Salesforce CPQ - N28tech

In March 2025, Salesforce announced the End of Sale for Salesforce CPQ. For existing customers, this means you can continue to renew and maintain the product, but no new licenses, features, or innovations will be added going forward. In other words, CPQ is still running, but it’s no longer evolving. This also means migration is inevitable. In Part 1 of our Revenue Cloud Series, we’ll cover why Salesforce made this decision, what it means for current CPQ users, and how Revenue Cloud is positioned as the path forward. Why Salesforce Moved On From CPQ Acquired from SteelBrick in 2015, Salesforce CPQ was a powerful step forward at the time. But after nearly a decade, its limitations became harder to ignore for companies with complex quoting and revenue operations. The Managed Package Problem: CPQ is Not Salesforce-Native CPQ runs as a managed package on top of Salesforce, not as part of the core platform. This creates fundamental limitations: Performance bottlenecks with large product catalogs Sales reps tend to experience noticeable slowdowns when building quotes with extensive product lists, delaying response times for customers. SOQL query limits during complex quote generation Complex deals frequently hit query limits, causing timeouts mid-process, forcing reps to restart or manually split quotes. Inability to leverage Salesforce’s latest AI and automation capabilities CPQ users can’t take advantage of innovations like Einstein AI or advanced automation, leaving their sales teams behind the rest of the Salesforce ecosystem. The Innovation Drought: CPQ Doesn’t Receive Salesforce Platform Advancements CPQ hasn’t kept pace with Salesforce’s platform-wide investments in AI, automation, and modern user experiences. For example, users haven’t been able to leverage native Einstein guidance, Agentforce capabilities, or the latest Lightning improvements, leaving sales teams working in an older tool while other parts of the Salesforce ecosystem evolve. The Technical Debt Reality: Heavy Customization Creates Fragile Systems Many companies using CPQ end up with heavily customized implementations full of workarounds. Companies often find that Salesforce CPQ requires significant customization to handle edge cases or performance issues in large implementations, which can increase maintenance costs and make systems more fragile over time. The Transparency Issue: CPQ’s “Black Box” Pricing CPQ often functions as a pricing “black box,” where sales teams and customers have limited visibility into how discounts, taxes, and markups are applied. This lack of transparency can slow approvals, create confusion, and add extra steps to the quoting process. A Better Alternative to CPQ: Salesforce Revenue Cloud Revenue Cloud is Salesforce’s native, end-to-end revenue management solution, designed to unify quoting, pricing, contracts, orders, and billing in a single platform. Revenue Cloud isn’t CPQ 2.0 — it’s a fundamental rethinking of revenue management. Built natively on Salesforce’s Einstein 1 platform, it addresses every limitation of the old CPQ approach. Image Source: Trailhead Salesforce The Architecture Advantage: Built Natively on Salesforce Unlike CPQ’s managed package approach, Revenue Cloud is built directly into Salesforce’s core platform using standard objects. This means: Better performance with large datasets and complex pricing Native AI integration with Einstein and Agentforce out of the box Modern Lightning UI that feels like the rest of Salesforce API-first architecture enabling headless commerce and omnichannel experiences The Seven Pillars of Revenue Excellence: End-to-End Revenue Management Revenue Cloud Advanced is organized around seven core capabilities that cover your entire revenue lifecycle: Product/Service Design – Centralized catalog management with flexible bundling Pricing Management – Dynamic pricing with complete transparency Configure, Price, Quote – Enhanced CPQ with real-time guidance Contract Lifecycle Management – Built-in contract creation and management Order Management – Seamless order processing and fulfillment Billing – Integrated billing for all revenue models Revenue Intelligence – AI-powered insights across operations The Pricing Edge: Better Transparency with Revenue Cloud Revenue Cloud resolves CPQ’s “black box” pricing limitations by introducing pricing waterfalls that show exactly how every price is calculated—list price, discounts, taxes, markups—in real time. Sales teams and customers alike gain clarity on how a quote is built, reducing back-and-forth and accelerating deal closure. Understanding Your Revenue Cloud Options Salesforce offers Revenue Cloud in the following configurations: Revenue Cloud Growth: The comprehensive solution that replaces CPQ with Order and Asset Lifecycle Management. Revenue Cloud Advanced (RCA): The comprehensive solution that replaces CPQ, while also adding contract management, order orchestration, and basic billing capabilities. Revenue Cloud Billing (RCB): Available separately or as an add-on to RCA, this option provides advanced billing functionality such as usage-based pricing, automated collections, and revenue recognition. What This Means For Your Business If You’re Currently Using CPQ Salesforce continues to support existing CPQ customers with renewals and maintenance, but no new features or innovations will be added. To stay current with Salesforce’ AI enhancements, automation, and modern revenue management capabilities, it’s recommended to migrate to Revenue Cloud. This migration is not a simple upgrade — existing configurations, customizations, and integrations must be reimplemented and carefully configured from scratch to align with your business processes. While it requires effort, this investment is worthwhile: it replaces an obsolete system, reduces technical debt, and ensures tight integration with Salesforce’s modern platform. Planning and acting now gives your organization the time to allocate resources and execute the migration efficiently. It also ensures access to advanced AI capabilities that CPQ doesn’t provide, while minimizing disruption before outdated processes create friction. If You’re Evaluating Revenue Management Solutions Within Salesforce, Revenue Cloud is the obvious enterprise-grade choice. It not only replaces CPQ but also future-proofs your revenue operations by bringing the entire quote-to-cash cycle onto one unified platform. The Strategic Opportunity This migration from CPQ to Revenue Cloud represents a fundamental shift from point solutions to unified platforms. Companies that make this move now will have significant competitive advantages: Faster quote generation with AI-powered guidance Unified customer experience from quote to cash Better insights with integrated analytics Future-ready architecture for whatever comes next Attribute Salesforce CPQ Revenue Cloud Status End of Sale; renewals supported but no new licenses or features Actively developed with ongoing features and releases Platform Fit Managed package on top of Salesforce; limited alignment

Medical equipment manufacturing sales is a tooth and nail business. What we often hear from our clients is the need to be flexible when it comes to pricing. That translates to the ability to support different pricing strategies for different buying groups. Recently, we delivered a transformative pricing project with a global medical equipment manufacturer. There were three key components to this transformation project: Agility Transparency Workforce enablement The overall challenge was simplifying the processes involved in delivering quotes to clients. The legacy process required coordination across multiple teams and systems. Getting a simple quote to the client required coordinations between three different teams using multiple systems. Our objective was to consolidate these disparate processes under one roof: Salesforce CPQ. The aim was to not just streamline operations but to empower Sales and Marketing with self-service pricing capabilities. Given that medical manufacturers operate in a highly regulated market, it can take years—from initial concept—to putting out a saleable product. Therefore, go-to-market pricing strategies are often kept simple using a combination of cost- and reference-based pricing. After the product is launched, the next big game is the ‘buying group’. The top three buying groups in the industry are group purchasing organizations (GPOs), aggregation groups (Agg Groups) and integrated delivery networks (IDNs—often also referred to as health systems). The size and volume of business these groups deal with often varies geographically. For instance GPOs are large, powerful groups in the US, but not so in Canada. Here is an example of how a hospital is aligned to an IDN, GPO and Agg Group: Salesforce’ CPQ offers a wide array of pricing-related functionalities out of the box. Examples include product and pricing rules, product bundling, and so on. At N28, the art and science of configuring Salesforce CPQ for simple quoting has been done and dusted many times over for various clients. The complexity in this instance was due to the intricate web of buying groups and their overlapping pricing structures. A single hospital was accessing pricing from the IDN it belonged to and also from all the GPOs and aggregation groups it was associated with. The N28 team implemented a tailored Salesforce CPQ system that enabled multiple tiers of pricing access for a single SKU. This includes: Tiered pricing for influential buying groups Bundled packages for value-based pricing, and… Support for distributor/reseller models. Here is a custom pricing access view component we developed to simplify the complexity of the underlying business model. N28 equips medical manufacturers with the tools to master the complexities of pricing strategies. Our expertise in Salesforce CPQ implementation ensures that clients can seamlessly adapt to the diverse demands of various buying groups while optimizing internal processes. The result? Enhanced efficiency and profitability in an ever-evolving and competitive market landscape. Get In Touch

Part 1: From Salesforce CPQ to Revenue Cloud — What This Shift Means For Your Enterprise

Salesforce CPQ for Medical Manufacturers