Panelists
| John Garvens Owner & Principal Architect Garvens Consulting Garvens Consulting on YouTube |
Contents
- 00:00 Introduction
- 05:01 Readiness: Product, Customers, and Partners
- 08:52 Talent Pool: Large and Growing, More Needed
- 14:58 Training, Enablement, and Certification
- 19:18 CPQ End-of-Sale: Decision and Action Required
- 24:24 Battle for Product-to-Cash
- 28:13 Established RevOps Best Practices: Grow Up Together
- 31:11 Customer Interest: All-Time High
- 33:23 More Customers Than Expected: SMB, Commercial, and Enterprise
- 37:30 Majority Net New Logos
- 39:53 More Sellers: More Teams, More Verticals
- 42:00 Conclusion
Transcript
Note on Transcription: Please note that this transcript is an automated or semi-automated reproduction of the audio recording. Due to the nuances of natural speech, some words or phrases may be mislabeled or omitted. The audio file remains the official record of this episode. The RevOps Roundtable podcast does not guarantee the absolute accuracy of this text and is not liable for any misunderstandings resulting from its use.
John Garvens 0:00
Hello everyone, and welcome to the RevOps Roundtable. I’m your host, John Garvens, the owner and principal architect at Garvens Consulting, and today I want to invite you to the newly rebranded RevOps Roundtable, the artist formerly known as the Revenue Cloud Roundtable . But that product has been rebranded more times that we can count, and now it is Agentforce Revenue Management. And so hey, if Salesforce is doing rebrands every two minutes, I’m entitled to a rebrand as well. So this show is now the RevOps Roundtable. And today I am calling my shot. I am making a claim. I am making a prediction, and that is that 2026, is going to be the year of Agentforce Revenue Management, and I have 10 reasons why I think that is the case. I’m going to go through them one by one, provide my reason and provide my reasons for that reason why this is going to be the best year for Agentforce Revenue Management, and why this is the year is really going to get started Agentforce Revenue Management, the artist formerly known as Revenue Cloud Advanced, which was formerly known as Revenue Cloud, which was formerly known as Revenue Lifecycle Management, which was formerly known as Revenue Cloud when it was the CPQ and the Billing managed packages. All of that has changed, and now it is officially Agentforce Revenue Management, because everything at Salesforce has to be Agentforce now. We know how this goes. That said, this is going to be the year that it really starts to take off, and I have 10 reasons why I think that is so. I’m going to go through them here in just a minute.
John Garvens 1:34
In short, in sum, the TL;DR is that we’re in the perfect storm. The time is right. Things are coming together in a way that we haven’t seen in the past few years. The very first whispers of new products happened many years ago. I was an employee at Salesforce. We started to hear whispers about new products. Subscription Management had just come out. Turned out that was kind of a flop of a product. It didn’t really go anywhere. But we knew that Salesforce was thinking about the future. We knew there were new products on the horizon. We knew that something was going to change. We just didn’t know when. And then a few dreamforces ago, in 2023 we saw the first screenshots and the first examples of a new product. It looked a lot more like flow. It looked a lot more core. It looked a lot more Oh, I don’t know, not early 2000s and that product started to develop. The buzz started to happen among me and my peers and the people that I talk to on a regular basis because I hang out with people who are at the tip of the spear of Product-to-Cash as that’s where I’ve been living for the last decade plus of my career. In 2024 at Dreamforce, we had our first ever Revenue Cloud sessions. These sessions were attended and packed. There were standing room only people couldn’t get in the door, and I was really excited because I saw the excitement from the customers on what this new product could be. They were very interested in it at the time. It was kind of a mishmash of old product, new product, and some of the demos, I thought, you know, that looks an awful lot like the managed package that you’re demoing right now and claiming that it’s the new one. But ya know, details. Who really cares about those?
John Garvens 3:29
Fast forward to 2025 the number of sessions at Dreamforce for this revenue cloud product, now called Agentforce Revenue Management, tripled, and then more partners were presenting on it. Partners were co presenting with product leadership at Salesforce, and that’s when the momentum really started. The pipeline had been growing by this point. I had already been on a project with Revenue Cloud Management, or Agentforce Revenue Management, whatever the hell we’re calling it right now. I get confused too, so do the product managers must be real. Everybody’s mixing up the words. Nobody remembers. It’s okay. You’re fine if you get it wrong.
John Garvens 4:10
But the excitement was there. Customers were purchasing. I’ve been working with a customer for a year and a half at this point on this product, starting with a proof of concept, helping them select a vendor to do the implementation, going through the implementation, advising on different pieces along the way. And I’m no longer working with that client. They’re live with Agentforce Revenue Management. It is in production. They’re good to go, and they’re starting their next phase. But I had worked with that customer for quite a while. I had also done some other proofs of concept for other customers, and my friends were starting to do implementation projects. And the slack group that I own, full of Agentforce Revenue Management professionals and RevOps people, was really a buzz with what was going on.
John Garvens 4:58
That leads me to all of the reasons why 2026 is the year of Agentforce Revenue Management, and I’m going to start with the word readiness. Readiness is the distilled version of this whole rant that I’m doing to you right now. The product is ready. Is it ready for prime time? Is it ready for the biggest of enterprise companies? Is it ready for a company like ready for a company like, say, Nvidia, where there’s incomprehensible complexity and all these other products? Probably not yet. But is it ready for the vast majority of Salesforce customers who are interested in it? I think the answer is yes. My peers think the answer is yes. Of course, the product management team thinks the answer is yes, because they also see the roadmap. They know what’s coming.
John Garvens 5:44
And speaking of what’s coming next week, I have the best podcast for you. I am so excited about it. It’s going to be so good. I have been working on this podcast, getting ready for it since Dreamforce 2025 it’s been three months in the making, four months in the making, whatever it is, you’re going to love it. It’s fantastic. My guests are amazing. It’s a great conversation. Be sure to tune in next week for this podcast. It’s going to be great. I’m going to love getting feedback about it, because you’re going to love it anyway.
John Garvens 6:17
Okay, so we have product readiness. The product is ready for prime time. We’ve got the spring release. We’ve got the summer release coming up. There are a lot more enhancements that are going to be in those packages, and they’re very exciting things, but the product is nearing completion of its first macro wave, right? So in software development, we have to build the basic structure. We can’t you have to have the underlying frameworks, the underlying platform, in place before you can start doing all the bells and whistles and fans. And whistles and fancy stuff. And there’s going to be bugs along the way. There will be issues along the way. There are tons of enhancements that need to happen. Everybody knows that. Everybody knows there’s bugs. Everybody knows there’s enhancements. We get it, the consultants get it, the customers get it, the product team gets it. It’s part of this game that we play in software development is that you don’t get this neatly curated, it’s already ready to go, can of Lacroix. It’s this big, complex web of things that needs to get done, and it’s an iterative process that happens over time. So many, many times, many months ago, a couple years ago, I was saying be compassionate towards the product management team. I know I give a lot of flack sometimes, but it’s because I care very deeply about this subject, and I want the greatest product in the world. Salesforce wants the greatest product in the world. The product management team wants the greatest product in the world. And that is the vision, and that is what all of this feedback is helping to achieve and to get to. The customers are ready. Customers are very interested in this product. The sessions at Dreamforce were packed to the gills, standing room only, still in the hallway, people were having conversations about this. There were a lot of people interested that I was speaking to a Dreamforce who were interested in Agentforce Revenue Management, and that interest continues to grow as time progresses. Equally importantly, the partners, both the ISVs and the SIS, are ready for ARM. I’m just going to call it ARM, because the name is too long. So ARM, ARM, Agentforce Revenue Management, you get the picture. You’re probably an expert anyway, so you already know this shit. So here we go. So partners are ready for ARM as well. They have been doing projects now for one to two years, depending on the customer, depending on the partner. Customers have been buying this product for a while now. So you have people, you have partners out in the ecosystem, like Garvens Consulting, like other entities that have been doing this work for well over a year, that are very familiar with this product and can help you, if you’re a Salesforce customer, get up and running on this product.
John Garvens 8:52
Which leads me to the next point, which is the talent pool. The talent pool has steadily been growing Salesforce CPQ was around for over a decade. That’s what I built my career on. Got CPQ. Get Garvens. You got a CPQ? Talk to me. SteelBrick CPQ? This is your guy right here. Here’s your boy. Come talk to me about that. I’ll help you get up and running on the new product. Anyway. I digress. CPQ created this very large talent pool of Quote-to-Cash professionals, Product-to-Cash, Lead-to-Cash, whatever to-Cash flavor you feel like saying this week. It created a whole talent pool of those people. At the same time the demand for Product-to-Cash talent continued to rise as customers continued to buy more Product-to-Cash solutions, Salesforce not being the only one. There are many other firms out there that make Quote-to-Cash, Product-to-Cash products, and they were growing as well. So as these other products were entering the market, the talent pool continued to grow, and it continues to grow now. Now people are starting to see and put together the people the boots on the ground, people like me. People like you, who are putting together that, wow, there’s a huge opportunity here, across the hundreds of thousands of Salesforce customers, to implement this new product. This new product is complex. It is difficult. The business processes that it supports are complex and difficult. And therefore, the tool itself is a robust, complex, sophisticated tool with lots of nuances, lots of details that we have to learn, lots of considerations. But that also means that, because it is not just some simple, clear-cut thing, that there is career opportunity there for a lot of people, both on the customer side, for the admins, the developers, the BAs, the product owners at Salesforce, customers and also in the consulting world. We need architects. We need developers. We need business analysts. We need people who can build stuff. If you’re one of those people, send me an email. I would love to hear from you because in 2026 I’m also starting to move in the direction of growing Garvens Consulting beyond myself and adding more people. So if you’ve been watching this for a while, or we’ve been friends for a while, and you want to let me know, Hey, man, I’m in the market, go ahead. Send me an email john.garvens@garvensconsulting.com or if it’s easier, just do podcast@garvensconsulting.com. They both go to my inbox, and let me know. So whether you’re a customer or whether you’re a consultant, I want to hear from you. I want to know that you’re interested in implementing this product, or I want to know that you’re interested in working with or for me, as a contractor or an employee. Let me know. Anyway. Sorry for the shameless plugs, but home slice doesn’t have ads, and so I need you to to help me grow this business. Anyway. I digress. Talent pool large, and it’s growing, but we still need more people. We do not have enough people to do this work. Think about it. So we got five to six thousand Salesforce CPQ customers that we’ve had over the course of the past, however long. At some point those customers need to cut over because of the end-of-sale announcement, which I’ll get to in a little bit. You’ve probably heard about it. One year ago, the end-of-sale announcement happened, and then everybody and their mother turned into a CPQ thought leader all of a sudden, and they used ChatGPT to say, it’s not this, it’s that. It’s not just a CPQ to this, it’s a whole new revenue platform. Anyway, people we’d never heard from before started having an opinion about this. Thanks, OpenAI. Anyway, we have more need than ever for this, because if we cut over just 10% of Salesforce customers over the next 10 years, that’s 600 customers a year. On any one of these projects, you’re going to need at least two people. So that’s what, 1200 people conservatively. So let’s just say sometimes you got big projects, sometimes you got small projects. Let’s average this out. You’re going to need at least, say, five people, some at the customer, some at the consulting firm, doing these migration projects to go from the old product to the new one. So that’s say 600 customers. That’s 600 times five an average team to get this stuff cut over both internally and externally, for the Salesforce customers, and that’s going to be 3000 people who need jobs, and that’s just with the existing install base of CPQ customers. So then you have to think about all the customers that are going to buy. And I have it on good authority from people familiar with the matter, very familiar with the matter, that there are a lot of customers buying the new product. The new product is selling like hotcakes. The numbers that I heard are way higher than I thought they would be at this time of year, at this time of the product cycle, and that’s very promising. It’s also very perilous because of the talent shortage. But if you’re somebody looking for something to sink your teeth into, this is a good career option. I’m going to stand by that. Some people have told me I’m wrong. Some people on my YouTube channel comment that isn’t like, no, no, AI is going to do everything. I call bullshit on that. I don’t think that’s going to be true. I think there’s going to be a huge need for humans with functioning brains to think through difficult problems and also to communicate those to other human beings, which is something that AI doesn’t really do that well, it might be able to think, think through things, and accurately predict the next best word to say that solves the problem, but it’s not going to be able to massage that, message that, and get that, and convince the stakeholder do the diplomatic politicking that has to happen to make All this stuff work and actually make projects move forward. So if you’re somebody who has those human skills, those soft skills, those are going to get you very hard results over the next 10 years, easy 10 years. And I have reasons for that timeline as well, which I’ll get to in a little bit.
John Garvens 14:58
The next big piece: training, enablement, certifications. This is my third reason why I think this is going to be the year of Agentforce Revenue management. The training, it exists. There have been more Trailhead modules produced for Agentforce Revenue Management last quarter than any other product in the Salesforce portfolio. I mean, we’re not talking like two or three, we’re talking dozens of modules on Trailhead. And, yeah, that’s Trailhead. It’s not the real world. It’s not a real project. Real project experience still wins. However, the investment in training and enablement sessions. Not all customers get access to the enablement sessions, but on the partner side, there are a ton of enablement sessions to help consulting partners get up and running and ready to go on this. And we’re talking Slack channels with like 200 different consulting firms and over 2500 different consultants, and that’s just the people who know about the channel, which is functionally useless because there’s way too much noise happening in there, which is why I also always advocate to people to create your own Slack workspace with your own group of expert friends. No, you can’t join mine. Stop asking, but create your own. It becomes a very valuable resource, but all of the training and enablement is in place, and we also have a certification faster than. I was wrong about this. I thought this would take years to create a certification, but there’s already a certification for the new product. It also has been rebranded about four days after I took it. I was one of the first people to take and pass the Revenue Cloud Consultant profession, whatever the hell it’s called, and now it’s the Agentforce Revenue Management Consultant credential. I think I don’t know somebody correct me on that, feel free to to send me an email podcast@garvensconsulting.com to let me know how wrong I am about what that’s called now. But I got that certification, and then, like, four days later, it was rebranded as well, frustrating for everybody, especially the marketers out there. Kudos to the marketers at Salesforce right now who have had to change everything everywhere. Anyway. So certification is ready to go. The certification matters because it’s your marketing materials as a Salesforce professional, it’s what tells somebody you know the fundamentals of this thing. It’s a hard test, but it is a doable test. Do the modules that Salesforce has put together for you on Trailhead. If you’re a partner, take advantage of the enablement sessions that Salesforce provides on a recurring basis. Join the office hours sessions. You can ask live questions to people who work at Salesforce, other partners who are very knowledgeable are in there. People from top partners in this space are on those office hours calls. Join those still go to the to the Trailblazer Community and join those groups specific to this product. Join the Slack workspaces specific to this product. Make friends with people in this industry specific to this product. The more of those activities that you do, the better your career is going to be over time, you have to build those relationships and start assembling that knowledge. Now, if you need a place to start, go to garvensconsulting.com/learn, and you can get. It’s just a simple page. You don’t even have to download, give me your email address to to get access to it. It’s just there. I want you to learn how this stuff works. I want to give you the best shot at building a career on this thing. People helped me get started. I’m trying to help you get started. So go to garvensconsulting.com/learn, and it’s full of resources. Git repositories from people on the product management team, training from other people in the industry, like Jean-Michel Tremblay at The Cloud Update, which is a YouTube channel you should subscribe to if you haven’t done so already, and links to documentation and links to other resources and data models and all sorts of stuff. And that page will continue to grow as time passes, as my way of giving back to the industry and these the area of specialization that’s given me so much so again, garvensconsulting.com/learn, to start learning about Agentforce Revenue Management.
John Garvens 19:18
The fourth reason this is the year of Agentforce Revenue Management. Is this CPQ, end of sale. It happened just over a year ago, in February of 2025 it was kind of unofficially announced. We all felt it. We knew it was going to happen. There hadn’t been substantial improvements to the product in over half a decade. So the writing’s on the wall. The product is going to go away at a certain point. This is basically windows 3.1 and we know there’s going to be something new, but we don’t know what it’s called. Well, we got Agentforce Revenue Management, which is, you know, Windows 95. I’m I’m dating myself here, but that’s what I remember. It was a big to do. It was going from the Old World to the New World, and everything was super cool. And everybody was excited. That came out on. It was first announced, I think, on the Salesforce Ben website, and then it just exploded. Everybody started talking about it. And by everybody, I mean, everybody started putting prompts into ChatGPT to write articles for them so they could post it on LinkedIn and look like a thought leader, when really they hadn’t said shit about this stuff ever in their life. But, you know, I’m not bitter. So what does that mean, though? CPQ end of sale doesn’t mean it’s end of life first of all. So if you’re a Salesforce customer listening to this right now, you have time. Calm down. You’re fine. You have time to think, to process, to think about how you want to approach this decision because you’re gonna have to do something eventually. Why wait to start planning for it? You don’t have to purchase it right now. You don’t have to go and put together your budget and start doing all this stuff to get approvals from your CFO on this, that, and the other thing. Besides, a lot of you just spent a whole bunch of money on CPQ, and you’re like, like, Hell, I’m gonna buy this thing already. We just implemented. We just spent five, $6 million on a CPQ implementation, and now you’re telling me, I gotta do this again? And I have to buy the software again? I get it, I hear you. So here’s what you’re gonna do. You’re going to think about it. You’re going to start planning for it. You have time. You’ve got years at your disposal. You can still do a renewal. You could talk, talk to your account executive about pricing and terms and all this other stuff. That’s my safe harbor statement that I’m going to hide behind right there. But Salesforce has an offer where they are letting you upgrade to Agentforce Revenue Management and pay for those licenses, and then you get your CPQ licenses for free, basically, is how it works. So you’re technically paying for the new product, but you’re still using the old one. What that means for you is that you can start rolling out Agentforce Revenue Management now, while you still have CPQ, the two products can coexist in the same environment. So on a technical side, there are considerations. Find a Salesforce partner. If you need recommendations and you don’t want to use me, maybe you think I’m an asshole. Maybe you think I’m too expensive, whatever. I’m happy to refer you to someone who’s a good fit for you. So feel free to reach out. If I can’t help you, I know who can, and I will help you find the right consultant for you, the right partner for you, to help you get where you need to go. Anyway. The fact is, you’re going to have to make decisions as a customer. You’re going to have to take actions based on those decisions, but you should start now plan. You can you can wait, but you must prepare, even if you choose not to go forward with Agentforce Revenue Management. Maybe you choose a different tool. Maybe you build something in house. Maybe you vibe code your way to an equivalent product. Good luck, by the way. That is that is a losing endeavor. You are going to regret that decision. I promise. The build versus buy decision is a murky one, especially with AI tools, especially with the speed with which you can develop things. However, the devil is in the details, and there are a lot of devils in these business processes that the vast majority of companies are not prepared to tackle on their own. So I would encourage you to buy some sort of pre-built solution and to adjust it based on your business needs. But even if you don’t want to go back to a Salesforce product, okay, but you’re still going to have to do something eventually. You probably got a timeline of five to 10 years, if we’re being honest, I don’t know. That’s just complete conjecture. Do not Well, I guess you can quote me on it because I said it, but you can quote me on it, but I’m not held accountable to it. I’m just that’s disclaimer right there, but you’re gonna have to do something. So take this time. Prepare the best that you can learn the lessons from the first implementation that you did, where you probably burned yourself. You probably wish you would have done some things different. Some things you should have went more out of the box. Some things we should have simplified our business process instead of trying to customize the hell out of the product. Take those lessons and incorporate them into this next business decision, so that you have a smoother transition going from the old to the new.
John Garvens 24:24
Number five, the battle for, Quote-to-Cash, for Product-to-Cash. The battle for Product-to-Cash has been raging for a while. For 20 years now or more, there have been Product-to-Cash, products to support business operations, and it’s been fairly fractured and all this other stuff. But what we have is there was a there was this class that I taught at Deloitte many years ago, and one of the seasoned consultants basically gave this lecture about how front end software like Salesforce and CRM tools is trying to move more toward the back office. Meanwhile, back office software like SAP, Oracle, etcetera, Microsoft are trying to move more to the front office, and the battleground is, as Meredith Schmidt calls it, the messy middle. It’s that Quote-to-Cash, Product-to-Cash, order, all that to cash, stuff sits here in the messy middle, and that’s become the battleground. So you see the advent of all these little startups that are, you know, you got your Chargebee and Subskribe and Nue.io and Logik.ai, and this, that and the other thing, you have all these different products that are spinning up in this space. And there’s a battle that rages on. You could go with one of those solutions. You could try. I worked with a client once who was doing a POC, and they were trying to figure out, what should we go with? Should we go with, at the time, it was called Revenue Cloud, or should we go with one of these startups? They chose one of those startups. The risk and the reward is like, if you’re a big new customer to a startup, they’ll do pretty much whatever you want, because they got to stay in business. But if they don’t stay in business, what do you do? Meanwhile, you have an established player like Salesforce, and they have this very comprehensive solution. It’s big, it’s complex. It supports a whole bunch of stuff, a lot of that stuff you might not even need because your business isn’t that complex. However, it is backed by a company that’s not going anywhere for a long, long time. I mean, Salesforce isn’t the quick little startup that it was 15 years ago. However, it it is a it is a staple of the industry. It is a bedrock platform upon which hundreds of thousands of businesses rest, including mine, and it’s going to be around for a while. It may not be your favorite thing in the whole world, but it’s a trade off game, and you have to think about it that way. But the battle for Product-to-Cash rages on. And next week we’re going to hear some exciting announcements about the Agentforce Revenue Management product, and it shows that that product is leading the way with its capabilities, its robustness, its its scalability, all of these things are factors to consider. And so when you’re looking at the battle for Product-to-Cash, and you’re deciding as a Salesforce customer, what should I buy? Sometimes it makes sense to take the established player, even if you think the startup might be cheaper, even if you think the startup might be better, they might have a cooler looking website. They might have young sales people who look really hip and all this other stuff, and they’re wearing a little t shirt. You know, that’s how the startup people are little t-shirt with my little blazer on right. Look how hip and cool I am. Okay, will you be around in five years? What about 10? How many companies even make it that far? So that’s those are some things to consider there. But I think Salesforce is winning the Product-to-Cash battle. It will continue to win the Product-to-Cash battle. There is serious investment in this product, and from what I can tell, having spoken to people familiar with the matter, it’s just getting started.
John Garvens 28:13
Number six, we have established RevOps Best Practices now. They’ve been developing for a long time, and even when I got started in CPQ, they were established best practices for CPQ, but we were starting to get to a macro maturity of what RevOps should be and how it should work. You can see this on LinkedIn where everybody and their mother is talking about I was talking to a SaaS CEO of $300 million ACV business, and blah, blah, blah, you know how those start, and it’s all the same story, and the person posting, it’s the big hero, and all this other shit, right? You’ve seen so but that means that people are talking about this. Lots of people are talking about this. Every company has revenue operations, but how mature are their revenue operations? And at this point, most, most companies know they need to mature their RevOps. You can always be better, right? How can I make my RevOps better? How can I find leakage and plug those gaps and make things go faster, get more customers and get more spend per customer, get more transactions per customer, all that stuff that grows revenue. There are established best practices for that, but not all businesses have systematized those best practices, and that presents a huge opportunity for a product like Agentforce Revenue Management to come in and say, Hey, we got you. You are a startup, and you sell five things, and they’re all subscriptions, but they you, they got some consumption, so we need to do our usage rating and all this other stuff. And you got some subscription model things, and this that the other we got you, we have a product that can support all those things. And as you grow. We’re going to grow with you. We saw this with the original Sales Cloud product. Salesforce made a product that the bit that the business world needed. They needed a CRM. Salesforce did it better than everybody else at first. Some would argue that some parts of that product could be improved, you know. But you could say that about any software. But the fact is that these businesses could get in and start with Salesforce. When they had a Salesforce of only five people, but now they got 50,000 people, and this product still works for them. Hell, Salesforce is still running on Org62 the 62nd org that’s ever been created. There’s a massive undertaking to do a transformation and to move into a new org, and I envy no one on that project, by the way. But if Salesforce can go from startup to Salesforce, then other businesses can too, and that’s because it provided a platform for sales. And that’s what Revenue Agentforce Revenue Management is doing, is it’s providing a revenue platform. All of your revenue stuff happening here on the same platform.
John Garvens 31:11
Next we have customer interest at an all time high. I said it earlier. At Dreamforce, you see it. People vote with their feet at Dreamforce, and when the feet were voting every single RevOps, Revenue Cloud related session, Agentforce Revenue Management session, every single one of them was packed. I couldn’t get into a lot of them. Some of them, I had to stand in the back. Some of them, I just waited outside and kind of hovered awkwardly and tried to hand out swag to everybody who showed up. But the interest was high. Customer interest was high. Partner interest was high. It continues to grow because of these other factors that I’ve already mentioned. They know they have to do something about CPQ. They’ve been frustrated with CPQ. They got other things they want to do. They start they want to start using consumption. They need to do something else. There’s a battle for Product-to-Cash. They got all these vendors taking advantage of the end of sale announcement, and you got, like, vendor a over here saying, hey, use us and use us. Use us. Everybody’s trying to hawk these CPQ customers trying to get theirs. And it’s just resulted in customers having a more general interest in RevOps and what product they’re going to use next, and they’re starting to vote with their dollars at Dreamforce. They were voting with their feet, but now they’re voting with dollars. We’re going to probably see some of that in the end of Q4 it’s basically the last day of Q4 over at Salesforce right now, and because of that, we’re going to have a lot more sales. Salesforce does most of its sales in Q4 it’ll be fun to see how that actually ends. We’ll see next week, I guess. And that’s basically my number seven reason. Customers are asking. I’ve got CPQ customers, former clients. I’ve got current clients that are on CPQ and are thinking about moving over. I’m having a lot of these conversations. My peers are having a lot of these conversations. And it’s not because we as partners are trying to peddle Salesforce licenses. It’s not because Salesforce is even trying to peddle Salesforce licenses. It’s because the customer knows they need to change. They need to do something. They need to make adjustments, and this is one of the ways that they could go, and they’re very interested in learning more about this way. So the demand is there.
John Garvens 33:23
Number eight based on that customer interest. I hinted at this, but we have more customers on the new product already than I expected, by a long shot. I had my predictions about what the number of customers would be at this point in the journey, and it is far beyond that number. But what’s interesting about that is it’s I thought, and I was wrong about this too. I was wrong thinking that Agentforce Revenue Management would be for enterprises only. Those are the only businesses that can afford this damn thing. It’s going to be too expensive. This, that, and the other thing, and I was corrected, and you’ll see that in the next in the next podcast that I’m going to release next week, there’s a conversation that’s going to happen about this topic. And what’s interesting is it’s about a third split for small and medium businesses, SMB, those mid-market businesses or commercial businesses, where you’re getting into your 1000-2000 employee and then the enterprise. Of course, the enterprise is going to be interested in this product. They need something that can be this big and this scalable and all that. However, what’s interesting to me is that two thirds of these sales are with the SMB and commercial company sizes. That was surprising to me, and I was dead wrong on that. And we’re also learning that these SMBs that are implementing the ones with simple products and simple structures and things they’re getting up and running on this product within six months. Now you can roll out something in six months. Can you roll out everything in six months? No. Just like, as the saying goes, one woman can make a baby in nine months, but nine women cannot make a baby in one month. It’s the same thing here, and you’re going to have to roll out something in three, six months. You’re not going to roll out everything, folks, just get that out of your head now. So when that SI comes to you, that Salesforce consulting partner says, Oh, we’re gonna do this project and it’s gonna be done. You’re gonna get everything you want, and we’re gonna do CPQ. We’re gonna do the quoting, and we’re gonna do the fulfillment, and we’re gonna do the billing and all these other things, and we’re gonna do it in only 12 weeks. No, no. Red flag. I call bullshit. That’s not how this is gonna happen, so be wary of that. Partner selection, if you’re not doing it yourself, and even if you do it yourself, you should probably have some sort of domain expert in the room, somebody who’s done this before. I’m happy to help you, by the way, shameless plug, but you should have people familiar with the matter and the business process and the systems related helping you with this, but vendor selection becomes critically important. Do not try to be cheap here, folks. There is a reason companies are cheap. You’ll find out if you use them. So are there overpriced places? Of course, but you get what you pay for when it comes to consulting, and who you have specifically on your project matters a lot. If the if the price is super low, find out why, who’s actually doing the work. Do they know what they’re doing? Are they some 20 year old kid who’s never done this before, or are they? Somebody who’s done this for well over a decade, has seen a lot of stuff, has a lot of experience, knows where they knows where the landmines are, and all that stuff. That’s what you want to be thinking about here. But that was that was another thing. That was another reason the more customers than expected is is another surprising thing that leads me to believe that this is going to be the year of Agentforce Revenue Management.
John Garvens 37:04
Number nine, I’m almost done here, and I’m trying to wrap this up. I didn’t want to make this too long. Hopefully it’s not too rambly. If you want to send me feedback, feedback is a gift, as Uncle Marc at Salesforce says. podcast@garvensconsulting.com. Send me your send me your love, send me your hate mail, whatever. It’s up to you. I appreciate getting the feedback no matter what, because it makes this better and it makes it better for you, my audience. Number nine, the majority of those new customers are also net new logos. I also was wrong here. I thought most of the new logos or the new customers on the new product would be migrations from CPQ to the new product. And the the fact is that the majority, I don’t know what majority, but the majority of new customers on the new product are net new logos, which brings back the earlier point that we have 6000 CPQ customers that need to move over, and now we have a whole bunch of new customers that need to start so our total customer count is going to continue climbing, especially if the majority of new buyers are net new logos. See where I’m going with this? So it’s conceivable that we’re going to have the 6000 CPQ customers, and then we’re going to have maybe a total of 18,000 customers, maybe more, maybe we’ll end up with because of the flexibility of the Revenue Cloud, of the Agentforce Revenue Management product, because of the flexibility there and the adaptability API for all that good stuff, agents, blah, blah, Agentforce. More businesses can use the new one than the old one. There were certain use cases that were terrible for the old product, but now some of those things went away. Some of those problems still exist, and there are some challenging industries, like engineer-to-order, for example. Professional services gets a little awkward. There are certain industries where these products are just difficult and it’s awkward use cases and things, but it’s solvable. You solve it somehow, and maybe you end up solving it with a new product. Now, so I see it where we could probably have five to 10x the customer base on the new one is the old one. So if we just take that, okay, we got 6000 on the old one. That means we probably are going to have 30,000 to 60,000 customers on the new one, and that’s probably going to happen within the next decade. Okay, so we have 30,000 to 60,000 that means, what, 3000 customers a year to 6000 customers a year for 10 years? I don’t know. My numbers might be wildly off, but the principle remains the same. There’s a lot of interest, there are a lot more capabilities. There are a lot more use cases on the table.
John Garvens 39:53
And that brings us to our last piece, which is we have more sellers. As everybody knows, Salesforce loves to market and sell their products, and whenever they get around to it, they develop and launch them. Anybody remember Salesforce blockchain? I proved my point. So we’ve marketed and we’ve sold this product for a while, and it has been delivered, and now we have a bunch of people who are selling it, and we’re going to have more sellers, according to people familiar with the matter, we’re going to have more teams. We will have more verticals supported, and that means more licenses. Salesforce is really good at selling software, and when they put their mind to it, they will sell a metric ton of software. Well, here’s a new product that supports a lot of businesses, that is ripe for the picking. You have customers who need to move and they need to do something. You have tons of interest from those customers. You have a big battle going on in the Product-to-Cash space, and Salesforce is one of the best marketing companies in the whole planet. They’re so good at marketing and branding and public relations and all this other stuff, it’s like these other companies basically don’t stand a chance if you’re trying to match Salesforce on marketing skills. You got the CPQ end of sales, so there’s an urgency that needs to happen. And you got the training and the support and the certifications to do all of this. You got the talent pool who’s existing, like myself, who’ve been doing this for over a decade, and then you got a whole bunch of new people getting into the pool, and there’s plenty of work to go around to those people who are trolling me and saying there’s, there’s no careers in this yet. It’s got to wait a little bit. I disagree. I have friends who are fully billable. Everybody’s working a lot right now, and that’s a good sign. And then we have the readiness of the customer. The product is ready, the customers are ready, the partners are ready. And then that 10th, number 10, you throw that more sellers on there. You got more sellers, plus the other nine points. I rest my case.
John Garvens 41:58
So to bring it all together. 2026 is the year of Agentforce Revenue Management. I’m making that claim now. We’ll see how correct I am at one year from today, it is basically it’s January 30, one day away from the end of Q4 we’ll see how we are at the end of Salesforce is Q4 in 2027, fiscal year 2027. I think I’m going to be right on this. I was wrong on a couple of things, but I was wrong in the right direction. So there’s more customers than I thought, the product is further along than I thought. There are more partners ready than I thought. There’s more talent than I thought. There are more sellers than I thought. So I was wrong on a whole bunch of these points because I tend to be a natural skeptic and cynic, as you probably have realized by now. However, the direction of my I was wrong in, like, the wrong direction. So if, if this is actually the truth, I’m far more optimistic about the future of this product. I’m more optimistic about my personal career. Selfishly, there’s gonna be a lot more work for me to do. I’m optimistic about the future of Garvens Consulting because you’re still listening to this. If you’re still listening to this, send me an email and let me know what you thought of this episode podcast@garvensconsulting.com. I would love to hear from you. Send me an email. And I’m optimistic about the consultancies that my friends own. I’m optimistic about the ISVs that are going to create specialized solutions built on top of this revenue platform. I’m optimistic about the product team and their enthusiasm you’ll see next week when I have some very special guests on this show to talk about the past, present and future of Agentforce Revenue Management, why I’m so excited right now, and there are some other cool things that are going to happen next week as well. But all of these factors together paint a sunny, maybe not a sunny, like a blue sky scenario. There’s still going to be storms. There’s still going to be issues. There’s still going to be bugs. That’s then. That’s the game we play. But overall, the trend we’re going in is the right direction, and I’m excited about it.
John Garvens 44:11
And with that, I’m going to wrap up. I hope you have a wonderful day. Reach out anytime: garvensconsulting.com, Garvens consulting dot learn. garvensconsulting.com/learn to start learning Agentforce Revenue Management. garvensconsulting.com/podcast to subscribe to the podcast and see where it’s listed. It’s on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and you can get updates by putting your information in the form there. If you are a Salesforce Agentforce Revenue Management professional, you’re a consultant, and you’re looking for somebody to work for, I’d love to talk to you. If you are a Salesforce customer interested in Agentforce Revenue Management, I would love to talk to you. If you’re a partner who’s in this space and you need some extra help, or you need some, just want to pick somebody’s brain on this space. Reach out to me as well. I love connecting with new people in this space. This is a hard line of work to be in, and we need each other to get through it successfully. So let’s do this together. Let’s crush this together. We all want happy customers on Agentforce Revenue Management, and I look forward to hearing from you. I look forward to providing more content for you. I’m super excited about the episode next week. Have a great day, and I will talk to you soon.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai