When Salesforce unveils a new product at one of its frequent customer events, it musters an array of consulting partners to help customers implement the offering. Users need help because, partly due to the SaaS giant’s focus on large enterprise clients, its cloud platform contains a fair amount of complexity. There’s custom code to write and settings to tweak, which is faster with the help of a consultancy.

That consulting-centric go-to-market strategy came to bear again a few months ago with the introduction of Salesforce RLM. It’s an upgrade to the set of features the company provides to help enterprises quote and bill their clients. Salesforce RLM adds capabilities for a number of billing use cases that weren’t supported this extensively before. 

CloudMasonry, a six-year-old Salesforce consulting partner based in Chicago, this week expanded its services portfolio to cover Salesforce RLM. According to its website, the firm can help companies get started with the offering and customize it for their requirements. CloudMasonry also provides a number of related services, including a training program that enables enterprises to familiarize their employees with Salesforce’s latest revenue management features. CloudMasonry head of alliances MacLain Johnson summed up the firm’s approach this way to Boardroom Insight: “CloudMasonry is a full-service provider of Salesforce consulting services. We guide organizations through every step of their Salesforce journey, from initial system design to ongoing innovation on the platform.”

Salesforce RLM overlaps with some of Salesforce’s existing billing management features in terms of the tasks it seeks to ease. At the same time, the offering introduces a number of changes. One of the main highlights is a new tool called Product Catalog Management that helps companies put together e-commerce storefronts. It can customize how a product catalog appears across different sales channels: Developers, could for example, display a different set of products in their firm’s shopping app and its e-commerce website. 

Salesforce RLM also eases a number of related tasks such as generating quotes and calculating how a discount changes a product’s price.

The way companies charge their clients varies significantly across industries. A SaaS business like Salesforce mainly deals in subscriptions, while a factory equipment supplier is more likely to generate the bulk of its revenue from large, one-time purchases. That’s why CloudMasonry’s Johnson pointed to the consultancy’s industry-specific experience as part of its value proposition to clients. He told Boardroom Insight that “our existing Salesforce CPQ practice has deep experience with Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce Industries products. He argues this experience makes CloudMasonry’s team “well-equipped to guide our current customers through the disruptive changes that adopting revenue lifecycle management technology and artificial intelligence can bring to their businesses.”

AI is coming up with increasing frequency in Salesforce consultants’ conversations with clients. Like many of its competitors, the SaaS giant is investing heavily to integrate LLMs into its flagship products. Publicly-traded tech firms’ AI investments are driven partly by customer demand, partly by pressure from Wall Wall to demonstrate they can plug into the trend that catapulted Nvidia’s market cap past $2 trillion this year.

Salesforce debuted the newest AI update to its platform on Thursday, a few days after CloudMasonry announced that it’s expanding its focus to Salesforce RLM projects. Agentforce, as the update is called, will give customers access to AI tools that can automate repetitive tasks such as qualifying sales leads. Looking ahead a few quarters, it’s not difficult to imagine the company adding an AI tool for automating the quoting and billing workflows that Salesforce RLM addresses. ChatGPT won’t be negotiating discount-at-renewal terms in sales calls anytime soon, but Salesforce’s AI investments are already driving go-to-market changes for consulting partners.

text

text