Decision notes
CPQ or Revenue Cloud: how to decide
They are not two versions of the same product, and the question is not “which is better”. The four criteria that actually decide, and what each answer costs.
How claims are labelled
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The question is usually framed wrong. These are not two
generations of one tool: one is a module you buy and install, the other is part of the
platform. Almost nothing written about one applies to the other — including your integrators’
proposals.
What is not a criterion
Three arguments come up every time and should carry no weight in any decision.
- “It is the future of Salesforce.” Maybe. That says nothing about what it costs you this year, or what you get back.
- “The interface is more modern.” Your sales team spends less time in the screen than in the exceptions. An interface does not fix a commercial rule nobody ever wrote down.
- “We are told the migration is simple.” The script takes days. What takes time is deciding what to carry over, and proving you have not manufactured double billing.
The four criteria that decide
- Does your selling model move? If you have sold the same thing the same way for five years and it works, the existing tool is not your problem. If every quarter brings an offer nobody can configure, this is criterion number one.
- Do you bill the same commitment more than once? Subscriptions, instalments, consumption. If so, billing weighs more in the decision than quoting — and billing is what gets underestimated.
- What happens today at renewal? If someone digs out the old quote and recalculates by hand, you are already paying the price of having no tool, every year, without ever having costed it.
- Are your pricing rules written down anywhere? If the answer is “it depends on the customer”, no tool will save you. That work happens first, and it happens either way.
What each answer costs
| Decision | What it costs | What it saves |
|---|---|---|
| Stay where you are | The invisible annual cost of manual work: renewals recalculated, prices retyped, billing tying someone up every month. | A project. That is a legitimate answer when the model is stable. |
| Move to Revenue Cloud | Modelling the catalogue — almost always the longest part — and carrying over live contracts. | The manual work above, and the invoice errors that always find their way back to a customer. |
| Wait a year | Another year of contracts to carry over, and commercial rules even less written down. | Nothing — unless you use the year to write your catalogue. Which is, on its own, a good reason to wait. |
The question you will be asked too late
What happens to your live contracts? It almost always arrives at the end of a project, at the worst moment. Asked at framing time, it fits in three answers.
- Carry over the active book, not the history. Live contracts exist in the new tool so they can be amended and renewed. Old invoices stay readable where they are.
- Re-bill nothing. Whatever the old tool already invoiced has to be flagged, or the customer receives the same period twice.
- The old billing engine is switched off first, not afterwards. It is the only truly irreversible risk in the exercise.
The technical detail of that migration is published here: carry the active book, not the history.
What to take away
- A stable selling model and written rules: staying where you are is a serious answer, not a failure of nerve.
- If you bill the same commitment more than once, the decision turns on billing, not on quoting.
- The fate of live contracts is settled at framing. Asked at the end, it costs a quarter.
- Writing your catalogue in commercial terms pays off either way, including if you change nothing.
A note on this article?
A correction, different behaviour on your org, a question left open: it is useful, and it gets fixed.