looked back. So I worked in house for a design company for a couple of years and built a really massive system for them, which is where I got the CPQ start. But I built natively like inventory and logistics system for them as well.
Wayne Salazar:And then I moved into the consulting space. I've been with a few consulting firms since then. I'm at Simplest now. Simplest is
John Garvens:an OG in the CPU space. I got my start as well. Yeah. I don't think we were there at the same time though.
Wayne Salazar:No. I don't remember. Okay. No, I started just this year. Okay.
Wayne Salazar:Started this year. So, I like it a lot. It's great. I have had a lot of time between projects. So that's how I have managed to dive into RLM.
Wayne Salazar:I have days like today where I'm not feeling well. And I just think like, I'm a little tired of butting my head against this learning this new thing and not being able to figure it out. And then I have other days where I'm diving into it I'm figuring it out and it's really fun.
John Garvens:For the rest of us, you're creating some fantastic documentation, which is deeply appreciated by myself. I'm sure JM, Matt, you probably benefited from this as well. So Wayne Salazar on LinkedIn. I'll include a link in the in the show notes and stuff. I guess it's show notes.
John Garvens:Is this a podcast? I don't know. I don't I don't even know what I'm doing, but it's fine. But, yeah, Wayne's put together a lot of guides on how this thing works. And as we all work together to try and and figure this out, he's gonna be one of the people to look to.
John Garvens:Matt, Matthew Coker, my work wife on a previous project or work husband, I guess. Say hi.
Matt Coker:Thanks, John. I'm Matt Coker. I've been in the Salesforce ecosystem for eight or nine years now, I believe. I got my start right around the same time as John. Good work friends back in the Simplest days, back when Simplest first got started up
John Garvens:It was worked such on a tiny windowless office. Oh my god. It was so small. Like 10 people crammed into a five person office.
Matt Coker:With no windows?
John Garvens:No windows at all.
Matt Coker:So I've been a handful of other consulting partners as well. My primary focus has been Salesforce CPQ. Worked on a few billing projects, nothing significant as John, but been in the weeds a time or two on those, but mostly focused on CPQ. I think about three or four months ago, I kind of took the same steps as a few other of my peers on this call and went out on my own and the implementation side. Spreading my wings a little bit right now.
Matt Coker:It's been pretty
John Garvens:A lot of stuff to learn. And it's been really fun because, I mean, once you get to a certain point with the CPQ stuff, you're going like, okay, okay, another CPQ project. But then now it's like, oh, I gotta learn like, oh, how does that work? Now I gotta get some systems and processes in place and all this other stuff, especially as I look to bring on other people potentially in the future. Thanks for those introductions.
John Garvens:Was really helpful. Make sure that you connect with these folks on LinkedIn and subscribe to the various YouTube channels and stuff. That's a good way to stay up to date on all of this. Without further ado, let's start diving into the agenda for today. Again, we're gonna talk about Salesforce Revenue Cloud at Dreamforce, the winter twenty five release notes, and then Salesforce Revenue Cloud's careers, current and future.
John Garvens:This is the garvensconsulting.com website. And here I have a post that I made of a review of Salesforce Revenue Cloud at Dreamforce twenty twenty four. I essentially wanted to scrape together as much stuff as I could find, starting with this shameless plug for myself. Absolutely shameless. And take a look at that thumbnail.
John Garvens:It looks absolutely horrible.
Wayne Salazar:It's so fun to use.
John Garvens:It's fine. Yeah. I mean, oh, such a good word. I would not have thought to use English. Damn.
John Garvens:I'll have to find a way to caption that, like John looking impishly to the side. The video has table of contents here if you wanna know what's in it. I linked to Jean Michel's the Cloud Update channel as well. And then I have starting at the top, the various resources that I was able to pull together. Starting with the main keynote.
John Garvens:Now if you're really interested in knowing the detail, it's on the Salesforce YouTube channel. I I wanna say it's about a forty five minute video or so. This will tell you everything that's on the coming road map, so make sure that you go there. As far as other content, I went into that events portal and I just signed I saw that, hey, here are the sessions that you went to and I thought, oh, well, that's convenient. And so what I've done here is I pulled together the Einstein created bullets, the summaries of what was discussed in these various sessions that I attended along with the presenters and links to their LinkedIn profiles, which took a lot of work, but I hopefully created a resource that will benefit a lot of people.
John Garvens:So as you're looking to learn about Revenue Cloud, go ahead and connect with these people on LinkedIn. These are the product managers, this the product marketing managers, who are on these teams. Some people that we know as well. Matt, we've got Swapnil here. It's Simplest.
John Garvens:He taught me how to create look price rules. I love Swapnil. He's fantastic. So as you go through this, feel free to to look at all these different sessions. We've got the various product managers, etcetera.
John Garvens:And then as you go down, we have that's pretty much it on this. But there's a lot of sessions and a lot of content here to look through. But we can start with overall impressions of Dreamforce this year. I'll go ahead and share some initial thoughts and feel free to chime in after this, everybody. First of all, I was thrilled to see that Revenue Cloud was even mentioned at Dreamforce.
John Garvens:Not only mentioned, but had more Revenue Cloud sessions than I have ever seen in the past. I went to more sessions at Dreamforce than I've ever gone to combined in this Dreamforce just because there was finally Revenue Cloud content. So I was really excited about that. I went to tons of sessions and saw tons of people. The most exciting piece for me about that was seeing the lines out the door down the hallway of people trying to get into these sessions.
John Garvens:Every single session I saw was full or standing remotely or lines going out and they had to say, sorry, nobody else can go in because the it is simply too full and we don't have any more space in the room. So I thought that's really exciting, and I was glad to see that. The road map session. I definitely encourage you to watch the road map video. There's a lot of cool stuff coming out.
John Garvens:And, yeah, it's new software. New software has bugs. Bugs get worked out. It'll get better. As a mentor of mine said, there's light at the end of the tunnel, and it's not an oncoming train.
John Garvens:So I'm excited about the future of the product because it's far more comprehensive as a solution. Rather than having to get a bunch of different products, we're now going to have one thing to rule them all. Wondering to rule them all, I guess we could say, if we wanna start stealing metaphors from other parts of life. And then I saw lots of Salesforce friends and that was basically my takeaway. So I I hung out with Salesforce friends.
John Garvens:We tried to do a revenue cloud crawl where we met for a couple of sessions and then went to the Dream Fest afterwards. I was hoping it would be bigger and there weren't very many people, but my solution next time is to create a pirate flag, that Jolly Roger flag with revenue cloud crawl across the the bottom and then lead the way with with a pirate flag because we're in Revenue Cloud, kind of the pirates of this here at Salesforce universe. Matt, you were also at Dreamforce. What did you see and and notice that stood out to you in this year's Dreamforce?
Matt Coker:Yeah, like you said, I was super excited by how many people were attending all the events. Was just crazy. You couldn't even find a seat. Like even if you got inside the events, you'd stand up and put your headphones on and be entertained by all the successful implementations and the different companies that have benefited from CPQ in the past and what their experience was and sharing that experience with all of us was fantastic. Hearing Logic present all of their updates about what they're bringing forth and how they're making Revenue Cloud a better system for those who have more data driven type sales actions.
Matt Coker:So it is just great to hear all the presentations overall.
John Garvens:Yeah. And you mentioned specifically CPQ and billing. There were sessions, if you are on those legacy products, there were some sessions that were related to both of the original CPQ and billing products, too. So, it wasn't just about the new product. There were also presentations about using consumption schedules and Salesforce billing and a couple of other things where there were some cool takeaways.
Matt Coker:Yeah. And even advanced approvals, making their sales process a lot smoother without having to manually approve things outside of the system. Salesforce had their presentation as well where they were going to go over all the changes they were making in their roadmap even internally. So that was pretty interesting to hear.
John Garvens:Yeah. That those sessions were really cool too. So for those who don't know, there's, Project Lotus is going on at Salesforce. Org 62 is the sixty second org ever created on the Salesforce platform. That is the instance that Salesforce uses to run Salesforce.
John Garvens:This thing is a monster. It has the biggest lead assignment rule I have ever seen in my life. If you printed it out, it would probably be like six pages long. I was I found out I had view setup acts, view set up or whatever when I worked there. And so I looked around a little bit.
John Garvens:This is a monster. Well, Salesforce, after twenty five years of using Salesforce, is going to replatform the whole thing. And org SF is the new org and Project Lotus is what's gonna be the next probably three to five year project to get from org 62 to org SF. And they had some sessions there around the revenue cloud part of it, quote to cash. And how is Salesforce going to move from its current quote to cash solutions?
John Garvens:And they have more than one, like, with all these different acquisitions, each acquired company has its own stack related to QuotaCash. And so what is it gonna look like for what a 80,000 person software company that's been using Salesforce for twenty five years and building out all sorts of stuff to cut over to a new platform? I'll be honest. I'm glad I'm not on that project. I would be so stressed.
John Garvens:Kudos to the people who are making this happen. Those sessions are worth a watch as well. You were saying, Matt?
Matt Coker:Yep. Two more things. One is, I've been on projects for the past couple years where I had to work completely remote. I haven't been on-site in years due to COVID. Being there at Dreamforce in person was awesome to meet some of my customers who I've never met in person before.
Matt Coker:And it's just so much And you can't recognize like them. You see on a Zoom call and then you meet them in person and it's just so cool to just have a conversation face to face talk about the success of your implementation about all the good things you've accomplished. Yeah.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:Fun part is guessing heights and then you're surprised one way or the other. Is that what happened? One must be small.
John Garvens:Think I already knew you were tall,
Jean-Michel Tremblay:but I know I got surprised by meeting some people.
John Garvens:Or it's like their LinkedIn profile or the photo that they use in Zoom, but they're never on video is 10 years old. And then you they're like, hey. So John. And you're going, who are you? We've been talking for six months.
John Garvens:Oh, yeah. Of course. Jean Michel or Wayne, I don't know if you had a chance to watch any of the sessions on Dreamforce or heard anything, any comments to add to that?
Jean-Michel Tremblay:Quickly watched some of the highlights. I guess I'm curious about the advanced configurator and both of you mentioned Logic earlier. And now it's interesting that Logic is pushing out a CPQ tool and Salesforce is pushing out an advanced configurator.
John Garvens:Awfully convenient or coincidental, isn't it? Yes. And Logic is having some some of their own pricing and things too. They're going more omnichannel. They got ecommerce capabilities.
John Garvens:It's good to have a working knowledge of a lot of different tools, I think. Because if you're if you're only I think a gap for me early on in my in my expertise and the development of it was just only knowing Salesforce CPQ. This is all that exists on Earth. But you gotta be realistic about this and understand that large companies especially are gonna have multiple tools. It's not just gonna all run on Salesforce or whatever.
John Garvens:So you have to be at least conversationally fluent in many different products, processes, systems, etcetera, to to be effective, not just as a consultant, but as as an internal stakeholder who's working for a company.
Wayne Salazar:Really interested in figuring out logic and how it's gonna fit into all of this with Revenue Cloud. I have not wrapped my head around it.
John Garvens:Yeah, same.
Wayne Salazar:It just seems like you kind of have to do this big complicated implementation in Revenue Cloud, and then you also have to do this big complicated implementation and logic on top of it, which just somehow can't be like, please, somebody tell me that's not true. And you know, why? And I guess the why is, you know, if you're using the legacy CPQ, and you're stuck to that is kind of as far as I have figured this out, then maybe you want to do this logic implementation to kind of make it work. Seems like if you're going to go to all that trouble, you probably ought to just go the Revenue Cloud route because that is me what is so elegant about Revenue Cloud is that, you know, you're going to have this flexible system for dealing with products and features and options and bundles, and pricing and all of that, that is going to work seamlessly with a commerce site. But you know, not everybody's going to be able to make that switch in terms of, know, the end user companies, right?
Wayne Salazar:Mean, have this whole tie into the design industry and they're on Shopify and they like Shopify and it works great for them. And they're loath to consider moving to a commerce site. And there really is no, at this point, there isn't a compelling reason to do that unless they really have the resources to also bring logic into the picture.
John Garvens:What would also be interesting is what if Shopify started to develop direct quoting capabilities? And what if Shopify made their own portal and self-service functions? I mean, that's something they could maybe add to their product roadmap. They already got the ecommerce and they have a massive footprint in the ecommerce space. I think what after Amazon, Shopify is one of the number one platforms or something like that for ecommerce.
Wayne Salazar:Have a limited quoting capability.
John Garvens:I didn't know that.
Wayne Salazar:Yeah. You can definitely put together a quote, and you can have up to three options on a product.
John Garvens:Oh.
Wayne Salazar:You could buy a rug in blue, red, and gold, champagne gold. Okay. So you can, you know, make that selection and the pricing can be different. And on the back end, like on the front end, you're making those selections, but on the back end, you're going to have product in blue, product in gold,
John Garvens:product in
Wayne Salazar:red as products. So it's very much like a commerce site.
John Garvens:Yeah. You basically have a whole bunch of flat SKUs for every potential combination of something that could be Very interesting. The the conversation about the elegance. I think that's a good time to start to pivot to the second bullet of the agenda, which is the release notes because we started off with Salesforce Revenue Cloud. I'm just pulling up my notes.
John Garvens:We started off with Salesforce Revenue Cloud really being focused on getting to parity with Salesforce CPQ first, and then Salesforce Billing, and then expanding from there. Where the future of Revenue Cloud is going to extend far beyond CPQ and billing ever did. Because we're starting to get more complex with orders. We could talk a little bit about dynamic revenue orchestration and how that works and and these other items that are gonna start to get onto the road map. JM, I'll pull up your article here on your website, wherever I put it.
John Garvens:There we go. So Jean Michel wrote a quick synopsis of the release notes for Revenue Cloud in the winter twenty five release. You can go to the cloudupdate.co and find this there. Do you wanna walk us through this really quick and give us a starting point for the conversation?
Jean-Michel Tremblay:Yeah. So, usage based products, right? We all thought that was missing in V1 of Revenue Cloud. So, it's interesting that it's now on there. I will say that I know some people have gotten it working.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:I'm not one of them. It requires a lot of record creation.
Wayne Salazar:Well, I just find the documentation so thin.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:Yeah, I guess that's the add on issue, right? You need to create a lot of records and also there isn't much documentation on what you actually need to create and what order they should be created on. So it's a bit, I mean, and it's expected, but you know.
John Garvens:How similar is it to building consumption pricing and Salesforce billing? Is it the same where it is you're building, you got your consumption schedules and tiers and then you
Jean-Michel Tremblay:No. There's additional records you need to create beyond that. It's more records than what you needed to do for CPQ usage billing. I
John Garvens:see. Okay. So, it sounds like there's probably a lot more coming in that as it ripens. Does that sound
Jean-Michel Tremblay:Yeah, that's not compatible yet with billing, which, you know, also came out with one through '25 yet. So, I imagine that it's going to be coming out as well.
John Garvens:That's an invoice management, right?
Jean-Michel Tremblay:Invoice management. Yeah.
John Garvens:Have you done that?
Jean-Michel Tremblay:So, I made a video on this one. It's fairly, you know, so far it works fine. I mean, I haven't done a full implementation, right? I got end to end on it and I got invoice generation working. I was happy about that.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:I haven't tested yet tax integration or anything like that, but it does seem to offer similar flex we had in billing. Fully manages volume better than billing did. That's on billing projects that I worked on. That was an issue, right? Anything above 100 lines is getting dangerous with Salesforce Billing.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:So, and they're using, it seems they're using data pipelines, and everything is batched in the background. So, I'm hoping this leads to better performance with larger scale, well, orders and invoices.
John Garvens:Okay. I think you also had a video about Ramp Deals. Were you starting?
Jean-Michel Tremblay:Yeah, yeah. Did a quick one on Ramp Deals. You touched on REM deals. And I think what stuff, I guess, not only REM deals, but I think about everything else, is we've been living in this CPQ space, right? And we've had the pain of, you know, some stuff in CPQ.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:So, we're getting a new product, and we're like, this should work and solve all the issues that we had with the previous product. And then we work with RUM deals, and it doesn't actually solve what was wrong with MDQ. So, we feel like we're in the same place, but I think where there's hope, obviously, is, you know, this is going to keep getting better, right?
John Garvens:Yeah. Going keep getting updates are and hundreds of engineers working on this product around the So, the amount of investment that I've seen from Salesforce on RevenueCloud RevenueCloud is something I've not seen almost in any other product. I mean, you think about it, a lot of the Salesforce products that been released in the last, say, ten years, a lot of them come through acquisitions. One of the first times that that's happened. Slack was purchased and Quip was purchased and name insert tool, specific Salesforce product going back to, I don't know, Service Cloud was built in house, but there's a whole period where things started to be like, Hey, have this new product.
John Garvens:Yes, but you bought it. Somebody else built it. It's interesting to see that develop as well. How's advanced approval is coming from
Jean-Michel Tremblay:the previous, sorry, Wayne, go ahead.
Wayne Salazar:Doctor. Well, what I'm finding in this release is that, you know, it's like you were saying usage based products, you know, that the pricing, it's not working yet with billing. It's like in the last release, the dynamic revenue orchestrator is not yet working with orders. So you have these different pieces where you're hoping, like you were saying with ramp deals, and it's not. And then because they're still working on it, and then you have like all of these pieces that are being worked on in that fashion that then need to connect to each other and those connections are not yet happening.
Wayne Salazar:And so what it seems like they're doing is making all of us UAT testers. And, know, I'm realizing like, okay, my expectation was this is GA. This is all like ready, it's ready to go. And it's, you know, it's not yet, you know? And I think they are relying on us early adopters to kind of help them think through all the use cases and figure out where some of the problems are.
John Garvens:A project you do where that last 20% takes 80% of the energy, because there's so much stuff that you just didn't think about. You're building or the Gateway Arch in St. Louis where you build one half and you build one half and then you get up to the end and you realize, oh, shit. We're off by four inches. So you're pouring water in the freezing winter on one side trying to get it to contract just enough to get the other Coker's smiling because he used to live in St.
John Garvens:Louis. But this whole it's it's some of it some of it is like, really? We didn't think of that? But then other parts you're going, yeah, that's that's a that's a challenging situation to try to engineer. And I don't know how trying to hurt all of the cats on a project of this magnitude or product of this magnitude has got to be a hell of a challenge.
John Garvens:How does advance approvals look so far from what you guys have seen? I haven't had a chance to mess around with it yet. So, when
Jean-Michel Tremblay:you create a flow now in Winthrop 25, if you have Revenue Cloud, you've got one view type of flow that you can create. It's well, two actually, because it could be either record triggered approval orchestration or auto launched approval orchestration. Okay. So, record triggered, I guess I don't see yet what the use case is, right? Like, launch and I mean, I see it, but I, you know, it's not something that I've ever had on a project.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:Like, as soon as this happens on a quote, launch the approval. Typically, I don't know, in my mind, you're used to like, Hey, you want to submit for approval? Click submit for approval. That's what happens, which would be the auto launch. But that's, I mean, it's available.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:So it's cool, right? It's one more option.
Wayne Salazar:My assumption was this, the use case of like, any discount up to 5% is automatically approved. So you could do that. You could just have it marked as approved. Okay.
John Garvens:I have had clients before it got contentious because they were saying, well, why do I have to click submit for approval? It should just be approved until it's not. And I'm going, Yeah, but the system needs to know when you're done with the quote. And they're going, Yeah, but I shouldn't need to click submit for approval. And it was this whole back and forth because in my head, thinking architecturally, I need some sort of systematic trigger to say, I'm done.
John Garvens:And then once the system knows I'm done, it submits for approval, goes to my boss, goes to finance, whatever it happens to need to do. But they're just saying, Yeah, it should just read your mind and know when you're done. What? That does it.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:Don't how you're ready to submit for approval. And now you can lock records in advance approvals and a new one.
John Garvens:That's Oh, really?
Jean-Michel Tremblay:That's fun. Yeah. Because that was always an issue, right? Then you have to play with record types and visibility Haskell: and
John Garvens:all that stuff. Now, you can simply can log the record, I will say that dynamic forms helped a ton with that because then I created I duplicated my sections in the page And then one was read only, one was editable and all this other stuff. But yeah, that created dynamic forms is really cool. I really liked that add the dynamic buttons and all of that on the more just general Salesforce admin stuff.
Wayne Salazar:Really good point that you've made though, about kind of knowing when you're done putting the quote together.
John Garvens:When is the user done?
Wayne Salazar:Because if you are going to use the set up a flow to automatically approve anything up to 5%, then in essence, you're gonna potentially be calling that flow like a gazillion times before you're done putting the quote together. Since you're being charged per call, that is maybe not a good thing to configure.
John Garvens:And that's a good point. Because one of the things, I'm not an API guy, but I need to get a fundamental working knowledge of APIs now because my architectural decisions will could potentially influence price that the customer is paying for the software massively. If I'm a lazy architect, and I do not architect an elegant, simple solution that uses as much as needed, but as few as little as possible, then that could have a negative impact on my clients. So to take care of them and their budget in this new world that we're operating in where everything is API first and we do have a consumption component to this, it would be wise of all of us to get a solid understanding of what triggers an API call that is rateable and how we can reduce that number to the amount that we need, but nothing more than what we need. So, it's a big exercise to figure out that line.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:And that's still a question that I have, right? Is a licensed user triggering AP, well, he is going to trigger API events, but do they count against your account? Right? Because you're already paying 200 a month for that user, right? List price.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:Sure. So, are you also consuming API credits, right? Because it makes sense if I'm using, if I'm on a website or an app and I call the pricing API of Salesforce, I'm consuming API credits, which makes sense and I'm going get billed for them. But for example, I've built a component to to clone quote line, quotes and quote lines, like clone with related. We're so used to it in CPQ, it wasn't in there in Revenue Cloud.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:I was like, how do I get this working? So I built this, but it does call the API. I'm a licensed user. Am I consuming credits or is it included in my license? I don't know.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:And licenses come with a preset number of events, right? Sorry.
Wayne Salazar:Well, my understanding is you're consuming a creditor being charged for overage or what have you just forever.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:A licensed user is supposed to come with a certain number of events, right? So I guess at least it's covered to an extent, right? But to your point, John, if it is counted and billed against and you design poorly and consume too many, then you're going to come out with ability in it.
John Garvens:Imagine too, like most of it. And I need to dig deeper into this myself so I understand it. I imagine as you have more users, you also get a bigger bank of credits to draw from and all that other stuff.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:That's how it was explained in the initial training, right? It was, you know, one user comes with, remember I the number 500 credits a month. And then you can buy extra on top of
John Garvens:it. Sure.
Wayne Salazar:Right. Which is, you know, they have this instant pricing toggle on the quote, or you're probably gonna wanna educate your users not to use that all the time.
John Garvens:Which I don't trust users.
Wayne Salazar:Which you don't trust, of course, that's sort of like, why do you even have it there? Yeah. Or if you have it there, then we need to have like some sort of control over who gets to use it and when.
John Garvens:I mean, I tended to be on the verge, on the border of totalitarian dictator and just control freak when it comes to system administration. So, don't want the user I wanna make it impossible for them to do the wrong thing. I wanna keep this as efficient and elegant as I can to keep the price low. We're investing a lot in this and yeah, it's gonna help us make money, but we don't wanna throw the baby out with bathwater and all that stuff. Well, isn't it
Matt Coker:just about keeping the price low? I mean, the the user the system would be intuitive enough for the user to know what to do without doing the wrong thing upfront in the first place. Right?
John Garvens:Fair point.
Matt Coker:It's like validation to prevent them from doing something that they shouldn't even have the ability do.
John Garvens:Yeah. Validations are so frustrating. Just hide the thing so they can't do it wrong. Yeah. Guided products selection, guided selling, how does that look?
Jean-Michel Tremblay:We all have opinions about guided selling and
John Garvens:Should we move along?
Jean-Michel Tremblay:Glorified filtering system, which really you could already do on the right hand side anyway. So I never really got into it because every time the customer is like, Hey, we wanna use guided selling. I'm like, Oh, the filters on the right hand side.
John Garvens:Guided selling is getting back to CPQ, guided selling customers use it all the time. It's always in the demo and they use the phrase. And to me, reminds me of the princess bride when it's inconceivable. You keep using that word. I don't think it means that because customers think it's like this magical forest and we walk down the trail with this wizard who's gonna help you.
John Garvens:It's a product filter. That's all it is. Search filters are technical tactical filters where if you know the specific data point you wanna find, but if you don't know what that data point is, that's where guided selling is more of a functional based search filter. But both of them just whittle it down. Large transaction support up to a thousand lines.
John Garvens:I was excited to see that. That was a big gap in CPQ. And I imagine, I mean, I don't have a safe harbor slide, but I imagine that these sorts of limits will continue to increase as time goes on and get then more
Jean-Michel Tremblay:competition, so logic made it clear that it wasn't a limit on their new CPQ tool, right? You can have thousands of lines in their CPQ tool. So, we know what they're Which
John Garvens:is a massive need for companies like yeah, it's a massive need for, say, communications companies where I want to buy 10,000 phone phone or whatever. Transaction line editor groups, quote line groups.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:So that's I
John Garvens:would have thought that would be much earlier in the rollout because it doesn't seem unless there's some extra functionality baked into it that we didn't have in C and
Jean-Michel Tremblay:Well, you can do auto grouping. So, you have an ungrouped quote and you have the product family column on your line editor and click group by. And then if you have, you know, 30 products, 10 per product family, it's gonna create three groups, one per product family and name the groups based on the product family right away or any other, well, not any other fields. I wrote a, made a video and a post about it, and there are limits. Not every field can be a groupable, but a lot of them can.
John Garvens:Is is it kinda like summary reports then in a sense where you just say, yeah, group by this column?
Jean-Michel Tremblay:Somewhat. Yeah.
John Garvens:Kind of a thing. You had a little section here, honorable mentions, nested option groups and product bundles, creating a custom product browsing experiences and new actions and configuration rules. Any of that you wanna touch on?
Jean-Michel Tremblay:No, these I guess were smaller stuff that weren't very detailed in the release notes when I read through them nested option groups. So, you can do nested option grouping. So, that's, I mean, it's interesting group section, as I
John Garvens:said Group in section, yeah.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:Customer experience. I think this one's gonna be interesting because the browsing experience so far, you know, kind of limited to that. And I don't know if that actually allows you to skip the catalog selection, but I feel like catalog selection on the add products page is gonna be a pain right away on any product project, right? It's gonna be the first thing. Can we bypass this screen?
Jean-Michel Tremblay:Yes, know. That's gonna be the first question on every project.
John Garvens:Yeah, I was a little confused about that because I thought, well, what I like to do on the CPQ side of things is if we can determine the price book on the opportunity level, let's just set it there so the user never has to choose it on the quote. We know it's gonna be right, all this other stuff, and then we filter. And then I like to use the the default value on that product's custom action. So they go right into the product selection screen. I would love something very similar because if a user creates a quote, why not immediately take them into the product selection screen?
John Garvens:Especially if we know that maybe the business has only one product catalog. Well, if you got one price book and you wanna have have one product catalog, why not kinda treat it like, know, you if you return a guided selling result that has only one record, you bounce right into configuration. It selects it for you because there's only one result. So I think something like that could be cool. I don't know if we'd be able to do that through the APIs and build maybe a custom UI to put on the front end to make that easier.
John Garvens:Yeah.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:Think that was true in CPQ as well. There's just a lot of places where you can easily improve the user experience, right? I think one of the first times we had a deeper discussion is when I posted that ad product flow action for CPQ, where you can create your quote and add products using the API in CPQ, which shaves you a bunch of clicks, right? Because you can just create and add products right away. And I think that's true beyond CPQ and Salesforce, right?
Jean-Michel Tremblay:There's a lot of places where you end up having to do 10 clicks where I'm like, you know, this action could be done in two clicks, right?
John Garvens:Yeah.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:I want less time spent working in there.
Wayne Salazar:Try to close time, short time, it takes you a week.
John Garvens:I was speaking to someone who's probably gonna become my business attorney that I use right before this call. And he was saying there was some law that came out today that, essentially says that you have to make a one click. So one click unsubscribe from a subscription service. Like this bullshit about we're gonna hide it and it's impossible. Submit a case and then that logs an email.
John Garvens:Now, why am I talking in the email thread? Let me close my account. I don't want it. Well, we have to verify your account. I'm in the app.
John Garvens:How do you not know that I'm the, what is this?
Wayne Salazar:What you were saying JM about like creating a component that's going to create these various records for you with a click and or three. I want that kind of throughout the system. Like anybody who's familiar with Salesforce Billing knows that, you know, you have to create like a gazillion records that are all kind of linked to each other.
John Garvens:Yeah.
Wayne Salazar:And they're, you know, they're like junction objects and stuff tying stuff together and it's tedious. And just seems and so RLM is basically all built like that. There's just a ton of record creation. And it just seems like you ought to be able to have a screen where talk about, what people think a guided selling experience is like, once you pick this thing, what are the pick list values? Then like click it and create all those records for you.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:Yeah, I created a package and I know we talked about it at some point, Wayne. I think I'm gonna publish it early next week. It's not security reviewed, but I'm like gonna ask for beta testing by the community. I'm gonna have the community UAT to reuse your words, Wayne. And the package as a quick product create where the product gets created along with the product selling model option and the price book entry.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:Then I created on top of that a clone with related for the product as well. So, if you've got bundle, you can clone with related, which we could do in CPQ, Not available yet. So, then it's the cloning quote with related as well, which isn't available, that's in there. And cloning quote line, which you can't do yet also in the standard transaction editor.
John Garvens:Nice.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:And the other one I'm working on, I don't know Wayne, if you've looked at pricing, you've got a contract price adjustment schedule, then you need to create your price adjustment tiers. So, I also this one won't be in the first release, but I'm working on something to make that into one screen instead of 25 clicks.
Wayne Salazar:Excellent. You just need to keep making these things and you'll make a lot of money.
John Garvens:Oh, 100%. I had back in the CPU days, I guess you could do this with say, a visual flow or something like this, but I wanted to call it the bundle builder. Because building a bundle in CPQ is a pain in the ass. And there's so much of it. For example, my client, they have the bundle structure is basically identical for 20 products.
John Garvens:All they need to do is take everything, the features, the options, the constraints, everything, and clone that and put it under a different product record. That's all that I wanna do. So thankfully, I've this client, I've been working with them a little over a year. This is the one that I haven't sent an email. No messaging in a year.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:What's nursery is this?
John Garvens:Trello. It's wild. Which card? Consistent, streamline business processes. We basically treat each card like its own email thread.
John Garvens:And that's really all it is. We put the inbox on the board now. So, the, he's got six certifications now. He he manufactured his own bundle data for this situation and loaded it into the sandbox himself.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:I'm a
John Garvens:damn good teacher. Anyway, the bundle builder. If somebody in the industry wants to make that thing, please do it. I I'm not the best flow guy in the world. I can make one if I have to.
John Garvens:Well, I
Wayne Salazar:have to say that is a nice thing that RLM has done is that, you create a, what is it a product category?
John Garvens:Yeah, I love that function. That's fantastic. I was using that with a payment processing company to set up their different attributes for when you swipe the credit card, there's usually some sort of nominal fee and a percentage of the transaction. But that's a little bit different for each type of credit card, Amex versus Mastercard or whatever. And then on top of that, sometimes you can edit those and sometimes you can't.
John Garvens:So all of these types of ideas is gonna be so much faster to build in Revenue Cloud. And there was a well, but we wanna see how the administration really is. Once I had all this stuff up there, like, well, but change that and change this and change this. Make a new one of these. And it'll go boom, boom, boom, knocking it out like a live administration demo.
John Garvens:I like I like to I like to ride on that wire, you know. We got a few minutes left. If you guys are cool going over a few minutes, I just wanna talk briefly on Revenue Club careers. What the hell should I do with my career right now? Because I spent the last personally, I spent since twenty sixteen ish basically working exclusively on CPQ stuff.
John Garvens:And now I gotta learn this new product. But how's that gonna go? I don't know yet. Logic's already out there. People told me I should've learned that.
John Garvens:Do I learn this? I can't learn them all. Becoming an expert in all of these tools is out of the out of the question. Plus, think logic requires coding. I'm not a developer yet.
John Garvens:So that's a new skill set I would have to do. What do you guys think about this?
Wayne Salazar:I do think that if you know CPQ, you're not going to forget it. So that's great. Have that.
John Garvens:How could you?
Wayne Salazar:Right? You're going to have whatever career opportunities come along for that. But then, you know, if you're that admin type of person, definitely RLM is the future. I mean, can't imagine that CPQ is going to die. I think CPQ has written for how many years now without any meaningful update, And it's been fine and people are implementing it new.
Wayne Salazar:They're
John Garvens:still buying it.
Wayne Salazar:Yeah, they're still buying. They're still gonna. I think it's and it doesn't make sense for smaller businesses to go into RLM.
John Garvens:It's fifty years still the right fit for some companies.
Wayne Salazar:Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, you can either stay put. Can Well, think it depends
John Garvens:on the career stage
Wayne Salazar:too. Like,
John Garvens:we're talking. You're you're looking to, I think, retire next year or retire ish next year. We'll say retire ish. And you got all this body of knowledge in CPQ. How much do you invest in learning the new product versus somebody like myself, where I have, you know, a few more years perhaps.
John Garvens:And to me, I don't know that I have as much of an option in that. I think I need to enable myself on this new product. I need to become and it's it's useful that there are many concepts and principles that are transferable. The things are called different things. The fields are called different things.
John Garvens:There's a there's a more complex and and and rich data model. However, if you have the core knowledge of CPQ already, why not? I had a person ask as well, should I get the CPQ certification? Absolutely. Why not?
John Garvens:It looks great on your resume. It's a damn hard exam. So if you pass it, thumbs up. And it gives you the general conceptions that you need to know and the principles to understand for whatever quote to cash system is in the future. Matt or
Jean-Michel Tremblay:I think if you understand the process, right? I think there's a big, you know, anyone can be technical, I think. Or rather, I feel like more people are technical than people can talk business. And I think that's a big gap in a lot of people's careers. You can't actually have the business discussion and that's what you're getting paid for.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:Right, John? That's why people are giving you all their money, right? That's because you can talk business.
John Garvens:Rain and over here.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:I mean, but it really is, right? Because if you're, if you know all the technical stuff, but we have to hide you in a corner because you can't speak with the customer, You need to be able to talk through that process, That quota cache, and it's going to be different in different verticals. So, think getting to know better some verticals, if you don't know any yet, right? Just speaking their language. Because if you're going sit in front of a manufacturing customer, you need to know their language.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:The same thing happened to me when I started to do some revenue recognition project. You end up in front of the, you know, accountants and finance people, and then, you know, quickly they're going to realize, Hey, you can't speak my language. So, you better ramp up quickly and be able to talk that language. Or they're going to say, you know, he's not working You with
John Garvens:know, Oh, the CFO just asked me a question. I don't know what that acronym means. Uh-oh. Yeah, something something ASC six zero six. Don't ask me what that is, but I know that I'm supposed to throw that word out there.
John Garvens:What about you, Kocher? What do you think?
Matt Coker:Yeah, I come from more of the admin background myself, so I'm more of points and clicks over code and I'm more of a business facing individual. So most of my interactions with the client is requirements gathering, documenting those requirements, making sure I understand and know how to communicate it to the developers or, you know, I can pick up some admin tasks myself if needed. So I think going down more of the RLM route is probably something more of what interests me based on my background and my experience so far in my career in Salesforce. I think there's a lot of opportunities available there in that space. But as I said, looking at the verticals and what verticals you're working into, you need to know where sales are heading.
Matt Coker:If you're more data driven type sales motions for your clients, I think logic might probably be more of that career path, more technical, more dev heavy. You know what you want to sell upfront and point and click and select pick list values and you have your pre configured bundles. But like you said, either way, having that knowledge, regardless of what tool you're using, if you know the process flow and what a good user experience looks like, having those conversations with your customer and designing your system to process in that fashion and getting alignment with the business on that process. I think both are ample opportunities. And CPQ is not going anywhere.
Matt Coker:Who are migrating from CPQ to RLM, you're gonna have to migrate from CPQ to RLM literally.
John Garvens:Gonna have have somebody who's enough of a CPQ expert to reverse engineer all the crazy shit they've built over the years and customizations and see how that's gonna map into the new product as well. Exactly.
Wayne Salazar:And here's a question. What do you guys think about learning RLM if you don't know CPQ? Like, I don't think I could.
John Garvens:It might be easier in a like a crawl, walk, run learning to learn CPQ first anyway.
Wayne Salazar:Yeah.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:Could be.
John Garvens:Yeah. There you go. Go to my YouTube channel because I got a whole bunch of CPU videos on there. You can watch them and start learning for free. So I think if I could sum up the whole career thing, technical skills are important.
John Garvens:However, I was I would argue that the soft skills are more important than that. The business skills, there's some advice the CEO gave to me a long time ago when I was in a role, at a small shop, in a leadership role. And I said, hey. What advice would you have to a young person in a leadership role at a small company? And he said, understand the mechanics of the business and how those mechanics tie to financial results.
John Garvens:So operations and commerce. How does the business sell stuff and make money? All businesses need to sell stuff and make money. If they don't do one of those two things, they're not in business very long. And so if you can understand the principles of how businesses work, you don't need an MBA for this.
John Garvens:I have a fucking bachelor of music degree in trombone performance, and and then I'm I've accidentally my way into the Salesforce ecosystem. So you do not need an MBA for this. If you have one, great. Matt, you have one. Great.
John Garvens:But you don't need one. What you need is the ability to work with people, the ability to help people think through difficult situations and figure out what the best path forward is, and understanding that businesses are always trying to make money and save money. And the difference between the two is profit. If you can help with those three levers, you'll find jobs for a long, long time. And with that, I know we're a little over time.
John Garvens:If you like it, leave some comments. Let them let us know what you think. I wanna bring on other people as well in the future. So we'll we'll try to keep this going. Maybe quarterly, we'll do a revenue cloud roundtable discussion and keep everybody up to date on what's going on in the ecosystem as we see it as those boots on the ground implementing this stuff for clients in the real world or our own companies, whatever the case may be.
John Garvens:Anything else to add before we head out?
Jean-Michel Tremblay:Thanks for having us. Thanks for setting it up.
Wayne Salazar:Thank you. And you're saying that, you know, if you people if you like it, comment, it just reminded me of this romance novelist named Barbara Cartland, who I saw interviewed once. And she said, Oh, I love it when people say I love what you do. Tell me again, tell me you love me.
John Garvens:Yes, tell us how great we are. We will love it.
Jean-Michel Tremblay:Positive comments only, please.