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Salesforce is not just a CRM. It’s not just software that lets you track opportunities, leads, and accounts. It has grown from those humble roots to a massive multi-faceted tool. It can (almost) run your entire business.

But, it can also cost your business a small fortune. The costs of Salesforce can quickly spiral well beyond your needs and use-cases. Worse, without help, your business will overpay for services it isn’t using. It even paying for Salesforce features you don’t need or don’t even know you have.

As an example, I found a line item on a mid-sized company’s contract for High-Volume Platform Events. When I explained what that was and asked about it, no one knew why it was on there. Eventually, it was discovered that a prior engineer had “demanded” it. They intended it for field testing of various physical units for a project. They believed that these devices would often “call home” into Salesforce. This would “overwhelm” the platform events on their Unlimited Org. This concern was particularly true if the test project was successful and expanded nationwide. No one questioned the engineer or pushed back. No one analyzed the numbers. If they had, they would have seen that Salesforce easily handled the small amount of traffic. This would be true even if the project were wildly successful. Still, the project was not a success and was shelved a few years later. But the High-Volume Platform Events line item stayed on the invoice for many years. (If I recall, the pricing was $6,000/year, and it was billed over five years before anyone noticed).

Many of us love Salesforce the software. We want to implement it well to help our business save money and grow. We also aim to better comply and manage all the expectations upon us. Still, we are not often quite as fond of Salesforce the company. They are known for being heavy-handed in their sales and marketing efforts. There are many stories of companies buying software (not just from Salesforce) that they weren’t able or ready to use.

I hope these money-saving tips below will be useful. They can help you put more of your hard-earned money back into your business’s pocket.

1. Don’t upgrade your Org Edition unless you absolutely must – and you understand all the ramifications.

If you move from, for instance, Professional to Enterprise, you can not easily move back. The way to move back is to contract with Salesforce for a new Professional Org. First, you migrate all your data. Next, eligible metadata is moved back into your new Professional Org. This process requires your time and efforts. Most end up hiring a consulting partner to manage and oversee such a project. If you’ve been in the upgraded Org for a while, some things do not migrate back. You need to create a plan for implementing workarounds. This is necessary if you built those in the new Org and now rely on them.

I don’t like to use the word “nightmare” often, but for most organizations, that’s how they would describe it. Be very careful about upgrading.

Sometimes Salesforce sales reps or consulting partners will pitch the savings this way. “You need feature A. You’re up against Org limit B. You’ve always thought it would be cool to have C. If you upgrade to the next edition, you’ll get all that… and more! And it won’t cost that much more than you’d pay separately.”

What happens if you don’t have time to implement A? After some changes in your business (or the economy), you’re no longer hitting the limit of B. You find a workaround for B. You never really acquire buy-in from others in your company to implement C. Instead, in most cases, I would recommend rolling out each matter independently. You’ll know in your heart when you really need to upgrade your Org.

Salesforce can push a few buttons. They turn a few wheels in their basement. They stomp on a few levers and… presto magico… you’re upgraded to the new Org! Your new bill will arrive instantly. But if you want to downgrade your Salesforce Org, those buttons are suddenly covered in rust. The wheels and levers are tangled in cobwebs. Go figure! 

If that ever changes, I’ll update this first piece of advice, but for now, caveat emptor.

2. Avoid multi-year contracts with Salesforce.

Salesforce claims to have invented the idea of SaaS. Modern SaaSs allow you to upgrade and downgrade at will, usually by clicking a few buttons in their billing administration. No email or notice required. As I wrote in #1 above, Org upgrades and downgrades don’t work similarly at Salesforce.

SaaS has also traditionally meant that you can “leave at any time”. You take your ball and go home. Most modern SaaSs allow you to just simply stop paying, remove your credit card, and start doing business elsewhere. In theory, that makes a more competitive landscape.

Software used to be more… permanent. You’d spend months hearing sales pitches and watching demos. Sometimes years. You’d finally sign a Big Contract with your chosen solution. They would send you a bunch of boxes in the mail. A technician, an installer, and an implementation team would visit you on-site. Your original sales representative would also be there. They would get you up and running and give all the contracted training sessions. Then you’d be on your own.

Due to high implementation costs, contracts were usually five years or longer. Ten-year contracts for service and support were common. They still exist in some enterprise and government software solutions.

But SaaS was supposed to change all that. For the most part, it has for small to medium businesses. But let’s not fool ourselves; companies love that guaranteed income. I mean, wouldn’t you prefer it too, all things being equal?

Salesforce loves to pitch and secure multi-year contracts now. It’s like they’ve forgotten their roots. If they could, they’d love to have you sign a three-year contract. In fact, it’s annoying to me that they even need one-year contracts for most of their solutions. They usually offer discounts on several line items to convince businesses to go with a multi-year contract.

Most businesses shrug and say, “Welp… where are we really gonna go on such short notice anyway?”. But, that’s not the point.

Yes, it would be veritable nightmare (there’s that word again!) to migrate a business from Salesforce into another solution (although all businesses should have a plan on how they would if they had to). It would take a year for most businesses to leave Salesforce once they actually determined to do so.

So, under that way of thinking, it seems to make sense to agree to a multi-year contract. I’m not saying never do it. I’m saying to exercise caution.

Salesforce has improved their behavior a little. In recent years, they’ve rolled out the Your Account App. It allows Salesforce Administrators and designated users to manage your Org’s products and licenses. These include Identity Licenses, which are free for your Accounting department users. They can also manage contracts, renewals, and more. It’s almost like they’re trying to join in modern SaaS alongside others in the SaaS field. Nonetheless, they haven’t brought their best equipment to the game yet.

While the app allows you to add services, as of this writing, you can not yet remove services. 

Let’s use an example. Let’s say you bought 100 sales user licenses with the hopes the department would expand. But you never used 30 of them. Six months later, you decide you won’t be needing those 30 and you just want 70. The “My Account” app won’t let you change that.

Moreover, you’ve agreed, contractually, to pay Salesforce the money for 100 licenses, whether you use them or not. Your Sales Rep will help you (after the usual back/forth of emails and calls) to remove those extra 30 licenses. Still, you will still pay for those unneeded 30 licenses for the duration of your contract. Salesforce will help you to repurpose the money you paid or are paying them. They will redirect it toward some other Salesforce feature. Ideally, this would further lock you into the Salesforce ecosystem. But this is only going to be discussed if they feel you’re an “at risk” customer. Such an “offer” is at their sole discretion; you have no guarantee of it. Moreover, there is nothing else you really need from Salesforce to exchange those licenses for.

That’s bad enough on a one-year contract. But imagine if you had 2.5 years left on a three-year contract. Imagine that being across a host of line items on your contract. It can get messy and time-consuming for your company.

Until Salesforce begins operating as a real SaaS, we should add or remove features whenever we choose. These changes should apply to a dashboard. This should happen at any time without notice. Until then, we should be very cautious about long-term agreements with Salesforce.

3. Use Lightning Platform Licenses as liberally and often as you can.

My goodness. Can we just get excited about Platform Licenses? Allow a user to log in. They can access most standard objects and up to 10 custom objects of your choice. Some reports are also accessible. Then, get them back out into the real world.

Sure, they can’t make use of Opportunities (you’ll need a Sales-based SKUs and a full Salesforce license for that). They also can’t use Service Cloud cases. This is the same reasoning. From my experience, they can view most case data. They can report on it. They’re just not allowed to work cases.

These folks in the bowels of finance, compliance/legal, and the executive suite can use Platform Licenses. Even if you only switch over five users, that’s real cash in your pocket. Well, your company’s pocket, but if they were nice, they’d give you a little kickback at bonus time.

You can read about Lighting Platform Licenses here and the various “considerations” you’ll want to examine. Don’t wait for your AE to mention them at contract renewal time. They are highly unlikely to suggest it as a way to save money. There’s also a Lightning Platform License Plus license (am I repeating myself?) that costs a little more and has more access, but still much cheaper than a standard Salesforce license.

Why did they preface Platform Licenses with the word “Lightning”? No one knows. There’s an entire Naming Department at Salesforce. They come into work drunk after lunch a few times a month. Then, they just go hog wild. No one can restrain them.

Running a Salesforce Org can be frustrating because its system isn’t designed to help you find cost-savings. Shouldn’t the Org tell you that the Executive VP of Finance only logs in once/month and runs a few reports? Sure, you can figure that out if you know what to look for. Yet, Salesforce the Product will not suggest that the Admin consider moving that user to a Platform License. Einstein works for Salesforce, not for you.

4. Make use of the new five free integration licenses

In Enterprise, Unlimited, Performance, and Developer Editions, orgs get five free integration licenses. First, I hook up the integration with my or another admin license in a sandbox. Then I get it working right. After that, I try to switch it to an integration license. In production, this saves a user license. Even better, each integration has its own name that identifies its purpose.

I’ve seen orgs use one user or integration license for all their integration licenses. It’s nice to see a record’s system data say that the last modified was “Dell Boomi.” This is better than seeing “Integration” as the modifier.

If you don’t know, an integration license provides API-only access to your Salesforce org. It has no user interface. The only interface is the login to accept the API query permissions for the third-party system you’re integrating with Salesforce.

If you need more than five, talk to your AE. Usually, extra licenses are quite cheap compared to user licenses. I mean, Salesforce wants you to connect more systems with theirs.

Don’t forget about Salesforce Foundations. Data Cloud is now called Data 360. It can offer benefits that are sometimes preferable to a direct integration, like zero copy.

5. Create a New User Request Form to decide use-cases. (Send to old users. Store the information on the User Object).

If you have more than a few dozen users, you will soon forget their original reason for accessing the Org. Aside from the usual user meta data that Salesforce puts on the user object, which you should definitely make use of (Title, Department, City, Company), I usually add two fields:

• Salesforce Experience Level (1-5, with 1 being new to Salesforce and 5 being a Power User)
• Reason for Org User Account: A text-area field. Use it to write internal notes. These notes should explain why this user is even in our Org to start with.

Both fields above are only viewable and editable by Admins.

Then, get as much information as you can from users when they or their managers ask they have users. I use a form. It can be a template in Jira, a Google Form, Cognito form, or just a template email you send. (And yes, I’d love to make it a submission form within Experience Cloud, but who are we kidding? That’ll never get approved).

I often will ask for a photo. Alternatively, I take it from their Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams, or Slack account if there’s one available there. I then login as them after creating their account and update their photo. Yes, I should teach them how to do so. But I also know users will never do it, particularly busy executives. If they don’t like their photo, then I send them the directions on how to change their photo.

One never misses a chance to send a user to the Salesforce Help website. Who knows which user can find nearby articles interesting and learn a few things on their own.

6. Make use of Scheduled Reports and Email Rules to reduce user counts.

Often, someone from QA will seemingly pop out of nowhere. A basement dwelling staffer can do this as well. They often say they were told they need access to Salesforce. They claim they’ve been tasked with overseeing some “critical” aspect of the company. But do they really? Even if they were told this by some VP three levels of your boss in I.T.?

Here’s where you want to put on your business analysis skills. You try using the Five Whys. You have read Jodi Hrbeck’s Rock Your Role as a Salesforce Admin. It covers similar scenarios. It also shows how to (delicately) manage these types of “requests”.

If you decide that they need access to “reports”, you have a possible solution. They aren’t going to be editing data within Salesforce often. Alternatively, they can task an existing user with that if its minimal. This solution won’t cost your company another Salesforce user license.

First, check to verify this inquiry is legitimate. Make sure the user is allowed to see the data they are requesting. (But I didn’t need to remind you of that, did I? Surely you too have a sticky note next to your desk lauding the Principle of Least Privilege, right?).

Next, ask your requester for the name(s) of the Salesforce users closest to their area of responsibility. Does a coworker or supervisor of theirs already have access?

We will use that user as the subscriber to the reports we’ll create for them in Salesforce. You don’t want to own reports that don’t impact your role. Your role is as a Salesforce Administrator. You want your requester to go to that user when they need minor changes later, not you. That user will also be the subscriber to this new report (or reports). Each Salesforce user is limited to a small set number of reports they can subscribe to. This number is firmly set at 15 as of this writing. If you set this up as the subscriber, you will quickly run out of subscriptions. You are the Admin in the scenario below. Regular (non power) users rarely touch this limit.

Login as the colleague user and create the new report(s) requested. Ideally, screen share with the requester and colleague. This way, they can learn how easy most reporting can be in Salesforce. It becomes simple once you know a few basics.

Once your report is ready, set up a subscription in Salesforce for the report owner (colleague). Choose a schedule frequency and be sure to choose the choice to attach the data as a spreadsheet (.csv or .xlsx). In most cases, your requester will be happier with a spreadsheet. They weren’t a user of Salesforce. They probably weren’t thrilled about another system login and learning curve to deal with. (CSVs are preferred for those doing further data manipulation or importing data into other systems. An Excel spreadsheet is preferred if they only want to see some grouped or summed data from Salesforce).

Once your subscription is live, help the colleague set up an auto-forward rule in their email platform. Every time the report reaches his email, your company email provider will forward that email. The email, along with its attachments, will be sent to the original requester. You need to wait for the first one to arrive. This provides a subject and sender to base your email forwarding rule upon. You can set the email to auto-archive. Alternatively, you can delete it from the colleague’s email inbox if they aren’t interested in seeing it themselves.

Just like that, you’ve provided the requester with prompt reports they need to finish their new task. You haven’t cost your company the expense of yet-another Salesforce license. This license would be used for only one tiny login per week. It can also be used once a month for just one small report. More dear to your heart, as an Administrator, you have spent less than one hour total and you’ll not have to worry about getting those calls from the requester each month, that start off with “Hey, I know we did this last month, but I can’t login again”, or “I can’t find that report we set up”, or “I’m stuck in something called Service Console”, or who knows…

Keeping infrequent consumers of Salesforce out of Salesforce itself not only saves costs for your organization. It also saves time for Salesforce Administrators.

7. Work Closely with your Salesforce Account Executive

There are great account execs and not-so-great ones, not just at Salesforce, but every company. But let’s be honest: there are knowledgeable software administrators and not-so-knowledgeable software administrators, too.

If you’re expecting your Salesforce Account Executive to spoon feed you all knowledge about Salesforce, you’re going to be disappointed. That’s what Trailhead and the Trailblazer Community are for, not to mention dozens of great Salesforce-related blogs and other forums.

Learn to read and understand your contract well before your renewal appears. Be capable of explaining it to your own executive or management teams. Make sure you know what your company is paying for.

Salesforce Account Executives are beleaguered with all sorts of internal initiatives. They must be in-touch with all of Salesforce’s products. They also need to know whatever Salesforce is now pushing as “hot.” They are under pressure to meet company goals. They want to help you, but in some cases, they simply don’t know. They get dragged into contentious contract calls. Salesforce hypes their Account Executives to push the latest whizzbang AI features. As a result, essential SKUs aren’t top of mind for many Salesforce AEs. Some companies genuinely need these SKUs, even if they seem “boring” and “dated.”

Your organization must be big. You must also have a strong partner relationship with Salesforce. Otherwise, they are not going to have the time to reply to every question. This is especially true if renewal time is approaching fast for you.

8. Understand the full TCO for any new feature before you contract with Salesforce for it.

Ah, the old TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), that ever elusive devil. It is often quoted by management, but it is rarely understood. Most times, only administrators and I.T. personnel hear Ross Perot’s “giant sucking sound.”

How does it apply to Salesforce, such a wonderful tool that helps improve efficiencies and automate business processes? Sadly, all too often.

A classic example I’ve seen now three times involves Salesforce’s security add-on offerings. These offerings are primarily those that come separately or as a part of Salesforce Shield. There’s no question that companies are investing in better compliance and security initiatives. They want to be more careful with their company data. They fear lawsuits from increasingly aware and alert legal communities. Consumer activists are also vigilant as they learn about their ‘rats’ under laws like GDPR, CCPA, and similar new legislation.

Salesforce Shield seems like the key solution they need. It brings them closer to their security and compliance needs. But wait. There’s a huge cost to certain offerings in Shield. (I’m not picking on Salesforce Shield; I highly recommend a strong look at its offerings).

For instance, two of Shield’s four internal SKUs is Data Detect and Platform Monitoring. There are hugely helpful tools, but only if you set up and manage them well. At one company, I estimated it would take 200 joint hours to set up Platform Monitoring. It was considered the “magic wand” we needed. This included meetings, back/forth emails, decision making, and various document creations. I tacked on another 100 hours for the same for Data Detect.

Then, we would need to create policies and procedures. These would instruct us on the actions to take as humans. We would not act as machines once we learned of issues via those two SKUs. Then, that would need management oversight and decisions.

All of this was important and, in my view, needed to be done yesterday. But there’s a catch. One company was so behind on “critical infrastructure” upgrades. No individuals with the skill set or managerial impact had any available hours in a given week. They didn’t have time in a month to add anything more onto their plate. The company was not hiring, but it was growing. The best estimates for completion of these other projects was six months out.

You know the truth if you’ve been in technology for even a hot minute. When PMs say “six months”, it really means the reality for “stable completion” is twice that, at best. We found ourselves in in-depth talks with Salesforce. We spoke with the new “Compliance/Security Director” about the importance of having Salesforce Shield. (This person didn’t have ultimate say, but had deep influence).

It’s important to consider not only the benefits of software offerings. Also, do not focus solely on licensing costs or hardware/software ‘setup costs’. One must look at the ‘real world costs’ of time. Does anyone have any left in their time budget?

The idea, in the above case, was that we’d buy Shield now on a three-year contract renewal. Then, “probably in about six months,” we can “start rolling it out.” The further idea was about dragon-based role-playing fantasy games. A few of us in I.T. get a “head start” with “some of the setup.” This way, once the critical infrastructure projects were rolling out, we would be ready to engage with management. We would then handle any final questions needed to implement those two SKUs.

Thankfully, I was able to craft a document with roughly 30 “tasks” required of both I.T. and management. It included time estimations of each task. This demonstrates what a successful rollout of these SKUs would actually cost the company in terms of combined hours. The managers of the critical infrastructure projects have a history of delays. That history helped push back the buying of Shield.

Here’s the simple truth: Salesforce will never not take your money. If you call them 18 months into a three-year contract, say you need Salesforce Shield, and give them money, you’ll have it live on your Org. It will be as fast as you need it. You can post them a check. You may not get as sweet a deal as you would have at renewal time. But, you also didn’t pay for 18 months for shelfware.

In Summary

Do I need a summary? My 7th grade English teacher said I must, so here goes.

As an Admin, be the owner of your entire Salesforce org, even if you’re on a team of admins. Learn to understand the reasons behind your company’s SKU purchases. Challenge the decisions when no one provides solid answers. Save your company money, even if it’s just for this year. Yes, no one is going to bonus you a percentage of savings, but it’s the right thing to do. Try to understand the technical and architectural decisions at the big picture level. Even if most days involve reports, dashboards, and rearranging fields on Lightning Record Pages.

Transparency, Ownership, and Accountability are essential for better efficiency for your users. They also lead to right-sized purchasing of Salesforce (and other tools) for your company. Just because you’re not the CTO, doesn’t mean you can’t think like one.