Nicolas Gerard

Salesforce won’t invest more in CPQ. The market sentiment says so. Since the launch of RLM (Revenue Lifecycle Management), the market sentiment for CPQ has gone down. People are speculating: → no new advancement → differences b/w RLM and CPQ → CPQ as an outdated tool and more. Here’s the most absurd yet believable speculation: In light of RLM, Salesforce will discontinue CPQ in 2-3 years. But all of this may be just that - speculation. There is nothing to worry, yet. Because RLM isn’t ready to use. It is still in beta. I’ve been getting a lot of queries around - how to migrate from CPQ to RLM. My answer - There is no straight forward way. Even if we do, the migration is going to be costly. What do you think about the future of Salesforce CPQ? #cpq #salesforce #salesforcecpq #rlm

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This Salesforce blog by Amber Armstrong (Oberg) is 💫 . Stat below but TL;DR: 86% of buyers want their goals understood but nearly 60% say sales reps don't understand them. SELLERS: if you take the time to understand your prospect's goals, you will win. Good old fashioned being a good human and working hard ALWAYS wins the day. Buyers demand personalization* 18. 86% of business buyers are more likely to buy if companies understand their goals. 19. But 59% say most sales reps don’t take the time to understand them. 20. 84% of business buyers expect sales reps to act as trusted advisors. 21. But 73% say most sales interactions feel transactional. *The data in this section comes from from the Salesforce State of the Connected Customer report.

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We know that keeping track of sales commission can be challenging. With so many deals to manage, it’s only a matter of time before something slips through the cracks. With Salesforce Spiff, you finally have a fast, easy, and reliable way to track and manage sales comp! 💸 Ready to see how Salesforce Spiff can make your life easier? Let's chat! https://lnkd.in/eSpgMU_4

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Sales is evolving, and Salesforce Sales Cloud is helping sellers evolve too! Here is a recap of how they are going about this from my experience at Dreamforce this week. Learn more: https://sforce.co/3B41QLF #SalesforcePartner #salesblazer #DF24

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💸 How can Salesforce ISVs use tiered pricing and multi-year contracts? 😎 Clip from discussion with Chirag Mehta, Founder Satrang Technologies, an ISV partner with multiple paid apps on AppExchange. 😎 The full Video podcast will premier soon on 🔗 https://lnkd.in/gdkzhmsu #Salesforce #AppExchange #Startups #ISVs #PDOs #TagsPodcast

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I like money. A lot. I also like saving money. (So I can spend more of it later 😂). So when looking at what SaaS to integrate into our marketing and sales stack, Total Cost of Ownership is a pretty huge metric for us. https://buff.ly/3SexH1J #salesforce #hubspot #finance #marketing

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The top leaders are able to answer the most critical business question: Are you going to meet, beat, or miss on revenue? Spoiler alert: The answer lies in your revenue cadence. It’s the operating system for your org that helps you run revenue like a process every day, every week, and every month of the quarter. When done right, you can create, convert, and close revenue repeatedly and predictably. But if there’s even a slight leak, you’re leaving millions on the table. To help you protect your revenue, we’re hosting Charge: The Revenue Summit virtually on May 8th. You’ll hear from impressive RevOps leaders like Scott Peyser (SVP, RevOps, Clari) and Jaclyn Spillane (Director, Innovation PMO, Genesys) on how to design and run efficient revenue cadences to help you capture more revenue. RSVP here: https://lnkd.in/gFW5nxX7

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Using 2 CRMs? Here is a cool automation I built for #RevOps to manage leads coming in from HubSpot then making their way to Salesforce. This will help you stay on track for the planning season. Additionally, Fullcast: The Intelligent Go-to-Market Platform, will help you automate the rest of your planning process! https://lnkd.in/gg6CbrNC

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90% of top-performing companies use incentive programs to reward their sales associates, but manually managing complex incentive compensation plans can be difficult and time-consuming. Today, Salesforce announces the immediate availability of the Salesforce Spiff incentive compensation management add-on for Sales Cloud. With Spiff, revenue professionals can get a handle on complex incentive compensation plans and quickly understand the factors influencing revenue performance. Learn more:

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When do PLG companies need professional services? Brent Ludwig, Head of PS at Celigo, shares insights from a long career of having built PS teams at Salesforce, Zendesk, and Gong. Key takeaways: - PLG companies often reluctantly add professional services as they move upmarket and realize enterprise clients expect implementation help beyond what CSMs can deliver - PS pitches should be positioned as "success packages" tailored by deal size, not sales segment   - The PS mission is to maximize ARR without losing margin - channel partners handle SMB while an elite internal PS team focuses on strategic enterprise accounts Listen to Brent's lessons learned on balancing customer-centricity, hiring experienced talent, and adapting your leadership toolbox to the company's maturity levels. Read: https://lnkd.in/g3EjcTj5 #ProductLedGrowth #ProfessionalServices #CX #TheLaunchStation

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We're thrilled to introduce Real-Time Integrations with top CRMs like Affinity.co, Attio, Salesforce, HubSpot, Airtable, and many more! 🎉 These integrations will transform your workflow by: 🔄 Syncing Companies and Contacts in Real-Time 🎛️ Offering Fully Customizable Settings 🧠 Automating Data Updates And, with our Push and Pull features, you can enrich your CRM data with Specter's unique growth signals and insights, making your decision-making process faster and more efficient ⚡ Read more in the first comment below 👇

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Great article by Vernon Keenan talking about some of the new Einstein releases and the impact it will have on RevOps market. We've seen Salesforce recently take a number of steps to integrate more data sources between this announcement + Data Cloud and the deepening relationship with Snowflake. We think there is a big opportunity for an AI native company to help unite data across the enterprise sales data stack. That's where Myko comes in, as we build a proprietary knowledge graph of your data during onboarding so you have one layer than can communicate across systems.

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You’ve probably heard the buzz about Salesforce’s next-generation revenue management platform, RLM or Revenue Lifecycle Management, which will eventually become a successor to Salesforce CPQ. As Salesforce’s preferred migration partner from CPQ to RLM, the team here at Prodly has been building the tooling to streamline migration for the past eight months, and I’d like to share some learnings ahead of time. To begin with, there are some fundamental differences between CPQ and RLM. 1️⃣ RLM is built “in core” or inside the Salesforce platform. 2️⃣ RLM  has a much more robust—but also more complex—configuration data model. Whereas CPQ has a pretty flat structure, RLM has multiple levels of hierarchies with product classifications, attributes, and attribute groups to name a few. 3️⃣ RLM is API first, which makes it much more composable and customizable. 4️⃣ RLM is built for omni-channel, so you can expose the same product catalog and pricing to your internal sales team, to partners through a partner portal, or to customers for self-service. All in all, RLM is a highly configurable & flexible but also more complex platform. Stay tuned for the next post in our CPQ to RLM series, where I discuss migrating bundles from CPQ to RLM. #salesforce #revenuecloud #cpq #revenuelifecyclemanagement #rlm #migration

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In last week’s post, I discussed some important differences between CPQ and RLM (https://lnkd.in/gTJ7bU-C). In this week’s post, I’m starting a deeper dive into the mechanics of migration for each of the major areas of CPQ, starting with features and options (or bundles and kits). Migrating features and options from Salesforce CPQ to Revenue Lifecycle Management is a relatively straightforward process — with one exception and some critical considerations. Here’s what you need to know: ✅ MIGRATION 1️⃣ Both CPQ and RLM use the standard Product (Product2) object to represent a SKU, though they enhance it with a different set of fields. This is both good and bad. Good because CPQ and RLM can peacefully co-exist in the same org. Bad because migration is required to move from one to the other. 2️⃣ In CPQ, possible selections within a bundle/kit are stored in Product Options (SBQQ__ProductOption__c) object. These map pretty cleanly to Product Related Component (ProductRelatedComponent) object in RLM. 3️⃣ In CPQ, product options are grouped into Product Features (SBQQ__Feature__c) object. Again, these map pretty cleanly into Component Group (ComponentGroup) object in RLM. *️⃣ The only wrinkle is that in RLM, bundled products must have Type field set to “Bundle”. Since that field can only be set when you create a new Product (Product2) record this means you have to at least duplicate bundled SKUs between CPQ and RLM. ❗ CONSIDERATIONS The object mapping described above achieves what I call a lowest common denominator migration. It will create functional bundles in RLM, but it fails to take advantage of the power of the RLM data model to build a scalable product catalog. For example, RLM allows you to configure Product Classification Components, which are basically placeholders that reference a dynamic product template that gets resolved to actual products at run time. This enhances scalability considerably and facilitates the management of large product catalogs at scale. And there is no equivalent functionality in CPQ. All things considered, this migration allows for a high level of automation, which simplifies the process, but I strongly encourage you to take this opportunity to refactor your product catalog to take full advantage of RLM functionality. Next week I’ll be covering Configuration Attributes. Stay tuned! #salesforce #revenuecloud #cpq #revenuelifecyclemanagement #rlm #migration

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How can Salesforce increase revenue and profitability? Listen to the expert on the topic. Andy Moldenhauer just launched his VLOG - begining with a "Summer Series" - first video is on the Pipeline Inspection Tool designed to increase the quality of your forecast. If you learn something valuable, like it and subscribe to the channel!

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Some great hack by Colby Ricker for troubleshooting #salesforce with AI https://lnkd.in/gYTtvq-s My favorite part is on the proactive stance SF teams can and should take instead of waiting for error messages... "While error messages may be a common use case for those looking to leverage AI in their Salesforce management, there’s another benefit to capitalizing on this technology: proactive problem solving. By using AI, Salesforce teams could determine where potential errors may be lurking and solve them before they even become an issue."

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What co-selling feels like to most AEs: too chaotic, too complicated, too unpredictable. So how do we change that? How about another enablement session, a few more amazing stats on why working with partners is better, maybe another Salesforce field? None of those truly deliver sustainably and at scale… Here’s my take: We need to stop telling AEs that what they do sucks and that they need to change their workflows. Instead: 1️⃣ We need to show up when they have an issue (e.g., a deal that’s stuck) and provide solutions when they need them. 2️⃣ We need to figure out ways to make it ridiculously easy to work with partners. So easy that they don’t need to be trained.

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Marc Benioff emphasized the importance of sales enablement during Salesforce's recent earnings call: 🧐 'The second attribute that's incredibly important for all of our leaders and, you know, in our company or throughout our industry is you might need a much higher level of enablement. What that means is so many people have come into our industry in the last five or even 10 years, you know, a lot of them just need the level of training capability, especially as we move into this new area of artificial intelligence, generative AI, data.' I see every day the impact strong sales enablement has on a GTM team. It’s great to see one of the most forward-thinking SaaS leaders advocate for more enablement! 🚀

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Are you navigating the Salesforce ecosystem? Here’s a quick guide to demo orgs that could turbocharge your next project! ⚡️🌐 Developer Org: Perfect for those in the coding trenches. Pre-sales Org: Customized setups for your client pitches. Trial Orgs: Experience full features with a temporary setup. Why not share your go-to Salesforce demo org and how it elevates your workflow? Let's exchange insights! 💬 🔗 Are you tired of juggling multiple demo environments? Wish there was a way to streamline everything into a single, accessible location? 🌐 We've made it easier than ever to manage all your demo orgs from one dashboard! https://lnkd.in/gnUACSAd #Salesforce #CRM #TechTools #BusinessDevelopment #CloudComputing #SalesforceAdmin #SalesforceDeveloper #Technology #Innovation #DigitalTransformation

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