For today’s PE-backed CFOs, staying ahead means staying in sync with the evolving technologies that drive business growth. This requires a critical look at current processes to ensure they’re optimized and powered by the most up-to-date technology.
The landscape of the Q2C offering from Salesforce is evolving right before our eyes. The legacy Salesforce CPQ-managed package was introduced several years ago, just as SaaS-based selling models were becoming popular. At the time of its inception, CPQ was well-positioned to handle the Product, Bundle, Pricing, and recurring contract strategies typically employed in the SaaS world. But the needs of these businesses have evolved, and companies using CPQ have been forced to rely on heavy customizations to account for new business initiatives (such as self-service capability). To address this, Salesforce announced the launch of a new Q2C product called Revenue Cloud Advanced (RCA) last year, and that the legacy CPQ product is now end of sale—meaning there will be no new sales, innovation, or investment for the product.
This has prompted existing CPQ customers to evaluate if they should remain on the legacy tool or transition to RCA. Some customers will decide to conduct business as usual, especially if CPQ is working for the way they sell their products today. However, many other companies will see the advantages and new capabilities of RCA and will opt to transition.
So, for those who want to transition: How do you make it happen without disrupting your day-to-day? At Accordion, we believe in a meticulous, step-by-step approach to ensure that this transition is not only seamless, but also optimized for long-term value creation:
The approach: a phased migration journey
Overhauling any process can feel daunting, and migrating from Salesforce’s CPQ to RCA is no exception. But having a structured plan in place makes it easier, and our approach breaks down the process into several key stages—each aimed at ensuring a smooth transition while minimizing disruptions.
1. Understand your current CPQ environment
Before diving into the migration, it’s crucial to assess the current state of your CPQ system. This involves an in-depth review of your existing CPQ implementation, identifying current pain points, integrations, and data health, including:
- Conducting a comprehensive discovery of your CPQ implementation.
- Documenting pain points and inefficiencies.
- Reviewing current integrations with other business systems.
- Analyzing the health and completeness of CPQ data.
- Evaluating business requirements for the future.
The goal here is to get a clear understanding of your current state and set the stage for a smooth transition to RCA. Also important in this phase is looking ahead at future business initiatives, such as leveraging AI or expanding to omni-channel selling, to ensure that your new RCA can support these goals down the line.
2. Plan the transition
The next step is to design and configure the target RCA environment. This phase will outline the future state and establish a roadmap for migration, including:
- Design definition based on business needs, with considerations for optimizing or improving overall processes leveraging the new tool.
- Planning for data transformation and migration, using tools and accelerators to streamline the process.
- Conducting detailed testing to ensure that all data is accurately migrated.
- Preparing for future business initiatives by ensuring the RCA system is scalable and future-proof.
Once this is complete, you’ll be ready to begin the actual migration process—with a well-defined strategy in place.
3. Execute the transition
This phase is where the bulk of the technical work happens, as it involves the configuration of RCA and the actual transformation of data from your existing CPQ environment to the new RCA platform. This includes:
- Transforming and migrating your data.
- Testing and quality assurance to ensure data integrity.
- Configuring RCA features such as products, bundles, pricing, and discounting.
- Setting up approval processes, output documents, amendments, and renewals.
Don’t forget: it’s crucial to conduct comprehensive testing iteratively during the implementation to verify that everything functions as expected, all components work seamlessly, and there’s minimal disruption to the quote-to-cash cycle.
4. Deploy RCA
The transformation is now complete and tested, which means the next step is deployment. This includes:
- Finalizing the configuration for your new RCA environment.
- Conducting end-user training to ensure smooth adoption.
- Monitoring the deployment closely to resolve any issues quickly.
5. Plan for future phases and continuous improvement
The work doesn’t end once RCA is deployed—you need to maximize its value. Continue to focus on incremental improvements to make your new system as impactful as possible, including planning for future phases such as:
- Incorporating AI and machine learning capabilities.
- Expanding to new sales channels (e.g., omni-channel selling).
- Continuously improving system configurations based on feedback and evolving business needs.
Transition assessment: A detailed roadmap
Through each step of the process—from assessment, to planning, to deployment—we’re here to help.
Here’s an example outline of how we approach the CPQ to RCA process over the course of a few weeks, maximizing efficiency and speed-to-delivery while tailoring our approach to your unique business needs: