Panelists
| John Garvens Owner & Principal Architect Garvens Consulting Garvens Consulting on YouTube |
| Meredith Schmidt Executive Vice President & General Manager Salesforce |
| Arun Abichandani Senior Vice President, Product Management Salesforce |
| Sam Chung Chief Customer Officer Salesforce |
| Tiffany Devlin-Drye Director Pierce Washington |
| Micah Gerger Founder & Chief Technology Officer Blue Robot Digital |
| Jean-Michel Tremblay Managing Principal Aleysian The Cloud Update on YouTube |
Content
- 00:00 Introductions and Fun Facts
- 07:58 The Past, Present, and Future of Agentforce Revenue Management
- 19:24 New Capabilities: Customer Use Cases
- 33:57 Agentforce Revenue Management Billing
- 42:47 Opportunities for Everyone
- 48:44 Training, Documentation, and Certifications
- 53:53 Keys to Success: How Everyone Wins
- 59:03 Final Thoughts
Resources
Complete Revenue Cloud Course: Use GARVENS10OFF to save 10%.
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 0:01
What’s going on, everybody? My name is John Garvens, and this is the RevOps Roundtable, where we talk about revenue operations with revenue operations professionals. And today I’m super excited, because we have the leaders of the product management team at Salesforce here to talk about Agentforce Revenue Management. 2026 is going to be the year of Agentforce Revenue Management. We’ve got tons of stuff to talk about, not a lot of time to talk about it, but we’re going to pack as much as we can into the next hour. I hope you love the show. Feel free to subscribe to the YouTube channel. We’re on Apple Podcasts and Spotify as well. There are going to be a lot more episodes in the future with industry leaders in the Salesforce space, in the RevOps space. Stay tuned for details. Without further ado, I’m going to add my fun fact here. You know my introduction here. I’m John Garvens, the owner and principal architect at Garvens Consulting, and I have a jiu-jitsu school that I teach at. It is now almost 50 members big it’s been around for three years, and the common thread here is that Meredith just signed her kids up for jiu-jitsu. David Beebe on the Salesforce product management team, he also has some kids in jiu-jitsu. So look at that. Martial arts brings people together, and with that, I’m going to send it over to Meredith. Meredith, give us a quick intro and a fun fact.
Meredith Schmidt 1:20
Awesome, perfect. Just on the jiu-jitsu fact here, my kid got home from the first one and I said, How was it? He’s like, I didn’t like it, Mommy. I was like, what? He’s like, I loved it! So it was awesome. So he’s going back today.
John Garvens 1:33
Nice. He’s got the bug already.
Meredith Schmidt 1:34
Yes, he does. He does. So thank you so much. This is I’m so excited to be here with all of you wonderful community of Rev Cloud or ARM. I still get it wrong, but I am the GM, Meredith Schmidt. I run our Revenue Cloud team. My team members are here today. I’ve been with Salesforce for over 20 years, almost 21 years now. Here’s my fun fact. You’re going to hear from Sam Chung in a minute, about a year into my role at Salesforce, Sam joined, and I was working in revenue recognition, actually, and I had all these ideas on operations, and Sam was running revenue operations, and he finally said, “Shut up and come over here and work for me.” So I spent years working for Sam, and what I love now being in product kind of manifest destiny. Sam and I are back together on the same team, and he gets to work for me now as our Chief Customer Officer. But that’s my fun fact.
John Garvens 2:30
Very nice. Arun, you’re up.
Arun Abichandani 2:34
Awesome. Hi folks and John team, thanks for having us. Really excited to be here. I run the product team for Revenue Cloud. I’ve been in Salesforce, the Salesforce ecosystem, for about 11 years, but I’ve been building essentially revenue products for over 20 years. It’s been a long time across multiple, multiple companies. I don’t have a fun fact of martial arts or anything like that. Unfortunately, I don’t do that. But folks who know me know I love to travel. I think others know that. But what’s a fun fact is, I think the reason also that my wife and I love to travel so much is we actually met at the airport. So that’s a fun fact.
John Garvens 3:14
Oh, very interesting. Sam, you’re next.
Sam Chung 3:19
Thanks, John, and thank you very much for the opportunity to be here like like Meredith and Arun just so grateful for you and the team and this community. And Arun, I would say that you don’t know how to do martial arts yet. I think it is the way that I would describe it. So as Meredith mentioned, I’m the Chief Customer Officer here at Salesforce for Revenue Cloud. And Meredith alluded to this, I will be celebrating your 20 at Salesforce not too soon. And the first six years was actually running our own revenue operations organization. So when I was in that role, I had the pleasure of implementing our own Product-to-Cash solution for Salesforce, and that was really the genesis story behind Revenue Cloud. So my fun fact is that when I was younger, I had an opportunity to dance on the Academy Awards. And so just imagine me, with a lot less gray hair, probably a couple pounds heavier, dancing to Irene Cara’s “Oh, What a Feeling” in 1984 on the Academy Awards.
Tiffany Devlin-Drye 4:20
Amazing.
Tiffany Devlin-Drye 4:22
Very cool, nice. Tiff, you’re up!
Tiffany Devlin-Drye 4:26
Yeah, well, thanks Garvens for having me back, excited to be here with this group and have a chat today. I’m Tiffany Devlin-Drye. I’m a director at Pierce Washington. We’re a Salesforce implementer and partner. My fun fact is that I am the only person that I know who has both a cosmetology license and a computer science degree. And if you’re out there and you also have a cosmetology license and a computer science degree, reach out, because I would love to connect with you.
John Garvens 4:56
Very nice. Micah!
Micah Gerger 4:59
Hey, John. Hey, team. Micah Gerger, I’m the CTO and Founder of Blue Robot Digital, a revenue life cycle management and operations consulting firm. So I’m also two-time Salesforce internal employee, including back at the original steel brick back in those days. And then I don’t think I’ve seen Meredith. I don’t think I’ve seen you, Meredith, seen you Meredith, since the Cisco days. So I was the lead cross track architect for the Revenue Cloud implementation on not a small implementation, or easy one at that. So some point I would love to hear how that project played out, but probably not on this call. Um, let’s see my fun fact. I think I used my screenwriting one on the last one, let’s see. I’m the only revenue operations technologist that I know that has 11 free solo skydive jumps and as a RevOps architect. So I’ll go with that.
John Garvens 6:01
There’s a combo.
Micah Gerger 6:01
John, can you? Did you do more than that in the army?
John Garvens 6:04
No, I never jumped out of a perfectly good airplane, nor do I have the intent to do so. I like being in the airplane for as little time as possible, though, because I’m six-five, and my legs don’t fit very well.
Micah Gerger 6:18
I do still occasionally look out and think about it.
Arun Abichandani 6:22
It is fun to jump out of planes, though.
John Garvens 6:25
I will let you guys enjoy that. Jean-Michel!
Jean-Michel Tremblay 6:30
Thanks for having us. John, as usual, yeah, so Jean-Michel Trembley or JM for short, usually it’s my English. Name is jam. So been in the Quote-to-Cash space and Salesforce space for 10 years now, actually celebrating that this year, been focused on Revenue Cloud, ARM, for the last two years, and been publishing a lot of educational content on my website, The Cloud Update, on my YouTube channel to cloud update as well. So if you’re not aware of that yet, well goes visit that now. My fun fact, and I thought I would be the only one with a dancing fun fact, but then Sam beat me to it, but I’m a fairly proficient salsa dancer will be my fun fact for the day. So and now.
John Garvens 7:15
Do you do competitions or anything?
Jean-Michel Tremblay 7:16
You’re all surprised, not competitions, but I’ve been, I’ve been training for a couple of years now. So I’ve, it’s only for fun. Been something that me and my wife have been doing together for the last couple years to, you know, after you have kids and work and, you know, time together kind of disappears. So that’s been our way to, you know, spend more time together, but also move around and just sit in front of the TV, right.
John Garvens 7:41
There we go. Another fun fact. Jean-Michel has a really nice online course for learning Agentforce Revenue Management. And if you use the code GARVENS10OFF, you’ll save 10% off of his course. Go ahead to his website, the cloud update to get that. And on we go. I want to start with the big macro question that’s been on my mind for quite some time, and I would love to understand from the Salesforce perspective, Sam, maybe you could start with this, given your implementation experience with the very first Product-to-Cash and the genesis of this product at Salesforce, let’s, let’s learn a little more about the past, present, and then the future of this product getting into the Spring and the Summer ’26 releases, and even beyond that, what is the grand vision for the next three to five years for this product?
Sam Chung 8:33
Garvens, yeah, thank you for that. You know, I think I’ll just start with maybe the history and leave it to Meredith to talk a little bit about, and render about what the future looks like. You know, when we, when I started in revenue operations, you know, back in the early 2000s you know, it was, it was an interesting place, because you’re constantly in a situation where, on a daily basis, you’re getting outscaled. Right? The companies generally will invest more in distribution capacity, billing durable money. I’m sorry.
John Garvens 9:10
You froze for just a second. Could you back about 30 seconds, Sam?
Sam Chung 9:13
Okay. Well, what I was saying is that when, when I was in the when I was running on revenue operations team, you’re just dealing with a constant struggle of being out scaled by other functions in the organization. Companies are gonna invest in distribution, they’re gonna invest in innovation, they’re gonna invest in other go to market functions at a far greater pace than you would the middle office and the back office. And so when you go into an environment where you’re you’re constantly in that battle, you have to really be creative and think about ways to solve business problems at the pace in which the business is going to operate. And I think today, not only do you still find that situation, but businesses are evolving much, much faster than they have in the past. New business models, new go-to-market opportunities, new selling motions. All of this is happening because customers are demanding that that businesses really rethink the way that they engage with them. And businesses also want to ensure that they can expand their opportunities to monetize that relationship with that customer, you know, in very, very different ways. There was an article that came out today about General Motors, which is a, obviously a company that everyone knows they now have a multi-billion dollar subscription revenue business based solely on the kind of the access to software and services that go as an extension beyond their cars. That is a great example of how GM is trying to expand their footprint and their opportunity to drive revenue from their existing install base. And I think every company is going through this as well. But at the heart of what I was trying to solve when I was in revenue operations was I realized that the data that we were focused on specifically product data, pricing data, contract data, order data, order fulfillment data, invoice data, payment data collections data. That was gold and that was locked away in ERP. That was locked away in other applications where I didn’t want my sales team to log on to those different applications. And by unifying all of those data elements and all of the customer interactions that occur because these data elements all potentially could be another customer touch point into our CRM application, it really helped to drive, let’s say, a completely different motion around how our sales team engaged with our customers, and that was a radical change. So we didn’t just stop at CPQ. We had literally the entire Product-to-Cash lifecycle embedded in our Salesforce instance, and all of that underlying data was used to ensure that not only did our sales people have access to it, but they could use it to make better decisions on that next opportunity that they were focused on with that same customer.
Meredith Schmidt 11:57
And Sam, you just led perfectly into the Revenue Cloud origin story. So a wise man once told me in my performance review of one sentence said, “You need to learn to love data.” I was like, that wise man is sitting here on the phone or on the screen here, and I was like, what I’m operations? And I’m like, what kind of data? I’m like, Oh my gosh. I mean, I just like, the light bulb moment went on, and it was just about, how do you scale and run a business without really understanding the data? And it was just like a light bulb moment for me, although maybe a little bit late, since it was on performance review. But anyway, the origin story, so Sam goes on, does all these great things at Salesforce, but we’re doing all these SICs with what we call, you know, briefings with our customers. How do we run Salesforce on Salesforce? It’s a big story, and we’d show how we built everything on the Salesforce platform. Because why would your customer data be in your ERP, right? Like all of this is customer interactions, customer touch points. It was really that story we were telling. I put together a deck about 11 years, 11 years ago now that I presented to Marc Benioff, and it was all about how we should go build Revenue Cloud. And I said, I don’t want to do it. I love my job in finance. I’m very safe over here. But I put a whole plan together, and I like, we got to go buy a CPQ. We got to do this. Is it an add on? Is its own thing? I put a whole analysis together, and then six months later, we went and bought SteelBrick. So that is really the origin. And then about four years ago, as we were really moving and looking at how we reimagine the future of not just CPQ anymore, this is much bigger. And really what we built at Salesforce, Sam and I together was just so much, always bigger than CPQ by itself, and all of it together is what we really wanted to reimagine based on that original vision. And so the time was right, and I came and joined the product team, coming out of finance, which is the interesting story, so I like to call it manifest destiny. And luckily, Arun was there. Who actually knows how to build products? Not that I and I’ve learned a ton, but I get to really build product for my former self. So that’s kind of the origin story of Rev Cloud, if you’ve ever heard that before,
John Garvens 14:09
I’ve not heard it go back that far. I do have A Brief History of Salesforce Revenue Cloud: Part I on my YouTube channel, but those were details that I was not privy to. Yeah, that’s cool to know.
Sam Chung 14:20
Yeah, yeah, we’ve been in the in the Revenue Cloud game for more than 20 years now.
Tiffany Devlin-Drye 14:26
Wow.
Sam Chung 14:26
That is a stat that most people don’t realize. They think it really started with SteelBrick, but it goes at least a decade before that, thinking again about the the problems that we were trying to solve for ourselves as we imagined our own growth. Now, when I started at Salesforce and when Meredith started at Salesforce, we were basically 1000 employees. So just imagine the size of our distribution team at a company that’s 1000 employees, and we’re significantly bigger than that now. And that scale that we were able to support was really done because we set the right foundation with this project. And what Meredith has done a. You know, after I moved on to a different role, continuing her education journey, uh, leading revenue operations.
Arun Abichandani 15:06
What’s really interesting
Meredith Schmidt 15:08
I was gonna pass over to you, I think the future around, before I pass to Arun, is what we said, like, it’s not just CPQ. It’s really the end-to-end, and this whole thing starts, it’s, it’s a good data model. And I mean, all starts at product, right back to the data. Like, if you set that up correctly all the way through invoicing and collections. It’s about automation, right? And, like, we’re just trying to get accurate data and get the data and tell the data what to do, right? Like, we just tell it what to do. You pass this test. You go over here, you do this, you transform the data. And I think this is where you know the future is coming in with Agentforce and AI, which is what you can’t do with automation, that’s where AI comes in, right? And then also AI on insights, right, on the data. So I think there’s so much and maybe around I’ll kind of pass to you, like the future.
Arun Abichandani 15:55
Yeah, for sure. And what’s really interesting, and this is an opportunity for us, right? Is the process that Sam and Meredith walk through. Every customer is in some part of their journey and and unfortunately or fortunately, it depends on how you look at it, there’s still a lot of customers that are stuck in sort of haven’t moved, haven’t done the transformation, haven’t gone through the process to understand, Okay, moving these processes closer to the customer is so useful, and unlocks visibility, unlocks the ability to move fast, unlocks the ability to go from Quote-to-Cash, from Product-to-Cash, quickly, right, and identify where the pain points are, and fix the messy middle. So I think that’s that’s really the opportunity, and that’s for what all of us need, evangel, help our customers with and and move, move them in that direction, right? And I think so it tells us history also, right? You’ve heard the history of SteelBrick, Vlocity, us coming together, building everything on platform which is, which is really critical to where we’re going. Because now that we’re on the platform and are a platform ourselves, we provide the ability to go from Product-to-Cash for customers in any industry, and industries are building on us, and industries within Salesforce are building on us as well. And one of the things that our focus, continued focus, is going to be, is, what can we do about scale? Because everyone who was familiar with the earlier iterations was we tapped out after a certain amount, right? And that’s been a big focus for us, and that continues to be a focus for us, is supporting higher scale, supporting better performance, supporting the composability of the capabilities, and because you’re billing everything, API first it’s ready for agents. And I’ve seen what some of y’all have done is really amazing, taking what Revenue Cloud is providing, taken the APIs that are providing, and creating agents that move the customer along, right? And it’s and it’s agents that that actually matter, and it’s not agents for the sake of agents, right? It’s agents and automation together that that is really critical. So we’re going to continue to focus on scale, performance, finding the product, making sure everything works as it’s supposed to work and continue to expand on ease of use, ease of adoption and agenda capabilities in those areas, right? Because what we want to make sure that we do is make it easier for all our customers and all our partners to leverage Revenue Cloud just for this potential.
Meredith Schmidt 18:41
And I think you know, when we talk about agents like this is so like, we all understand there is no margin for error. Like this is not when you get an answer to a case and maybe they give you the wrong order number or your your delivery dates wrong. Like, not great, but we know that our what we’re doing has to operate with 100% accuracy. And when we think about agents too, in, you know, the revenue life cycle, it is always human in the loop, right? There’s going to be some things that could be but I was going to, like, we recognize the importance of accuracy and humans in the process. This is. We call our Agentforce, our agents. They’re joining the team. They’re not replacing the team.
Tiffany Devlin-Drye 19:24
Amazing. I have a question for the Salesforce team. So everybody on this call has been familiar with the products that Salesforce has come out with over the years. So we’re all familiar with SteelBrick. We’re all familiar with Vlocity. My question is, with the new ARM product, what use cases are you seeing that you can solve for customers now that you weren’t able to solve well before?
Sam Chung 19:49
Why don’t I start there’s a few things that come to mind, Tiffany. Arun touched on the first one, which is the performance and scale of the managed package relative to being on core. I know that it’s night and day, you know. Arun mentioned, if you got to a quote with a couple 100 lines on it, you timed out, and that was a difficult experience. You had customers that had to split quotes into many quotes. It just drove a sub optimal experience for their customers. And probably a lot of questions on is this the kind of company that I want to I want to create a relation, a long-term relationship, with, and do I want to buy from them if they can’t even give me a quote that kind of makes sense? And so that is a, you know, what we’re experiencing now with our customers is, is an order of magnitude more performant and of higher scale than what we were able to accomplish in the managed package. And we can share more of those details. That’s the first thing. The second thing, I would say, Tiffany, is that the minute you kind of went outside of a direct sales promotion, outside of a subscription based offering on the managed package, you had to get into pretty heavy customization to make that work. And one of the things that we really believe, again, getting back to the example I shared earlier with General Motors, every company right now is in a hunt for revenue. They care about profitability. You know, every company that I know of right now is thinking about profitability and agents and how that’s going to play into profitability, slash product profit, you know, productivity. Those are all debates that are happening. But what every company really wants is growth. That’s what they really want. And the way to unlock growth is to sell products in a way that speaks to your customers. Think of all these new AI startups that are happening in the bay area right now. Selling an AI product in a subscription model is illogical. It just doesn’t make sense. So they’re using consumption-based offerings. They’re using outcome-based offerings as a way to monetize those AI products. And we are really laser focused on making sure that we can support all of these different selling models and that we can support them in the channels that also make sense. You know, I referenced our sales team at Salesforce. You know, I don’t think this is a surprise to anybody. It’s expensive to hire a salesperson. It’s expensive not just because they’re you have to pay them a lot just to get them there, but then you’re paying commissions on top of that. When you think of a customer and the way that they want to interact with you as a company, there may be a time where it makes the most sense to have an account executive engage with that customer as you’re going through dealing negotiations, you’re finalizing terms and conditions, you’re thinking about price sticks, counting, you’re setting up that contract structure for a long for a long-term relationship. But then if that customer wants to simply add on to that already previously negotiated contract, do you want your very expensive account executive to be involved in that sales transaction? Or would you rather have that customer have the opportunity to do something self service, to do something that’s in the product itself? You know, these are opportunities to drive efficiency and also ensure that your customer is engaging you in the way that you want to operate. So omni-channel, selling, selling with any model, selling with the kind of performance and scale that we we want to be able to support for our largest customers, but also SMBs as well, that are really in the game of high volume businesses. These are things that just could not be done elegantly in the managed package that we are really focused on with Agentforce Revenue Management.
Arun Abichandani 23:17
Yeah, absolutely. I always like to say, Build once, deploy anywhere, right? And that was impossible in the past, and that that’s unlocking so many opportunities for our customers, so they can baseline on one tool, and it’s, you know, central there. I think the other thing is, you know, that we have, we have a pretty comprehensive set of products. And there are a number of those products that people don’t know that much about. And Meredith, you’re going to jump in on this one, DRO is one of them, right? And in DRO is really a hidden gem where we need to do a better job explaining what it is and what it can do. And that’s something that we didn’t have in the past, right? Right in for SteelBrick customers, for CPQ customers. Allowing you to go from quoting to fulfillment and have visibility and auditability across the process, you know, making sure that the right operations teams are informed, making sure that you’re tracking things so that you can get visibility back up if there is a delay, making sure that you know you’re you’re only paying commissions once you’ve collected revenue. All of that stuff is possible using DRO. And it is. What’s the beauty of it is it is something that you can build and create where you’re not creating bespoke flows for each and every different combination or product. It is based on your product model, right? And that is an unlock that I think more and more customers are figuring out now that they didn’t know before. I think that’s amazing. And the other thing I would say is, again, coming on the platform and building everything on the platform, not only omni-channel and all monetization models that Sam talked about, it is the end-to-end. We have customers who can start with the selling part and then add on invoicing and billing, and it just works, right? Because it is one interconnected product, as opposed to taking two packages and integrating it together, that it takes time. So I think that that’s another time-to-market opportunity for all our customers.
Meredith Schmidt 25:36
Now I will talk about DRO because I love it. It is the missing piece. It’s really the handoff between sales to finance, right? The deals been signed. Now what happens? This is how you orchestrate all your downstream process for revenue, fulfillment, billing, rev rec, collections, like they’re all tied together, and you can actually orchestrate based on your own company’s policies and processes. It’s super flexible. And it’s, I actually think the missing piece. Something else you said, Arun. I’m very excited it’s going, it’s publicly available today on Gartner’s website. But we just went through the MQ evaluation for CPQ and first time evaluation of Revenue Cloud, and we came out as a very, very strong leader on the MQ. So really excited to see just what we’re doing there and just unlocking the things we couldn’t do before. You know, complex configuration, constraint-based configuration, it’s this, it’s everything the guys said, and so much more. It’s just really delivering the backlog that we could never deliver in a package.
Micah Gerger 26:40
Definitely agree on DRO being underutilized, too. I think what I’m seeing is kind of similar to the about 10 years ago, when there was a real push for a lot of net new CPQ implementations. I think at the time, it was under 8% of Salesforce customers had any formal CPQ tool of any brand. And so there’s a big push. And we saw a lot of new sales, a lot of new implementations kicking off. And in almost all the ones like and I was deployed on some full time and then splitting and had a lot of touch points on a lot of different projects over a few years there. And so many of them, we would get in and either not be a part of presales scoping, or just be brought in at the tail end, when we’re handing off to delivery on the consulting side, and we’d learn that the fulfillment or provisioning, we’re not touching, that that’s out of scope. And we go, well, it’s got to be in scope some like, to some degree, like, well, but we’re, it’s their system. We’re not going to touch it. We’re just going to create orders, or we’re going to pass orders to invoices. And it was almost, like, almost every single one I can remember that was de scoped. And then surely, sure enough, once we’re in it, we’re like, we can’t completely we have to do something with it, either just feed into whatever it’s doing now, or we’re going to have to retrofit to some extent, even if we’re not taking that on as additional scope. And so I think, you know, seeing a little bit of that again, where, you know, trying to get ARM out the door, at least build or POCs, or wherever they’re starting with, a lot of the interesting use cases where DRO is really just a great fit and kind of a real game changer for how you can use tooling to design these processes, rather than just write triggers and custom code. I think a lot of it’s getting de-scoped, and then it’s just going to naturally start getting pulled in and be in these kind of phase twos. Because I’m not seeing a lot of it out in the wild, even though I think everybody who’s been working in the space knows, just like you’re saying Meredith, it really fits what’s almost always a gap to some extent, and is really a handoff from your out-of-box RevOps tools into whatever back office structure you’ve got depending on the types of products and other systems that need to be tapped into.
Sam Chung 29:06
One of the things that we see as we kind of analyze our own install base and the customers that have come on the Agentforce Revenue Management journey with us is how many of them are considering an IPO in the near future, and it’s a growing list of customers that we have where this is top of mind for them. And when you go through that process as a company, you have to really think about your internal control environment. You have to think about SOX financial controls and your compliance efforts as part of all of your systems that you focus on. And obviously you know your revenue system is going to contain very, very important information, critical information that you’re going to need to generate accurate financial statements. As you know, Meredith and I come from a finance background like these are things that we know very intimately, and the power of DRO to be able to provide a control center, as Meredith likes to call it, for your fulfillment organization, and then to know that you can use that information to help ensure that your revenue recognition is happening accurately. It is just so powerful. And to your point, Micah, it’s a place where I think it doesn’t necessarily seem that important at the beginning relative to other other areas of focus, on a revenue cycle implementation project. But if you are really thinking about your internal controls, and you’re really thinking about partnering with finance and the CFO in particular, on raising the importance of these projects within your organization, it’s a really, really critical part of our solution.
Micah Gerger 30:39
We need to make it sexier. We need to make that sales-to-finance connection sex here,
Meredith Schmidt 30:44
That’s why. The demo is not. It doesn’t demo well, because it’s like, it just flows. You’re like, but it’s so powerful. So actually, it’s, it’s really interesting. We were talking to an analyst today said the same thing. She’s like, you need to market this more, right? We really do.
Sam Chung 31:00
Arun needs to come up with a sexier name.
John Garvens 31:03
I was gonna say, like, if one thing needs a rebrand.
Arun Abichandani 31:09
We’re good at renaming things, so we’ll figure that out.
Meredith Schmidt 31:12
And we’re open. If you have suggestions, let us know.
Arun Abichandani 31:17
But that’s the thing with this. You know, it’s like, it just works, and it’s working in the background, and that’s, that’s the beauty of it. So we got to just pump it up and make sure that everyone understands that.
Jean-Michel Tremblay 31:29
I’m also a big fan of, yeah, no, I was just going to add to all of this. I love DRO but I mean, we’ve all been fanboying and fangirling for the last 10 minutes on it. So I do want to do a quick shoutout to CLM. I’m a I like CLM. I feel like it fills a gap that a lot of companies have where they don’t have dedicated CLM tools. So Contract Lifecycle Management, right? A lot of companies still operate in random word documents, and it’s like, oh, we need a contract. Let’s call them one that has all the contracts, and tell them the account name, and then you’re spending 30 minutes filling in random stuff on a Word document to get it out of the door. Or, well, use CLM, and now I’m from a quote, I generate a contract, and the NDA is generated in a minute from the account, right? Or I’ve got red lines if I’m connected to Microsoft, 365 also. So for anyone that’s using 365 on on their end, is an amazing tool, I think.
Arun Abichandani 32:23
100% agree, right? That’s that’s another one that that is, is another part of the toolkit that people need to know more about, and it not only what you said, but other things. Now this so many times you got to go and search your contracts and update them for new terms, and usually you spend hours and, Meredith, you said you’ve you’ve done that in the past, right where, when you were in RevOps, you had to go through and read all the contract documents. But with contract search, it gives you that data, and it’s looking at unstructured data, and it can search it with intelligence, and it really shortens the time and gives you the accuracy. So there’s, there’s a lot in CLM that that can help our customers for sure.
Micah Gerger 33:08
There’s a there’s a lot like, even if you just look at the the release notes for Salesforce Contracts over, say, the last seven or eight releases, I would be willing to bet nothing, none of the other products could touch it, as far as what new capabilities like the way. The speed that that product went from hey Salesforce Contracts, we can generate contracts, and there’s some rigor around state management, and there’s an obligation data model, all the way into all the AI stuff that’s available today with ingestion and everything else. It’s really impressive what that team specifically has been able to release in that short amount of time where now it’s truly a competitive CLM tool and what used to be a pretty closed off space.
John Garvens 33:57
I’ll just do a direct cut over to a topic that Meredith specifically wanted to talk about: Billing. Meredith tell us about Billing.
Meredith Schmidt 34:05
Well, the other part of our beautiful product, it’s actually a separate product, but we really, actually thought about the the intersection between what, where does CPQ kind of end and where does, where does billing pick up? And, you know, we, we truly believe creating a billing schedule from your subscription, right, that that’s actually part of, you know, kind of our core Revenue Cloud Advanced product. It’s still actually the product still called that, by the way, we didn’t change the SKU names, just so you all know. I can go into that if you really want a history on the naming, Sam has a really great slide that he can take you through. But I think, yeah, you mentioned it earlier. It just works. We built billing on the same on the same core platform, right? It’s not a connection. It turns on like a feature, not an implementation. It’s not going to take you a year to implement billing, like you may start with getting everything all the way set up through even DRO, whether you’re using it or not. You don’t have to use DRO to use billing, right? You need the order. As long as you use the order, you go to billing. And I think that that is the giant unlock. And you think about we’re using the same proration engine no matter where you are in the product, and that is where you see so many issues of even our old CPQ product, you know, integrating with another billing tool. It was never completely accurate. It might be off by $1 here, a penny there, a yen here, right? But this is actually about looking across as a single data model on everything we do. So I think it’s just a different for our for us in particular. And I am telling you, we had seen so much success in one year, more than I think we’ve added more customers on billing. They’re all I would say, 90% of our net new customers never used billing before from Salesforce. And I would tell you, it probably took us five years after launching the managed package billing to get to the number of customers we have in less than 12 months.
Tiffany Devlin-Drye 36:08
Wow.
John Garvens 36:10
That’s some pretty impressive growth.
Sam Chung 36:14
I’m sorry, John, if you think about consumption and usage based products, I think it’s an entirely new it’s an entirely new beast. You know, like billing for a subscription is a little harder than billing for one time. Billing for consumption is a lot harder than billing for subscription. And so you need rating, you need mediation, you need a digital wallet. You have to make sure that your customers understand with transparency and accuracy, how much they’re being billed. This is also one of our first use cases for our billing agent, which is really an agent that allows our customers to be able to offer this agent to their customers to explain invoice line items in a way where, you know, a customer service rep or a billing representative doesn’t have to get involved. It’s very, very complicated, but again, as we see the our customers really think about these new monetization models, billing becomes an even more critical part of what they need to do. And then what I’m personally really excited about is, how do you take that all the way to collections? And again, collections is another area, just like revenue operations, where you’re getting out scaled. In this case, you’re getting out scaled not just by sales and customers, but by invoices, enabled talent and what like I’m personally very excited about what we can do with automation for collection, but then more importantly, what, what can we do to identify collections on behalf of our customers? When you think about the combination of Salesforce voice along with all the other capabilities we get from the platform. You could really see, you know, companies really meaningfully impact DSO in a good way and cash flow performance because of the tools that we really focus on with, with Revenue Cloud Billing.
Micah Gerger 37:54
Yeah, it never ceases to amaze me how small an AR collections team actually is, no matter how big the organization is, you start talking about collections, you’re like, Okay, tell me about your team. And they’re like, yeah, this is it. You’re looking at it.
Sam Chung 38:08
But it’s funny. Micah, I mean, what I remember may have changed, but when you start, when you work at a startup and you’re hiring of, you know, kind of folks in finance, very often that one of the very first three people that you hire is a collector, because ultimately, you have to make payroll, and you need to be able to collect the cash from your customers to be able to fund your business. And so, you know, we think about revenue and cash flow as two parts of the same coin, and things that we’re after, we want to make sure our customers feel like they can optimize both of them at the same time.
Arun Abichandani 38:38
Yeah, so billing is an amazing product. I think one of the things we’ve talked about, right? It, it works together, right? You have Revenue Cloud Advanced CPQ all going all the way to billing, but we also build it where you may want to start with RCA, then add on billing. Great. You can do that. You may want to start with RCB, billing. You can do that as well. You don’t have to start with RCA. So if you need, need to get, you know, invoicing, collections, all of that, done, you could start with billing, and it’s and it works again for across industries, right? And, and that’s what we’ve done, even for contracts, for that matter, right? You could start as a, you know? You could start you have, you needed to solve a problem with contracts. You could start with that, and then add on the other things, so they are composable, and they all work together. And you could pick and choose where you want to start based on what your most pressing need is.
Jean-Michel Tremblay 39:31
And volume support, I think we’re all excited about because we’ve used the old managed package billing that adds some problems with with volume. So now being able to invoice, create invoices with 1000 lines and generate invoices that don’t, you know, without any issues, I think, is very exciting.
Sam Chung 39:50
Yeah, JM, that’s a good point. And by the way, I think this is one area for all of our customers, and for you know, folks in the community that you know have have. A CFO in their organizations that may be neutral or maybe even negative to Salesforce, because they don’t really feel the applicability of Salesforce as a tool to help their organizations. RCB is really, I think, the way that you get attention from your CFO. And again, it’s about driving that your ability to optimize your cash flow, but then just operationally, to your point, JM, like the way that most companies are dealing with invoicing and billing right now is really in core ERP and I spent my life implementing many, many ERP systems. They’re all really a version of terrible when it comes to billing, invoice management, invoice creation, and collections, like when Oracle has advanced collections as a module, it just makes me laugh a little bit. There’s literally nothing advanced about it. And so you’re thinking about dealing with in comparing these very archaic tools that you’ve been using for many, many years, decades, against now modern technology that, again, is similar to what you’re doing across the rest of your CRM suite, it is night and day different.
Meredith Schmidt 41:05
And I think that 100% Also fun fact could use this one ran, you know, revenue operations, orked in revenue at Salesforce for 15 plus years. Never once logged into Oracle. I never once logged into our ERP. I did it 100% on Salesforce platform. So although Sam implemented ERPs, I didn’t touch it. So that’s I did it for, yes, but I will say maybe I’ve lost my train of thought. Now. No, no, no, I got it back so and sorry I am back because I’ve got a kid who just got home from school who now actually I was putting out a fight between my husband and my kids. So another fun fact for you today. A lot of fun at home. So anyway, you know the reason why, in the example I always give, and this is something you know, Sam and I think you and I use this example a ton of times, is when you’re a collector and you’re calling on a $10,000 invoice, but there’s a million dollar open opportunity, you’re going to have a much different conversation. You may actually reach out to the AE before you try to go collect your $10,000 right? And then vice versa, right? If you’re an AE, you get a new account, and there’s all these past due invoices, you should know that. Maybe there’s something wrong in this account, right? And so it’s that visibility, no matter who you are in the organization of what, what is the customer? What is the full 360 degree view, like we have to say, of the customer, right? And whether you’re in customer service, sales finance, you all need to see that same data.
Jean-Michel Tremblay 42:34
I would agree to customers that we’ve worked with that have the most success overall in Salesforce are the ones that get all the way to billing in Salesforce, I find personally, just because you get a lot of value from having those data points in Salesforce.
John Garvens 42:49
So what I’m hearing about all of this, if I was going to distill all this into a short little sound bite, is that there’s opportunities for everyone here. We have opportunities for customers to do what they couldn’t do before, to roll out new processes, to implement ideas that they haven’t had the tooling to be able to do, to connect their business from end to end in a much more cohesive way than sending data back and forth from different systems, or worse, doing our swivel chairs and dumps of reports and VLOOKUPs and using Excel for all this stuff, or BI tools. We’ve got opportunities for partners, consulting firms, of course, implementing these things, and ISVs building bolt-ons for the underlying revenue platform that this thing is. But then we also have, at the most granular level, the individual. There’s a bright light at the end of the tunnel for admins, developers, architects, consultants, and so on, to to advance their careers, to grow, to learn, to be a part of this specific area of the business for a very long time. And that, I think, is one of the most exciting things for me, is the opportunity is there. We hear all this doom and gloom in the news of the AI is taking jobs, this, any other thing but this specific kind of work, you need humans for this stuff, and they can have enhancements. We can have a person who’s got a cruise control maybe, but they still have to or autopilot in some areas, but they still got to be paying attention. They still have to be flying the plane.
Arun Abichandani 44:20
Especially in this field, right? You have to be accurate. You you can’t have hallucinations. You can use that as a you can use AI and agents as a partner. You can use the capabilities that we provide, build your processes, whiteboard those processes, use the Agentforce platform to do that, but leverage the services and the APIs that are provided in order to get you there and get you there faster, right? And then there’s a lot of opportunity around that.
Micah Gerger 44:53
I think it might have been you or Sam earlier who were talking about organizations need to have gone through that transformation and, and I think that’s that’s an area that, you know, the AI tooling can help us with, you know, as consultants and partners and, you know, just internal, you know, leadership trying to drive a program through in our own business. But that transformation is the part that AI isn’t going to do for you, getting the different parties to the table to work through how what are your plans for, your go to market strategies and plans for this next year, and how is that going to impact finance, and what kind of scale are we expecting, and can our systems handle that type of throughput through this new channel? All of that type of stuff is where, you know, the ChatGPTs and Geminis and so on of the world can help take notes, but they’re not going to be driving that discussion. And that’s where, I think, you know, the people in the space you’re talking about John, that’s where we need to really matter, use all the new AI tools and everything for delivery and for analyzing what we’re what we’re taking down. But driving that transformation, asking those hard questions, getting people to the right table, helping broker discussions and broker out outputs that are, you know, aggressive, but strategic and valuable, I think, is super important. So, yeah, definitely no jobs being lost there. But I think the talent and skills that we need to bring to the table maybe may need to evolve a little bit more as well.
Sam Chung 46:37
Micah, well said. Again, I come back to, you know, I worked in companies where the joke was, you call RevOps, and it’s, you know, somebody picks up the phone and they say, Well, this is sales prevention, how can I not help you? And then, you know, that’s not at Salesforce, but at some other places that I worked at. And then that’s on one side of the spectrum, you know. And then you have the order takers that are kind of in the middle. But what you really want, what everyone really wants, is to be a strategic partner and to be someone that is not just sitting to everything by the organization as they think about the evolution of their business. And again, you know, I come back to where I started, which is like businesses are only going to work and evolve faster than they are right now. That is not going to change. And so it’s just incumbent upon folks who are in who are running these organizations, to really be there, to really think ahead, to be in a to understand that they’re in a position where they’re being outscaled on a daily basis, but do it in a way where they understand the golden line, and the golden line is growth, and it’s growth and profitability, but it’s still growth. And so it’s like a really tough thing, especially if you’re, you know, in the finance organization, which doesn’t always happen, but if you are, that’s not necessarily the prime directive, but it ought to be. And the ones that make that leap and that have access to the right tools, like the ones that we provide, but also the right mindset, Micah, which you talked about. Those are the ones where their jobs are never going to go away. You know, as I’ve throughout in my career at Salesforce, one of the only steel thread I could think of around all of them is that, at the end of the day, I’m responsible for change. And if you’re responsible for change, think the humanitarian facts of being a change leader, a change enabler. Those are skills that you cannot replace with AI, you know, we will give you the tools to be able to leverage the best technology that’s out there, the most modern technology out there. We will help you understand how agentic technology can augment what you’re doing, but you as the human are the one that’s driving that change, and the people in the audience that are really embracing that opportunity will never see their jobs go away.
Jean-Michel Tremblay 48:44
And if we’re going to grow on Salesforce, that’s a great transition point to our next topic. So we need to learn and learning through Trailhead and documentation. And, I mean, that’s off to the documentation, because I think over the last year, it’s gotten a lot better, right? Initially, I think we had some, some, you know, shoes with document lacking, right? But Sam or Arun, the other day, you told us that the Revenue Cloud team is the team that output the most Trailhead, or trails, I guess, on Trailhead over the past quarter, right? So that’s, that’s interesting. I think documentation got a lot better. Trailhead offers a lot. So I think people need to, well, please the people that are interested. I think it’s been good for Micah, well, all of our careers. Quote-to-Cash has been good. So I think it’s a good niche to focus on, as good at any anyway.
Sam Chung 49:37
Trailhead is a big part of the Salesforce strategy. And obviously, I think we think of all of our admins, really, as the heroes and the trailblazers within their companies. And, you know, we need to make sure that they have the tools and the information they need to be competent and capable of doing their jobs. And Trailhead is a great scale opportunity, you know, but it’s not the only thing that we have and not the only thing that we’re focused on. We also at Dreamforce we launched the Revenue Cloud Certification Program, which is primarily there for consultants and delivery experts, but is not just exclusively there for them. I think really power users, super users, admin can benefit from that experience as well, but ultimately and, Arun, I would love for you to talk about this. A lot of this is about what’s in the product, and how do you make the product easier to use? You know, Meredith talked about this, ease of use, ease of implementation, is a huge focus for us in the near future, because we know that a go live is only just the first phase, and when you when you’re live again, the business doesn’t stop changing. You’re going to add new products. You’re going to acquire another company. You may divest the company. You’re going to do something that requires you to do something and set up again. And so we want to make sure that you get time to value quickly with Agentforce Revenue Management.
Arun Abichandani 50:51
Yeah, absolutely. And that sort of starting the trails, getting a certification, starting our trails are sort of the baseline, right, getting an understanding or where the product is, getting an understanding of how to how to use it, and then going to certification will give you more, more capabilities. And we’re trying to build on that, and there will be the next, you know, so one on one to 201, and so on. So that is absolutely coming. But I think what we also want to do in the product is with things like GO and Accelerate is the ease of the ease of use, ease of adoption. Because, let’s face it, right? Revenue operations, Revenue Cloud, CPQ, Billing. They are harder than the traditional products to do, to build and operate. So we want to help our customers. We want to help our implementers make it easier, and that’s, that’s where we’re going with the goal. How can you improve the setup so that you’re not, you know, going through 45 pages and saying, Okay, now I gotta do click, you know, these 500 steps? So that’s cool. Accelerate is, how can we provide templates that provide best practices so that, as you’re setting up, you can turn that on and say, Okay, here’s, you know, here’s the products, here’s how you can create, you know, go through a quote to DRO to contracts to billing, right? So that’s, that’s the Accelerate part, and we’ll keep doing that. And the beauty of Accelerator is, then you can have those templates and you can also have more templates for different classes of customers. So I think that that is where our focus is going to be in FY27 in year 2026 but FY27 for Salesforce is working on all the great capabilities we’ve provided, and making sure it gets easier to use, easier to adopt, easier to implement, easier to maintain. Because, as Sam said, there’s a lot of business-as-usual activities, right? You’re going to be introducing new products. You’re going to be changing pricing. You got to you’re going to be updating your contract clauses, all of that. How do we make sure that we help the admins as well as the end users? That’s a big focus for us coming.
Meredith Schmidt 52:57
And I’m just going to tell a big shout out to all of our partners. Like, we would not be here today with the success we’re having today with, you know, well over 1000 lots and lots of customers. I’m not allowed to give exact numbers around here, but it’s only because of you that we have been a success. And I just you know you’ve helped us. You’ve told us, when our documentation is bad, these inputs are gold for us, right? I’ve got lists and lists of product feature requests from you all. They’re on a list. Don’t worry, I’m gonna get to them eventually. But your feedback back into product is what makes the product better and what makes us better. So I mean all of the implementations you do with the customers I know, JM, you got now instructor training customers. That’s amazing. Things that we can’t do, like we can’t do this without you. And so I just want to say a huge shout out, because your feedback is truly gold to us.
Micah Gerger 53:53
That’s another perfect segue, I think, into the last section, I think, is near and dear to all of our hearts, at least the all the folks on this call that aren’t at Salesforce work as an SI in some capacity. And so I think, you know, we’ve touched on a lot of different pieces of this, that the product’s moving really fast. It’s much more sophisticated than, you know, prior, legacy, Revenue Cloud applications. It’s got more depth. It’s got more breadth. It’s evolving very quickly. There are a lot of customers that are are now live and are moving into, you know, post go live phases as well. I think, given all of that and just, you know, recognizing how much work the product team is putting in on every release. I mean, I think all of us are regularly working with at least outbound product teams for around specific capabilities like I’ve been doing a lot with the Commerce and Rev Cloud interoperability. I know Tiff’s in the manufacturing space a lot. We all kind of have our touch points. I think just recognizing that the product’s moving really fast, these programs tend to take, you know, at a minimum, three, four months to get something out the door. But for larger programs, it can be a year or a year and a half, even before you’re, you know, you’ve got a full release, in some cases. All of that to say, like, given how fast it’s moving, and you know we’re moving, we’re building, as always, with Salesforce to a moving target, because then the product is going to be another evolution by the time we’re going live. I guess, what would be your recommendation for, especially partners, but customers as well, in terms of how to engage Salesforce on, you know, product functionality that’s coming out, or gaps in what they expected, or, you know, another variation on a capability that’s going to be live that we need to utilize for our current design, I guess, what’s the best way for us to collaborate with the Salesforce product team during implementations to make sure what we’re building doesn’t isn’t going to require a ton of retrofitting, is aligning to best practice and using what capabilities are there, but also recognizing, hey, there’s usually going to be one more thing that’s coming after this that the customer would benefit from?
Sam Chung 56:23
Well, I think it’s a great question, Micah. And your point about kind of aligning to a moving target is a really good way of describing, I think, not just the way that we’re thinking about our product, but I think just, you know, broadly across Salesforce, you know. We’re, we’re a company that believes in continuous innovation and Agile development, and that plays out through the innovation that’s happening across the entire portfolio. I would say the number one thing that I would recommend is come to our events. And you know, whether you go to a World Tour event, you know that’s in your local city, those are free. They are free, accessible to anybody. And generally we’re there at the ones where we think it’s the most important for us to go to. You know, New York is a good example, London, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, and we’re going to have product presence at those events to talk not just about what we see happening as major trends. So one of the things that is top of mind for us right now are customers that are on a managed package solution, and they are evaluating Agentforce Revenue Management and how do we think about that migration? But the other thing that we spend a lot of time doing is talking about a roadmap, and what do we know about the next few releases, and what can we tell you in terms of the direction in which we’re headed, so that you can be informed around those that directional guidance and kind of where we’re taking the product and stay in line with this there. So you know, those, those are great opportunities. And we spent as a company, I think I can’t even tell you how many World Tours we do a year, but it’s a lot, and so hopefully it minimizes travel, and we do them very, very regularly throughout the calendar year. So that’s the first thing I would say. The second thing I would say is, you know, we are pumping out a lot of information on our help and training portal. Again, Arun is doing a fantastic job with documentation now, making sure that there’s this much transparency and visibility to what’s going on in the products. Think about, you know, our upcoming spring release, which is which we’re in the throes of going through right now. There’s just a lot of focus right now to make sure that people know what’s happening as we go through major releases. And I think it’s really important to stay aligned there as well. We do have a partner enablement group that we partner with at Salesforce. They are regional specific. My job is, part of my job is to partner with them to make sure that they’re engaging our partner community at large. We obviously use Slack as a big as a big channel for us to communicate changes as well. So there’s all sorts of avenues to get involved, you know, for the broader team. But you know, I think if there’s anything in particular that anybody needs, they can reach out to me or Arun or Meredith, and we’ll certainly make sure that we’re connecting with them as well.
Meredith Schmidt 59:03
Yeah, and I know John wants to help but get us wrapped up, and I just want to say we are taking the voice of the customers very seriously. So we have a whole program where we track and it’s from partners and our customers. And one of the things we’re looking at on every one of our releases is how so similar to IdeaExchange. How are we retiring points from the voice of the customer? So this is embedded in our planning. All of the current how we’re built is addressing a need from a customer or a partner.
Arun Abichandani 59:30
That’s actually the first thing we start with.
Meredith Schmidt 59:32
Yeah, it’s where we start our planning. Thank you. Sorry, John. I want to give it back to you, because I know that I’m feeling the pressure.
John Garvens 59:41
Yeah
Meredith Schmidt 59:42
You need to get to jiu-jitsu.
John Garvens 59:44
I’ve been in the group chat just like you got two minutes. We got two minutes.
Meredith Schmidt 59:47
I know I watch it.
John Garvens 59:48
I just started my car. This actually, Sam, like you’re talking about Hyundai has the same type of thing that GM does that you were talking about. So I just started my car because I got to take off and go teach some kids how to choke each other. So with with that said, I want to just say a very sincere and heartfelt thank you to everyone on this call. I know you’re all very busy people. You have a lot of things going on. Thank you to everybody who’s listening and watching. Please feel free. Send me some feedback. Go to garvensconsulting.com/podcast. You can sign up to get updates there, or you can also email podcast@garvensconsulting.com if you have feedback for me, I would love to hear it. Feedback as a gift, as Uncle Marc says all the time. And with that, farewell, have a wonderful day, everybody, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Jean-Michel Tremblay 1:00:33
Thanks, John.
John Garvens 1:00:35
Bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai