Explore Components and Personas

Learning Objectives

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

• List the lifecycle stages of a consumption-based product.
  
• Explain key components of Usage Management.
  
• Identify the personas who work with Usage Management
  

A Component for Every Stage

A consumption-based product follows a lifecycle from setup and pricing to selling, tracking, and customer visibility. Usage Management gives you five key components, one for every stage.

1. Usage Modelling
   
2. Rate Management
   
3. Usage Selling
   
4. Wallet Management
   
5. Consumption Management
   

Let’s go through them to find out how they can help.

Usage Modelling

Every consumption-based product begins with clear definitions of what’s being used, how it’s measured, and what the customer is entitled to. Usage modelling provides a step-by-step system to set up and define consumable products and services, usage resources, and product usage grants. Let’s explore each of these.

• Usage resources: These describe what’s being consumed, such as gigabytes of storage, number of API calls, or meeting hours. You can offer them as part of a bundle or as standalone add-ons. And specify how usage is tracked and rated, such as adding it over time or capturing ‌peak usage.
  
• Units of measure (UOM): This is how usage is quantified. Examples include GB, Minutes, or USD. UOM Classes group similar units and define conversion rules for consistency.
  
• Product usage grants: These represent the customer’s entitlement, such as how many units customers get, for how long, and under what policies (rollover or expiration).
  

This stage establishes the foundation, ensuring you know exactly what customers are using, how much, and what they’re entitled to use.

Rate Management

After your usage products are defined, the next step is to determine how usage translates into charges. Rate Management is the configurable part of Revenue Cloud that applies pricing rules to consumption-based products and services, turning usage into charges without manual calculations. It includes:

• Rate cards that contain pricing for each usage resource, either flat or tiered rates.
  
• Rate card entries to specify the rate rules based on quantity consumed or attributes such as region or customer type.
  
• Rating procedures that apply pricing logic to convert usage into cost.
  
• Pricebook rate card entries to represent the price of a product in a price book.
  

Rate management is crucial to make sure customers are charged consistently, especially for overages or discounts, while giving businesses the flexibility to adapt pricing.

Usage Selling

With usage pricing in place, you can offer products to customers during the sales process. Usage Selling provides upfront visibility of rating details while browsing or quoting a product. This includes usage product quotes, orders, and activation as part of Transaction Management. You can:

• Add consumption-based products to guided selling flows.
  
• Bundle grants with base products or offer them as optional add-ons.
  
• Customize entitlements as per the customer contract.
  

This makes it easy for sales reps to create quotes that align with what each customer ‌needs.

Wallet Management

The usage management process creates wallets for each purchased usage resource for each account. Wallet Management provides a dashboard UI that lists and tracks resources by account. Here’s what you get.

• Wallets: Act as live usage trackers for customers.
  
• Drawdowns: Track how much has been used and deduct it from the grant.
  
• Grant Rollover and Refresh: Determines if unused units carry forward or reset monthly.
  

The Wallet Dashboard gives customers and internal teams real-time visibility into how much is used, how much is left, and whether they’re close to hitting limits. So you avoid billing surprises for both customers and your internal teams.

Consumption Management

After products are sold and customers start using them, you track consumption data. Consumption Management facilitates tracking of consumption data, management of grants, and generation of invoice-ready summaries for billing and analysis. Let’s explore some of its concepts.

• Transaction Journal: Capture all raw usage events.
  
• Usage Summaries: Aggregate usage data over time using methods like SUM or PEAK.
  
• Ratable Summaries: Convert usage amounts from the usage summary into a monetary value to determine billing charges.
  
• Liable Summaries: Represent the final amount a customer owes and is sent to the billing engine for invoicing.
  

This step transforms raw data into clean, structured insights ready for billing, reporting, and customer support. You get a full picture of what customers used ready for analysis or billing.

With all these components working together, Usage Management gives you a complete, end-to-end system for managing the entire lifecycle of your consumption-based products.

Key Personas

In the consumption-based product journey, different personas play a part. Here's a look at the key roles and how they use the components.

Together, these roles contribute to a smooth and transparent consumption-based revenue process.

In this unit, you learned about Usage Management components and the personas that use them.

In the next unit, you explore the different phases of setup, get an overview of the decision-making processes, and envision your own implementation.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Give Your Customers More Flexibility with Usage Selling
• Salesforce Help: Usage Selling
• Salesforce Help: Set Up Usage Selling
• Salesforce Help: Usage Management Setup
• Salesforce Help: Permission Set Licenses, Personas, and User Permissions