Successfully deploying CPQ with Gearset
Overview
Cloud Giants is a leading Salesforce Consulting Partner headquartered in North Carolina’s innovative Research Triangle Park. The company’s client roster includes a wide range of industry-leading corporations and non-profit organizations.
Cloud Giants’ approach with clients focuses on collaboration and co-development, effective communication, and simplicity. One of its specialties is Revenue Cloud — companies rely on Cloud Giants to implement CPQ as well as to optimize their use of the product.
Tackling the challenge of complex metadata and CPQ deployments
Deployments are a necessary part of any Salesforce admin or consultant’s role. However, without the right processes and tools in place deployments can be painstaking and tedious.
Before Gearset, Principal Consultant Deepak Veera and the Cloud Giants team were using change sets to manage their metadata deployments.
During a sprint, a team member used a spreadsheet to detail all the components that needed to be deployed. Then, another team member was tasked with creating the change set and deploying it to production. The rising complexity of deployments meant this process began to take hours and become a drain on everyone’s time and energy.
“When you are working with two or three consultants on one project, you need to make sure that you are effectively collaborating and tracking what needs to be included in a release. At Cloud Giants, it is also not uncommon for our clients to co-develop alongside our team and this adds a layer of complexity to any DevOps process.”
Gearset is a game-changer for deploying CPQ config with metadata
In 2022, Deepak was tasked with finding a solution to streamline deployments. Like many Salesforce consulting partners, Cloud Giants works on multiple Salesforce products. However, its specialization in CPQ meant Cloud Giants needed a solution that would support CPQ configuration as well as metadata.
In Salesforce CPQ, data functions as metadata. The data resides in individual records that span 24 custom objects (not including anything related to Advanced Approvals).
A typical CPQ deployment starts with metadata being pushed into production followed by a series of data exports from the sandbox and imports into production. The exported file(s) need be prepped for import into production by adding all the appropriate lookup field IDs.
For CPQ deployments, Cloud Giants previously used an iterative template that consultants had to fine-tune after every CPQ engagement to ensure everything ran smoothly. But all this work took time and effort.
Because Gearset treats CPQ configuration just like regular metadata, the Cloud Giants team can run a comparison between the source org and the target org to view all the differences in their data, before choosing the specific CPQ records they want to deploy. This is a huge time-saver and helps them focus on the sprint at hand. Additionally, consultants use Gearset’s problem analysis to identify dependencies and address common errors in the deployment package before it gets pushed.
“Gearset’s approach to CPQ deployments is groundbreaking. I would estimate it saves us on average 50% of the time we used to set aside for CPQ deployments. But the advantages it provides truly go beyond time-savings. Consultants have so much more confidence (and less stress) when deploying with Gearset.”
Cloud Giants’ DevOps process is a differentiator
Gearset provides the platform for the entire deployment — both metadata and CPQ — which Cloud Giants love.
“Gone are the days of feeling like I’m playing ping pong by constantly jumping between a client’s sandbox and then their production org for outbound change sets, inbound change sets, finding validation errors and then fixing validation errors.”
One of Cloud Giants’ core values is simplicity (and not adding complexity just for complexity’s sake). When testing Gearset, Deepak asked the other consultants for feedback, and they all agreed that Gearset made deployments easier and greatly streamlined the process whether they were working on Sales Cloud, Salesforce CPQ or Service Cloud.
“Gearset simplifies our lives and frees us up to focus our attention on other mission-critical work. As a result, we’re able to deliver more value to our clients. It also helps build confidence in the time we’ve scoped for deployments.”
Cloud Giants uses its DevOps process as a differentiator when speaking with prospective clients and also shares how using Gearset directly benefits them.
“For consulting firms and enterprises working with multiple Salesforce products Gearset is essential.”
