A global B2B leader in corporate travel and spend management was in the midst of two seismic shifts: the acquisition of a fintech startup and a global rebrand. These were not independent milestones…they converged, and fast. And at the point of impact was Salesforce, the backbone of the company’s revenue engine, supporting enterprise sales motions, complex pricing structures, and high-volume commercial activity.
Salesforce sat at the centre of this transformation, expected to unify two fundamentally different commercial models inside a single org. One side of the business relied on a mature but heavily customized CPQ implementation. The other operated without a formal quoting engine at all. Both needed to sell together, immediately, under one brand.
As revenue complexity increased, the limitations of the existing pricing architecture became harder to ignore. Pricing logic was fragmented, quote behaviour diverged across teams, and assumptions embedded in legacy CPQ designs no longer aligned with how the platform needed to scale post-acquisition. Under an immovable three-month deadline, the risk was not just delay, but structural instability.
The moment called for a shift from migrating legacy logic to redefining pricing architecture. Revenue Cloud Advanced (RCA, now known as Agentforce Revenue Management) emerged not as a like-for-like replacement, but as a new foundation for how pricing would be modelled, evaluated, and governed moving forward, without disrupting revenue at the most critical point in the organization’s growth.
The Problem: When Pricing Architecture No Longer Matches Business Reality
As the organization prepared to unify revenue operations post-acquisition, existing pricing architecture began to show its limits. Pricing logic had grown increasingly complex and fragmented. With only one part of the business relying on a mature CPQ implementation with significant customization and another side with nothing in place, it was clear the organization’s pricing logic was never designed to scale. Individually, these mechanisms worked. Collectively, they created a system that was difficult to change, test, and reason about.
And the acquisition surfaced this fragility quickly. A single quoting motion now needed to support multiple teams, products, and commercial scenarios inside one Salesforce org. Under a fixed delivery timeline, every pricing change carried higher regression risk, longer validation cycles, and greater reliance on manual intervention. Salesforce remained the system of record for revenue. But the way pricing was structured within it no longer aligned with how the business needed to operate post-acquisition. The challenge was not volume or scale alone. It was that pricing architecture had been optimized for historical behaviour rather than future flexibility.
What the Business Needed
Success wasn’t about replicating legacy systems. It was about enabling sales teams from both organizations to quote with confidence from a shared platform, without disrupting revenue. The organization needed a unified pricing foundation that was clean, governed, and flexible enough to support two product catalogs (sold together or separately) while remaining stable under volume.
At its core, the business needed quoting clarity at speed:
- A shared product and pricing model across teams
- A quoting experience consistent enough to onboard new reps
- Manual guardrails to manage complexity, without stalling deals
- A phased delivery that protected immediate revenue while laying groundwork for long-term scale
The Architectural Tension and Redefining Readiness: CPQ Assumptions versus RCA Behaviour
Early assumptions leaned toward parity. The initial plan aimed to recreate CPQ capabilities inside RCA and onboard both teams into a fully automated, end-to-end quoting experience by the three-month mark.
But within weeks, things became clearer. For the team moving off a mature CPQ implementation, transitioning to RCA was not a one-to-one exercise. This would be different for the folks adopting a quoting engine for the first time, but as a platform, RCA itself was new and still maturing during this time. The platform’s architecture was different, and still evolving. Known limitations, gaps, and instability that naturally comes with a newer product meant that not all existing pricing logic could be carried forward safely.
More importantly, only one side of the business, representing 10% of revenue, was pushing for those advanced CPQ-style capabilities. The dominant quoting flows were simpler, faster to stabilize, and more valuable to get right early.
The breakthrough was becoming more confident that transitioning from CPQ to RCA isn’t a lift-and-shift; it’s a redesign. Long-term success would come from redesigning pricing with intent rather than attempting to replicate legacy behaviour within a new and evolving tool across a now, multi-phased approach.
The Solution: Intentional Pricing Architecture with RCA
Lane Four reoriented the implementation strategy around business-critical outcomes, not feature parity. Rather than rebuilding legacy logic inside Revenue Cloud Advanced (RCA), the team engineered a phased approach focused on quoting stability, strategic prioritization, and long-term maintainability.
Phase 1 prioritized stability and impact:
- Built a unified pricing and product structure to support the 90% of revenue-generating activity from the acquiring company
- Enabled the acquired team to quote net-new business from the same Salesforce org, with guided manual steps and interim processes where automation wasn’t feasible
- Avoided unnecessary complexity that could threaten delivery timelines or platform stability
Phase 2 was sequenced intentionally:
More complex pricing logic, automation layers, and advanced RCA configurations were deferred to a defined follow-up roadmap to ensure new capability was layered on top of a stable quoting core.
Throughout, Lane Four operated with architectural discipline, aligning each decision with platform maturity, technical constraints, and real business need. RCA was not treated as a one-for-one CPQ replacement, but as a platform to reimagine how pricing would scale, govern itself, and evolve.
Documentation, training, and enablement were also embedded into the project plan. The client’s teams were brought into the architecture early, equipped to own the system after go-live and evolve it as product and pricing needs changed.
The Impact: Measurable Improvements Without Platform Risk
Lane Four delivered a stable, scalable quoting foundation on Revenue Cloud Advanced (RCA) within the fixed three-month acquisition deadline enabling both commercial teams to quote from a single Salesforce org without disruption.
Key business outcomes included:
- Immediate quoting continuity across both teams, preserving momentum during a high-stakes acquisition and rebrand
- RCA established as the system of record, replacing fragmented CPQ logic and field-based pricing with a governed, scalable model
- Unified pricing architecture that supported bundled, cross-sell, and standalone product sales, without duplicating logic or risking divergence
- Reduced delivery risk by prioritizing quoting flows tied to 90% of active revenue, while deferring edge-case logic to a post-go-live roadmap
- Guardrails over gaps, where manual interventions were intentionally designed to guide quoting behaviour where automation was not yet viable
- Client enablement and internal ownership through embedded documentation, training, and a roadmap for enhancement beyond launch
The result was more than a successful cutover. The system now supports day-to-day quoting needs while leaving room to evolve, with a pricing foundation architected to adapt as the business grows more complex.
A Platform Designed for What Comes Next
This project underscored a critical truth: quoting systems are not just operational tools…they’re architectural reflections of how a business thinks about revenue.
When organizations move to tools like Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced, the temptation is to chase parity. But porting legacy CPQ logic into a fundamentally different platform rarely yields stability or scale. In fact, it often recreates the very complexity that leaders are trying to escape.
Lane Four’s approach broke from that pattern. By decoupling automation from value delivery, and treating pricing architecture as a strategic design challenge (not just a tech implementation) the team created a post-M&A quoting engine that was reliable from day one and extensible over time.
For any company undergoing rapid growth, acquisition, or platform modernization, the question isn’t “how fast can we migrate?”. It should be: “How intentionally are we designing our pricing infrastructure to support how we sell tomorrow, not just how we sold yesterday?” If you’d like support navigating those questions, let’s chat.