Set Up Your Product Offerings

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe the high-level architecture of Revenue Cloud.
  
• Explain the components of a product catalog.
  
• Use Qualification Rules to define product visibility.
  

Revenue Cloud Architecture

Revenue Cloud is a unified product-to-cash suite for omnichannel buying and selling. It’s made up of several components to support all stages of the sales cycle.

The diagram shows the Revenue Cloud components, which work on top of the Salesforce Platform.

As you can see, several components in Revenue Cloud join forces to provide an end-to-end revenue-management experience for different types of end users. Product managers, marketing managers, pricing admins, sales teams, service teams, and consumers can all use Revenue Cloud to play their part in the sales process.

A great sales experience starts with a strong foundation: setting up the product catalog and defining pricing. Once the catalog is in place, customers and sales reps can easily create and submit quotes. Quotes evolve into contracts and orders, bringing customer assets to life. The last step ties it all together—generating invoices. Revenue Cloud streamlines the process so that everyone involved enjoys a seamless journey from start to finish.

In this module, you explore the Revenue Cloud application architecture alongside various context definitions, decision tables, pricing procedures, and flows. Plus, you learn how to configure the components.

Shared Catalog, APIs, and Actions

Before diving into specific features, discover the capabilities that make Revenue Cloud a modular and scalable solution that’s just right for revenue management.

Shared Catalog

Product Catalog Management is a Revenue Cloud component you use to define a shared catalog for storing product information. Once you establish the catalog, use Salesforce Pricing to price those products. For complex products, use Product Configurator to set them up to be configurable during product selection. For instance, you can set up a phone such that customers can configure it by selecting a specific color or the storage capacity during product selection. All the other components of Revenue Cloud use the product and pricing data in your shared catalog.

End users are typically customers or sales reps, who browse the product catalog and select products to build a quote. This can also entail configuring more complex products. With successful execution of contracts, automated processes efficiently turn quotes into orders and fulfill orders into assets. And with business needs always changing, a shared catalog supports the amendment, renewal, and cancellation of quotes, orders, and contracts. Invoice Management monetizes sales through invoice generation, including tax calculations for products and services delivered to customers. All these Revenue Cloud components use the same product data from your product catalog.

Extensible APIs

Built as an extensible platform, Revenue Cloud follows an API-first approach. It provides an intuitive, configurable user interface and extensible and headless API-first business components across the product-to-cash process. Using APIs, you can automate business processes like complex product bundling and product configuration. Other cloud services can use these composable APIs to access Revenue Cloud features.

Invocable Actions

The Salesforce Platform provides a powerful tool called Invocable Actions that developers use to create reusable actions. The actions encapsulate a process and can be invoked from various applications in the Salesforce environment and from external applications. Revenue Cloud components use invocable actions to automate processes and to make their use available to other Salesforce and external off-platform applications.

Product Catalog Building Blocks

To start, it’s important to understand the product catalog and how to configure product visibility. With Product Catalog Management, the shared catalog setup process involves four main stages.

• Define products and their attributes.
  
• Create reusable product categories to classify products.
  
• Build bundles and product offerings.
  
• Configure rules to govern product visibility, packaging, and attribute configurations.
  

Other Revenue Cloud components, including Salesforce Pricing, Transaction Management, Dynamic Revenue Orchestrator, and Invoice Management use the shared catalog, too. Here are the main parts that form a product catalog.

Start by creating the product catalog, which is a container for all other objects. Next, create the product attributes. After that, you can create templates—called product classifications—to create product variations. Products can be simple stand-alone offerings or bundled products that offer flexibility and scalability in your go-to-market options.

While creating quotes, customers and sales reps can view products and product bundles, including product images, descriptions, product attributes, prices, and buying options in a single comprehensive view. This well-organized product-browsing experience makes it easy for sales reps and customers to efficiently identify the most suitable products.

The image shows an example product catalog that uses product images, descriptions, and other solution features.

Notice that the categories arrange all products neatly into related groups, including laptops, desktops, and accessories.

Qualification Rules and Product Visibility

Different parts of the world use various types of power plugs. When a customer searches for power plugs in your catalog, they should see only those relevant to their region for the best shopping experience. A Qualification Rule acts to qualify or disqualify products or product categories based on different customer requirements. With these rules in place, you ensure that the products shown to customers are relevant.

Product qualification rules control which products and product categories are presented to which users for selection, based on a variety of conditions such as location, account attributes, and customer type. You can qualify or disqualify specific products or entire product categories using qualification rules, which rely on different elements. These elements include objects, decision tables, qualification rule procedures, and context definitions.

Objects

Product Catalog Management provides these objects to help you define Qualification Rules.

The Revenue Cloud data model is extensible to support different industries and unique business needs. For example, if you’re defining product eligibility for accounts that operate in specific industries—communications, manufacturing, media, or finance—update the Product Qualification object and add a custom field. In this scenario, you can add an Operating_Industry field of the data type Picklist. This information is used by other components involved in setting up Qualification Rules.

Decision Tables

In Salesforce, you use decision tables to implement business rules outcomes. For example, decision tables can calculate discounts based on certain product attributes.

Product Catalog Management uses decision tables to define the criteria for qualifications and disqualifications of products and product categories.

Use predefined templates to quickly create decision tables for qualifying or disqualifying products and categories. These tables define rules based on object fields, letting you set conditions and specify if results are qualified or disqualified.

Qualification Rule Procedure

A qualification rule procedure contains a series of steps, with inputs and outputs defined in a logical flow. Each step evaluates a rule defined in a decision table so that the procedure returns a list of qualified or disqualified products.

The example screen shows an Evaluate Qualification rule, which uses the ProductQualificationDT lookup table.

This rule uses the ProductID as an input parameter and the IsQualified field as an output. The Reason field explains more about the rule decision. To ensure that your qualification rule procedure is working as expected, run simulation tests to confirm the results are as expected. Finally, activate the qualification rule procedure.

Context Definitions

A Qualification Rule Procedure requires a context definition to obtain the data—in this case, a list of products to qualify or disqualify. The context definition includes the relationship between context structure and source data objects through attributes, context tags, and mapping.

Think of a context definition as an interaction layer between the objects and the qualification rule procedure. Data from the objects maps to the context definition, and the context definition attributes are used in the procedure. In this way, the procedure isn’t dependent on the underlying object.

You can map any object to a context definition and the data from that object flows through the procedure for execution.

Context definitions pass product or category data to the qualification rule procedure, which evaluates and returns results—either qualified or disqualified.

Revenue Cloud provides the ProductDiscoveryContext context definition out of the box, which you can use for product qualification and disqualification. The pricing procedures defined in Salesforce Pricing also use this definition to calculate the price of qualified products.

This image shows the structure of the ProductDiscoveryContext context definition, including the nodes it contains. Selecting a node, in this case Account, shows the attributes of the node, their data types, and other details.

After you define the decision tables, qualification rule procedures, and the context definitions, make sure that the correct context definition is selected in the Product Discovery settings for your org as shown here. Here’s the Product Discovery Settings page with the right values selected.

Remember, the list returned to the user contains those products identified by your qualification rules and procedures. This way, when a customer browses the product catalog, or when a sales rep adds items to a quote, the right products along with the correct prices show up based on the Account attributes.

Once your products are set up and you’ve defined the business rules, you’re ready to configure product options.

In the next unit, learn how to set up configuration options for your products, so that customers, sales reps, and other users can modify product attributes when adding products to quotes and orders.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Introducing Actions
• Salesforce Help: Context Definitions for Product Catalog Management
• Salesforce Help: Decision Tables for Product Catalog Management
• Salesforce Help: Qualification Rules
• Salesforce Help: Configure Product Discovery Settings
• Trailhead: Revenue Cloud Foundations
• Trailhead: Product Catalog Management: Quick Look