Product Building in RLM
To quote Henry Ford, ‘Nothing happens until someone sells something.’ Products are this integral to the very concept of a business, which is why Opportunities are centre stage in CRM, and Product Building is the first core of Salesforce RLM, i.e. Revenue Lifecycle Management (see the other cores in our ‘Salesforce RLM, time to get excited?’ blog.
All companies have products; which may be time, a physical object, access to a system, or even discounts on other external products. With so many ways to sell and systems that organise products differently, Salesforce has needed to give its customers more control over its products for some time. I'm delighted to say they've now done this through RLM.
Within Salesforce there are a few different mechanisms for product control; however, at the core of RLM is the Business Rules Engine (BRE). This tool has learned from Salesforce Industries (Vlocity), Salesforce CPQ, and other tools inside and outside of those owned by Salesforce.
So, what can you do with BRE? Well, here are my main highlights:
Use tables to populate information elsewhere without risking governor limits as you would in Lookup Tables in Salesforce CPQ.
For example, if your business rents rooms in venues you own and you have a different price for a room depending on the day, time of day and event, you can define the options in a table and then dynamically populate the price in real-time.
See the pricing waterfall decisions made in why the price is what it is.
For instance, let's say you sell wine and you get an order for 100 bottles of Champagne at £90 per bottle. There are 100 bottles, so the order qualifies for a 20% volume-based discount. The sales rep also applies a value discount of £1,000 to get the deal. Crucially, the order in which the system applies the discount makes a big difference, as shown here:
As you can see, in this scenario a volume-first discount is £200 cheaper. If you only see the end price, you can’t be sure which method has been used. Being able to see and control these workings can save a business a lot of money and allow it to be much more clever about its business. Seeing this in real-time on the quote line level is a game-changer!
You can use this logic in Flows via its own components, which can be used like templates 🤯
I think I will just let that sink in a bit, as this sent my mind into a vortex of possibilities. I will just say ‘Screen Flow’ and ‘mobile’, though, to hint where my mind went with this, as it is probably a blog in its own right.
You can test your logic in the builder.
This functionality works well, allowing pre-activation testing. I have found that building out and testing CPQ functionality in Sandbox works well if you have a full Sandbox. Using the Builder for testing, though, means you can test in Sandbox and then deploy and test again in production before activating the Flow. This saves time and mistakes, making me very happy.
Use Omni-studio to display an interface for this logic on working pages in other places (thank you, Vlocity).
This really opens up the possibilities, especially if you use disparate sales models.
To add to these abilities, RLM is all on core, which means better reporting, performance and configurability. It also means you are not restricted by a managed package (Whoop whoop).
Hopefully, this all sounds helpful. It does have to be said that it takes a bit of getting used to as a tool. It's not as convoluted as Salesforce CPQ; however, it took me a few hours to understand how to control the tool and get the most out of it. To compare this to Salesforce CPQ, for instance, it took me a while to work out how to implement pricing methods like percent of total and block price. I am told these will become easier as future releases come out, but right now, it can be fiddly to implement these options.
Overall, I am a fan of the tool and have had fun bending it to my will. I do look forward to seeing how it develops in the months to come, but fundamentally, it is a sound start. There are great trails here and here that take you through how to use the tool that I would strongly recommend
