Pricing Overview

Background and Product Information

• Following acquisitions and numerous rounds of product development, Salesforce’s true product breadth is far-reaching and covers almost all corners of the Sales and Marketing Saas space. They have purchased Slack, Tableau, Mulesoft, and more, but this summary will focus on what you may find in a core contract.
• Salesforce contracts take different forms, but they routinely feature products in a Sales/Service Cloud capacity, Marketing Cloud, Revenue Intelligence, or B2B/B2C Commerce. In some instances, these feature sets may appear on the same contract, while in others, they may be kept on separate order forms as a result of governance by different MSAs.
• Salesforce changes it's pricing and packaging often for customers, but the list pricing is typically transparent.  Please note that most customers get significant discounts from the below list pricing, depending on SKU mix and volumes.

Pricing Model and Packages

• Sales/Service Cloud contracts: Salesforce has the following tiers that involve varying levels of feature sets, storage, support, AI, and core product functionality:
  • Starter Suite: Account, contact, lead, opportunity management ($25 per Sales or Service Cloud license list price)
  • Pro Suite: Account, contact, lead, opportunity management, Premier Success available as an add-on ($100 per Sales or Service Cloud license list price)
  • Enterprise: Account, contact, lead, opportunity management, 20MB Data storage per user, and partial sandbox included. Premier Success and full sandbox available as an add-ons, forecast and pipeline management, AI and other features available for purchase ($175 per Sales or Service Cloud license list price.  This was recently increase)
  • Unlimited: Account, contact, lead, opportunity management, Premier Success, a full and partial sandbox, sales engagement and conversation intelligence, and 120MB Data storage per user included, forecast and pipeline management, AI and other features available for purchase ($350 per Sales or Service Cloud license list price.  This was recently increase)
  • Agentforce 1 Sales: The complete Sales CRM with built-in AI and unified data. One platform that does it all.  This is $550 per user per month list price.
• Einstein1 brings AI-driven automation, including email and case summarization, next best actions, and smarter routing to help improve efficiency and decision-making.  This is designed to be an all-inclusive platform that integrates Salesforce's suite of products, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud, Tableau, Slack, and more.
• Agentforce which is a standalone product. Agentforce represents the broader vision for building and managing autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks across various business departments. Based on what we have heard recently, eventually, most Salesforce products (except Slack and Tableau) will be aligned under the Agentforce naming as it is the big picture for them right now. There are also a lot of creative, customizable use cases specific to your team.
  • There’s a new pay-as-you-go SKU that can be added at $0 to your contract (or a small amount) that you pay only for your actual usage. It’s still being rolled out, but early feedback is promising. This could be a good way to test ROI and value before fully committing. We’ll learn more as this rollout continues.

All Salesforce packages feature a mix of per user costs, “% of the contract” costs, and usage costs.  

• Examples of line items that follow a “per user” cost include: Sales or Service Cloud, CPQ or CPQ+, Einstein, Maps, Slack, Tableau, Inbox, Data Backup.
• Examples of line items that follow a “% of contract” cost include: Support, Sandboxes (Partial and Full), Event Monitoring, Shield, and Audit Trail.
• Examples of line items that are usage based costs include: Data Storage (500MB or 10GB), API Calls, Super Messages, SMS/MMS, and Heroku Connect Rows/Dyno Units.

Target Prices for Various % Based Line Items:

Most percent based SKUs are a percentage of the contract total, minus usage based items.  Below are some targets to keep in mind when negotiating these add-ons.  Ability to land in the target ranges below is dependent on existing SFDC footprint and spend volume but achieving the below targets would typically constitute favorable pricing:

• Premier Support List: 30%; Target: 10-15%
• Full Sandbox List: 30%; Target: 7-12%
• Partial Sandbox List: 20%; Target: 5-10%
• Event Monitoring List: 10%; Target: 3-6%
• Audit Trail List: 10%; Target: 3-6%

Marketing Cloud Contracts:

• Salesforce Starter: The simple CRM suite with marketing, sales, service, and commerce. $25 per user per month.
• Marketing Cloud Growth Edition: AI-powered emails and campaigns, multi-channel marketing, forms and landing pages ($1,500 per org monthly list price)
• Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition: $3,250 per org/month.
• Salesforce Personalization = $8,000/org/month.
• Marketing Intelligence: $10,000/org/month.
• Loyalty Management: $20,000/org/month.

B2B Commerce Contracts

• Commerce Cloud Growth: 6 storefronts, order management lite, analytics and automation (1% Gross Merchandise Value)
• Commerce Cloud Advanced: 10 storefronts, full order management, advanced analytics and automation (2% Gross Merchandise Value)
• Commerce Cloud B2C Premium: Unlimited storefronts, full order management, advanced analytics and automation (Percentage to be negotiated)
• Commerce Cloud B2B Growth Edition: 6 B2B storefronts, analytics, automation, and segmentation.

New SKUs:

• Data360: uses a flexible, consumption-based pricing model, so you only pay for what you use. Most costs come from Consumption Credits, which can be used across Data 360 for actions like ingesting data, unifying profiles, and creating segments. Data 360 also charges separately for data storage and offers premium add-ons.
• Agentforce: $500/100K credits, $2/conversation.
• AI add-ons like Agentforce 360 modules are enhancements, not replacements, allowing incremental adoption.

Special Terms

• 9% uplift: Salesforce has mandated a 9% uplift at time of renewal. Their requirement for removing the uplift is predicated on anticipated growth, which needs to be 15-20% or more in spend from the current ARR.
• Uplift Cap: Some customers have been successful including uplift cap language in their renewal order form. This language prevents Salesforce from increasing the uplift during the next renewal beyond a certain percentage. While Salesforce will typically start with the cap being set at 9%, the floor that they’ve been willing to honor is 5%.
• Pricing Schedule: An attachment on the order form known as the pricing schedule should be a part of every agreement. This is a chart that shows the pricing honored by Salesforce for certain volume bands. While rare, Salesforce may be willing to include a tier in the pricing schedule that shows the guaranteed rate available with additional volume. This provides a bit of visibility and security in knowing what your team will have to pay for more licenses.
• Push for swap rights to be included, allowing you to replace unused licenses with other Salesforce products if needs change.  This provides flexibility in case of headcount reduction or product realignment.

General Strategy

1. Early Engagement and Contract Timing

• Engage early with Salesforce, especially considering early renewals as they can push for concessions. Timing your negotiations to align with Salesforce's fiscal year end in January can also yield better rates and terms.
• Renew before your current contract expires to leverage potential early renewal discounts or to avoid upcoming price increases.
• Early engagement allows for more time to negotiate, communicate changes, and if necessary, explore alternatives to the current products being purchased. Salesforce is sticky and requires immense resource allocation to conduct a migration off of their software while keeping your Sales Organization functioning. Transitions to a new supplier include switching costs and countless hours of labor to ensure there is no service disruption to your CRM.

2. Leveraging Growth and Multi-Year Commitments

• Highlighting contract growth and committing to multi-year contracts are powerful levers. Salesforce is receptive to discounts for both increased user licenses and adding new products or features.
• Multi-year terms in more recent years with Salesforce have resulted only in price locking.
• Utilize forecasted growth or an increase in license count to negotiate better rates, especially to mitigate or waive the standard 9% uplift Salesforce applies to renewals. Make sure to communicate that expansion or potential for new use cases as an opportunity for Salesforce.

3. Right-Sizing and Utilization

• Right-size your contract by removing unused licenses and waste, leveraging usage reports from Salesforce to reflect actual needs. This strategy not only streamlines your costs but can also be a negotiation point to adjust pricing.
• Consider reducing your usage where possible, especially if paying list price, and leverage this as a bargaining chip to secure better terms.

4. Negotiating Terms and Conditions

• Push for better billing terms, such as quarterly or semi-annual payments, despite Salesforce's preference for annual billing. This can improve your company's cash flow management.
• Salesforce’s standard terms are Net 30, Annual, but both have been successfully negotiated by customers looking to improve their cash flow.
• Request a price cap in the order form to limit future price increases, aiming for a cap as low as 0% and negotiating up to a 5% maximum. Salesforce typically does not offer this for less than a 24-month term or with contract reductions, but it's worth pushing for.

5. Utilizing Competitive Pressure and Special Events

• Use competitive quotes and the urgency of signature timelines to pressure Salesforce into offering more aggressive discounts. Understand that competitive quotes utilized for incumbent products under 9 months out from renewal will likely not change Salesforce's behavior, as they know how hard it is to move away from their core SKUs.
• Leverage special events, like Salesforce's end of fiscal year or acquiring new products like Spiff, as opportunities to negotiate better terms due to their increased motivation to close deals.
• Competitive pressure is most effective when discussing specific products and not the entirety of your CRM or Marketing software requirements, where Salesforce may be weaker when compared to other products on the market.

Custom Strategies

Regarding Renewal Reductions

1. Start early, gather information on usage
2. You’ll want to start your discussion early with Salesforce if you wish to reduce your volume with them or deprecate features.
3. Before that can happen, you should ensure you have a strong understanding of your usage. Request a usage report from Salesforce or from your admin view, run an audit yourself.
4. Determine 3 Numbers
   1. How many licenses are purchased
   2. How many licenses are provisioned
   3. How many licenses are in active use in the past 30 days
5. Evaluate historical usage & future requirements to determine needs for renewal
   1. Once you know your usage, combine it with your forecasts in the coming months. If you need to remove a few licenses in order to right-size, they may be offset by a future hiring need. Combine your subtractions with your additions and determine what your net reduction will look like.
   2. You should attempt to build in a slight buffer in case needs change, and you need a Sales Cloud license ASAP, for example, and do not wish to work through a portal or a representative to secure one.
6. Communicate an exaggerated reduction to Salesforce
   1. If you are looking to reduce your Sales & Service Cloud Enterprise licenses by 20% in order to remove waste and control your spend, gear up for an increase in the rate per license. The amount by which Salesforce will increase your rates is arbitrary, and varies from customer to customer, rep to rep, and renewal to renewal. There does not appear to be a standard formula that determines how much the cost per license will go up based on a reduction in volume.
   2. Therefore, it’s important to ask for an exaggerated reduction, lower than what your team truly requires for the renewal. If the cost goes up $5 per license whether you are removing 10 licenses or 75, asking for a quote with more removed than you need to drop allows you to add a few back over the course of negotiations in order to control the uplift.
   3. If pressed, you can tell Salesforce that you’re looking to right-size the contract beyond just what appears to not be in use, and that costs are top of mind for your company. If you can include future growth into the renewal, you will later, but for now, you need to see a quote with a large reduction in volume.
7. Build back licenses
   1. Over the course of the next few weeks, begin to add back licenses to the renewal. The goal here is to get Salesforce to incentivize you to reduce your downgrade. They’ll be looking to turn a large downgrade into a small one, as that is seen as a win internally. Your rep may be rewarded for doing so.
   2. This offers you unique leverage. Adding back licenses as a “give” during negotiations, in increments, can help get you as close as possible to your original rate.
   3. Begin using figures in your negotiation and force Salesforce to confront them. If you reduced Service Cloud Unlimited licenses by 40% and the line item in total has only dropped 8% in cost, there is a large gap Salesforce needs to explain away. Adding more licenses back, you could inform Salesforce that you’d be willing to make that reduction only 30%, but costs need to drop 25%.
8. Reference total cost of ownership as a reason for getting the best rates
   1. Reducing your account size is never fun, and certainly not something any company intends on doing from the onset of signing a contract. It’s a necessary measure to protect one’s business.
   2. That said, it doesn’t negate all of the dollars you’ve committed in the past. Salesforce should be reminded that, especially if you’ve had a long relationship, plenty of dollars have been spent with them, and that you’re still looking to invest a considerable amount if your business partner. Salesforce should not discard all discounting, and keep in mind the existing relationship when determining how to price the contract following the contraction.
9. Bring in leadership and budgets
   1. Should your pricing still be off the mark, pull in leadership; a VP of Finance, CFO, or someone who has a say in the budget. Salesforce cares about executive alignment and will take their opinion seriously.
   2. Have your leadership communicate the budget, or reinforce the initiatives or circumstances that led to a downgrade. They can reassure Salesforce that the future of the company is bright and therefore so is the account, but that the budget needs to be hit in order to allow for future growth.

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