Salesforce’s decision to retire its legacy Salesforce CPQ (SF CPQ) product is more than a product roadmap decision; it marks a turning point for the entire revenue lifecycle management landscape. Revenue operators and IT teams recognize this as a moment of disruption and forced reflection of their revenue tech stack.
Forced Migration, Strategic Risk
Salesforce is moving from its long-standing managed package CPQ to Revenue Cloud Advanced (RCA), effectively requiring customers to rebuild a critical business system on a timeline that they did not choose.
Implementations to Salesforce CPQ were often measured in 12–24 month timelines, with costs that can reach 2–3x the original investment due to heavy dependence on system integrators. Companies we have spoken with underestimated complexity, and each found implementations taking multiple iterations and six months longer than planned. Companies discovered their Salesforce systems were ‘actually a mess’ requiring months of cleanup before a successful CPQ project could begin.
Early indicators are the same extended timelines and costs will be in line for new implementations of Salesforce RCA. For companies already under pressure to accelerate revenue cycles, the idea of investing multiple years into a back-end rebuild introduces material strategic risk.
Two Diverging Paths
CIOs, RevOps leaders, and IT teams face a choice:
- Stay within the Salesforce ecosystem. There are benefits of staying with an ecosystem such as Salesforce’s, with a broad product portfolio and deep technical expertise available, but at the expense of committing to a multi-year, high-cost re-implementation, accepting SI-led dependencies with potential slowdowns in GTM execution.
- Rethink the revenue architecture. Use this moment to evaluate modern, vendor-agnostic systems that can deliver agility, faster deployment, and reduced long-term dependency on external services.
This isn’t a decision about tools alone, it is a decision about how companies want to execute go-to-market strategy in the next five years.
Emerging Needs: Agility, Visibility, and Governance
Today’s GTM strategies demand more than static quoting logic. We have found that operators are increasingly dealing with complex pricing scenarios that legacy systems struggle to handle, particularly around subscription and usage models. Leaders are asking for:
- Adaptive pricing models: Support for subscription, usage, hybrid, and geography-based structures.
- Executive visibility: Real-time dashboards that connect quoting with pipeline, forecasting, and revenue recognition.
- Governed automation: Compliance and approvals embedded into workflows without slowing down sales velocity.
Legacy systems were not built for this level of agility. The SF CPQ sunset is a reminder that organizations need execution-first platforms capable of scaling with the business, not holding it back.
Orchestration, Not Assembly
This is where the third wave of revenue execution solutions emerges. Instead of focusing on ecosystem lock-in or piecemeal assembly, these solutions prioritize speed, adaptability, and complete quote-to-revenue workflows.
| Era | Focus | Strengths | Limitations/Outcomes |
|---|---|---|---|
| First Wave: Early CPQ (2000s–2010s) | Digitizing the basic quoting and approval processes. | Successfully replaced manual spreadsheets and improved overall pricing control. | Solutions were siloed from CRM and ERP systems, offering limited adaptability to changing business needs. |
| Second Wave: Assembly Model (2010s–2020s) | Embedding CPQ functionality into CRM ecosystems to scale adoption across the enterprise. | Achieved deeper CRM alignment and broader usage across global sales teams. | Required complex assembly of various modules; often led to heavy dependence on System Integrators (SIs) and long 12–24 month implementation timelines. |
| Third Wave: Orchestration Model (2020s–Present) | Unified revenue execution that seamlessly connects CPQ, CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management), and Billing. | Provides a single source of truth, governed workflows, and highly adaptive pricing models. | Delivers faster time-to-value, reduced revenue leakage, and greater Go-To-Market (GTM) adaptability. |
In this evolving landscape, platforms like DealHub represent the transition toward an execution-first, orchestration model.
- Native Workflow Integration: Utilizing a single-platform architecture where CPQ, CLM, and billing function as a continuous data flow, reducing the need for the complex cross-module syncing common in older ‘Assembly’ models.
- Implementation Velocity: Orchestration models focus on configuration over custom coding. For example, some organizations have reported deployment timelines significantly shorter than traditional enterprise CPQ projects, with measurable improvements in renewal speed and quote accuracy.
- Platform Portability: This approach decouples the revenue logic from the CRM. This architectural flexibility allows companies to maintain their pricing and contract rules even if they migrate between CRM providers (e.g., from Salesforce to Microsoft Dynamics), mitigating long-term ecosystem lock-in.
By contrast, the Salesforce Revenue Cloud (RCA) path offers the security of a single-vendor ecosystem and immense scalability for global conglomerates. Its modularity allows organizations to layer on features as they grow. However, this ‘Assembly’ approach typically requires a more intensive partnership with system integrators (SIs) to replicate existing workflows, making it a better fit for firms that prioritize deep ecosystem density over rapid deployment flexibility.
A Moment of Forced Clarity
The retirement of Salesforce CPQ is a market-wide signal that the second wave of CPQ is ending. The third wave, centred around orchestrated revenue execution, is already here.
Companies now face a defining choice: commit to costly, ecosystem-bound migrations, or embrace execution-first solutions that deliver agility, governance, and time-to-value in months.
For CIOs and revenue leaders, this isn’t just a technology decision. It’s an opportunity to reset the foundation of GTM execution for the next decade.

Rhonda Bavaro excels in boosting SaaS companies’ growth through innovative content marketing, thriving in the dynamic sales tech industry amidst evolving technologies that drive revenue acceleration.
