We won the engagement because we said no to a big-bang cutover. The team that pitched against us promised it in five months. We promised it in eight, with a phased model and three reversal points. They picked us.
Week 11: the first reversal point
A discount-stacking rule that had lived in legacy as undocumented tribal knowledge surfaced as a $2.1M revenue reporting anomaly. We rolled back the affected product line, kept the rest live, and re-shipped two weeks later. Nobody at the board level heard about it because we had built that reversal in.
“The work is not building the new system. The work is building the new system without breaking the old one, for a finance team that has to close the month on Tuesday, every Tuesday, no matter what you ship.”
What actually went live
- •Full CPQ-to-Revenue Cloud cutover on four product lines
- •Fourteen system integrations migrated to MuleSoft API-led architecture
- •Real-time revenue reporting on Tableau, replacing a nightly batch process
- •Ramp deals and mid-cycle changes handled natively, no spreadsheets
- •ASC 606 compliance baked in, audited by a Big 4 firm in month nine
The lesson we keep relearning
Every Revenue Cloud migration we have shipped has uncovered at least one piece of undocumented tribal knowledge that broke the model. We now budget two weeks of discovery time just to surface those rules before architecting the new system. It is the cheapest insurance you can buy on these projects.
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Written by
Drew Jennings
Territory Manager, SiiMPLY 7
Drew runs SiiMPLY 7's territory practice and leads partner relationships across our portfolio of Salesforce implementations. He spends most of his time in the field with active client engagements.