How Salesforce CPQ Is Holding Back Your Expansion Revenue
Related tags
Erin Rand | Content Marketing Manager
There was a time when the SaaS sales playbook was relatively simple.
Sales were linear, contracts were static, and an ever-replenishing pipeline of new logos drove growth.
That playbook is now obsolete.
Today’s SaaS landscape is much more complicated, and the real growth happens after the initial sale.
Net Revenue Retention, or NRR, has taken center stage, with companies relying on expansions, not acquisitions, to drive business forward.
However, as SaaS evolved, Salesforce CPQ stagnated — and it’s now slated to be discontinued. It was built for a bygone era of annual contracts and one-time renewals and struggles under the weight of modern expectations.
This post explains how Salesforce CPQ creates a roadblock for expansion revenue and how Nue clears the path to faster growth.
New business is more challenging than it used to be. Economic conditions, greater competition, and changing buyer expectations have made it tougher than ever to land net-new customers. As a result, SaaS companies shifted their focus to what’s right in front of them: their existing accounts.
At the same time, customer expectations have changed, and they aren’t waiting for renewal dates to make changes. They want to scale up, switch plans, and add features on demand without jumping through hoops or rewriting their contracts from scratch.
Salesforce wasn’t built for today’s revenue reality. It was designed for fixed contracts and predictable renewals — not the messy, fast-moving world of mid-term changes. The moment a customer wants to upgrade, co-term, or add-on, Salesforce starts to crack, and sales and finance are left scrambling with spreadsheets and manual workarounds that slow down deals and kill revenue velocity.
This matters more than ever because expansion is where real growth happens for SaaS companies. According to the High Alpha 2024 SaaS Benchmarks Report, for companies surpassing $20 million in ARR, 35% of new ARR comes from expansion. And companies with high NRR — 106% or greater — are growing 2.5 times faster than their peers.
When your quoting tool wasn’t built for flexibility, every change creates friction. Let’s look at four common expansion scenarios and how Salesforce CPQ handles (or fails to handle) each.
The scenario: A customer decides to upgrade from a Professional Plan to the Enterprise Plan mid-contract.
What should happen: The sales team updates the contract, pricing adjusts, and billing reflects the change immediately.
What happens with Salesforce CPQ: Since there is no native cancel-and-replace function, sales must cancel the original quote and create a new one. Finance must reconcile credits and invoices.
The scenario: A customer adds 50 seats six months into their contract.
What should happen: The system updates the seat count, prorates billing, and rolls it into the next invoice.
What happens with Salesforce CPQ: There’s no way to amend an active contract, so sales has to create a new quote, and the finance team tracks the changes manually.
The scenario: A three-year deal ramps from 100 to 500 seats with changing discount tiers.
What should happen: The system handles dynamic pricing over time and updates contracts as seat counts grow.
What happens with Salesforce CPQ: There’s no native support for ramped pricing or scheduled discount changes, so sales uses manual overrides. Billing and revenue recognition fall out of sync.
The scenario: A customer adds 75 seats in April to a deal that began in January, and they want all seats to renew together.
What should happen: The system prorates additions and aligns renewal dates.
What happens with Salesforce CPQ: Co-terming is done manually, so renewal dates must be changed manually. This creates fragmented billing and renewal cycles, and customers get multiple invoices.
If expansion is your biggest growth lever, your CPQ shouldn’t be slowing you down.
Salesforce CPQ was built for a world of static contracts and linear sales, but today’s customers expect flexibility. The moment they want to make a mid-term change, Salesforce breaks down, resulting in friction, delays, and frustrated teams.
That’s where Nue comes in.
We’ve reimagined CPQ from the ground up with a Salesforce-native program that handles every mid-term change, upsell, and renewal in just a few clicks — all without switching tools or writing custom code. Whether it’s ramped deals, dynamic pricing, real-time expansions, or co-terming, Nue handles complexity seamlessly so your sales and finance teams don’t have to.
There’s no SKU proliferation or disconnected systems. Just one platform that supports usage-based pricing, subscription, and hybrid billing models. And with native support for both product-led growth and direct sales motions, it’s built to scale with you, no hacks or workarounds required.
If you’re ready to start unlocking your expansion revenue, check out a demo of Nue.