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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.

However, 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 likely overpay for services it isn’t using. It may 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 for some field testing of various physical units for a project. They had felt that these devices would be “calling home” into Salesforce with such frequency that it would “overwhelm” the platform events on their Unlimited Org, especially if the test project was success and was rolled out nationwide. No one questioned the engineer or pushed back. No one analyzed the numbers; had they done so, they would have seen that Salesforce could have easily handled the small amount of traffic that even a wildly-successful project would have generated. However, 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).

While many of us love Salesforce the software, and want to implement it well to help our business save money, grow, and better comply and manage all the expectations upon us, we are not often quite as fond of Salesforce the company. They are known for being a bit 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.

Therefore, I hope these money-saving tips below will 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. Then you migrate all your data and eligible metadata back into your new Professional Org, at the cost of 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, there may be some things that you can’t migrate back, so you’ll need to plan on implementing workarounds if you built those in the new Org and have come to rely upon them.

I don’t like to use the word “nightmare” often, but for most organizations, that’s likely 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, and you’re up against Org limit B, and 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.”

But what happens if you don’t have time to implement A, and after some changes in your business (or the economy), you’re no longer hitting the limit of B, or you could find a workaround for B, and 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, turn a few wheels in their basement, and 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, wheels, and levers are suddenly covered in rust and 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 could “leave at any time”. You could 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, installer, implementation team, and your original sales representative would visit you on-site, get you up and running, provide all the contracted training sessions, and then you’d be on your own.

Due to high implementation costs, contracts were usually five years or longer. It was common to see ten-year contracts for service and support — and still is 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 can, they’d love to have you sign a three-year contract. In fact, it’s annoying to me that they even require one-year contracts for most of their solutions. They will usually offer to discount a number of line items to convince businesses to go with the 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 extricate the average business from Salesforce into other solutions (although every business should have a backup plan on how they could do so if they had to). It would likely take a year for most businesses to leave Salesforce once they actually determined to do so.

So, under that way of thinking, it appears 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 which allows Salesforce Administrators, designated users (such as Identity Licenses (free) for your Accounting department users) to manage your Org’s products, licenses, contracts, renewals, and more. It’s almost like they’re trying to play modern SaaS with the others on the SaaS field, but 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. However, you will still pay for those unneeded 30 licenses for the duration of your contract. Salesforce might help you to repurpose the money you paid or are paying them toward some other Salesforce feature, ideally one that will further lock you into the Salesforce ecosystem. But this is likely 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 may be 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.

My opinion is thus: until Salesforce begins operating as a real SaaS, allowing you to add/remove features at will from a dashboard, at any time without notice, 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? Let someone log in, access most standard objects, and up to 10 custom objects of your choice, some reports, and 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 (same reasoning), although from my experience they can view most case data and report on it. They’re just not allowed to work cases.

But you’ve got those folks in the bowels of finance, compliance/legal, and the executive suite that can make use of 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; it’s highly unlikely they’ll 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 that comes into work drunk after lunch a few times a month and they just go hog wild. No one can restrain them.

One of the frustrating aspects of running a Salesforce Org is that the system itself isn’t geared to help you figure out 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, but Salesforce the Product isn’t about to Einstein Recommend to the Admin to 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. Usually, I hook up the integration first with my or another admin license in a sandbox, get it working right, and then attempt to switch it to an integration license. In production, not only does this save a user license, but 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. But it’s nice to see a record’s system data say that the last modified was “Dell Boomi”, for instance, rather than “Integration”.

If you don’t know, an integration license provides API-only access to your Salesforce org – no user interface, other than just the login to accept the API request permissions for the third-party system you’re integrating with Salesforce.

If you need more than five, talk to your AE, but 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 and using Data Cloud, now called Data 360, which can provide benefits that sometimes are preferable to a direct integration (such as zero copy).

5. Create a New User Request Form to determine 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 what a user’s original reason for accessing the Org was. 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 to write whatever internal notes as to why this user is even in our Org to begin 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 request 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 “require” a photo (or steal it from their Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams, or Slack account if they’ve got one there). I then login as them after creating their account and update their photo. Yes, I should teach them all how to do so, but I also know users, particularly busy executives, will never do it. If they don’t like their photo, however, then I do 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 might find nearby articles interesting and learn a few things on their own.

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

Frequently, someone from QA, or a basement dwelling staffer, will seemingly pop out of nowhere and say they were told they need access to Salesforce because 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 might try using the Five Whys. Or you might have previously read Jodi Hrbeck’s Rock Your Role as a Salesforce Admin, which covers similar scenarious and how to (delicately) manage these types of “requests”.

If you determine that they basically need access to “reports”, but aren’t going to be editing data within Salesforce frequently (or can task an existing user with that if its minimal), you have a possible solution that won’t cost your company another Salesforce user license.

First, of course, check to be sure that this request is legitimate and that 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 requestor for the name(s) of the Salesforce users closest to their area of responsibility. Perhaps a coworker or supervisor of theirs already has access.

We will use that user as the subscriber to the reports we’ll create for them in Salesforce. You don’t want to be the owner of reports in Salesforce that don’t directly impact your role as a Salesforce Administrator; you want your requestor 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 (currently hardcoded at 15 as of this writing), so if you as the Admin set this up as the subscriber in the scenario below, you’ll quickly run out of subscriptions for yourself. 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 requestor and colleague so they can learn how easy most reporting can be in Salesforce 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 option to attach the data as a spreadsheet (.csv or .xlsx). In most cases, your requestor will be happier with a spreadsheet anyway since they weren’t a user of Salesforce and really weren’t thrilled about another system login and learning curve to deal with. (CSVs are likely a better option for anyone who’s going to do further data manipulation or import the data into some other system, where as an Excel spreadsheet might be preferable if they just need to see some grouped or summed data straight out of the Salesforce report).

Once your subscription is live, help the colleague set up an auto-forward rule in their email platform. Every time the report comes to his email address, your company email provider will forward that email with its attachments to the original requestor. (You might need to wait for the first one to arrive so you have a subject and sender to base your email forwarding rule upon). You can even have the email auto-archive or delete from the colleague’s email inbox if they aren’t interested in seeing it themselves.

Just like that, you’ve provided the requester with timely reports they need to perform their new task and you haven’t had to cost your company the expense of yet-another Salesforce license that will only be used for one tiny login per week or month for the sake of just one small report or reports. Perhaps more dear to your heart, as an Administrator, you have likely spent less than one hour total and you’ll not have to worry about getting those calls from the requestor each month, that start of 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 is not only cost-savings for your organization, but time-savings 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 likely 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 able to explain it to your own executive or management teams. Make sure you know what your company is paying for.

Salesforce Account Executives are beleagured with all sorts of internal initiatives. They have to be in-touch with all of Salesforce’s products, as well as whatever Salesforce is pushing at the moment as “hot”. They are under pressure to meet company goals. They might want to help you, but in some cases, they simply don’t know. They get dragged into contentious contract calls. They get “hyped” by Salesforce to push the latest whizbang AI features, often to the point that the “boring” and “dated”, but essential SKUs that some companies genuinely need, aren’t “top of mind” for many Salesforce AEs.

Unless your organization is big and a hefty partner relationship with Salesforce, they are likely not going to have the time to reply to your every question, especially if renewal time is fast-approaching 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. Oft-quoted from management, but rarely understood, it’s frequently Ross Perot’s “giant sucking sound” that is only heard by administrators and I.T. personnel.

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

A classic example I’ve seen now three times is Salesforce’s security add-on offerings, 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 either just want to be more careful with their company data, or they don’t want to be sued by increasingly aware and alert legal community and consumer activists, as they learn about their ‘rats’ under laws like GDPR, CCPA, and simliar new legislation.

Salesforce Shield appears to be the magic switch they need to flip to bring 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 that it would take at least 200 combined hours (meetings, back/forth emails, decision making, various document creations) to set up Platform Monitoring to be the “magic wand” we needed. I tacked on another 100 hours for the same for Data Detect.

Then, we would need to add on the creation of policies and procedures as to what to do (as humans, not 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 that no one with the skillset or managerial impact had any hours in a given week or month to add anything more onto their plate. The company was not hiring (but was growing), and the best estimates for completion of these other projects was six months out.

If you’ve been in technology for even a hot minute, you know that when PMs say “six months”, that reality for “stable completion” is 2x that, at best. Yet, here we were, having in-depth talks with Salesforce and the new “Compliance/Security Director” about how also important it was to have Salesforce Shield. (This person didn’t have ultimate say, but had deep influence).

Like many software offerings, it’s important to consider not only the benefits, but to not look only at 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, and then “probably in about six months” we can “start rolling it out”. The further idea (and by “idea” here, I mean dragon-based role-playing fantasy games) was that a few of us in I.T. could get a “head start” with “some of the setup” so that once the critical infrastructure projects were rolling out, we’d be “ready to engage with management” on any “final questions” needed to implement those two SKUs. Again, a lofty director having almost no clue as to the day-to-day workloads and staffing resources available to keep the company running today, much less any considerations for new initiatives.

Thankfully, I was able to craft a document with roughly 30 “tasks” required of both I.T. and management, along with time estimations of each, to demonstrate what a successful rollout of these SKUs would actually cost the company in terms of combined hours. That, combined with the managers of the critical infrastructure projects having a history of delays, helped pushed back the purchase 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 and say you need Salesforce Shield, and give them money, you’ll have it live on your Org as fast as you need it and can post them a check. Sure, you might not get quite a sweet deal as had you done it 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 Saleforce org, even if you’re on a team of admins. Learn to understand the reasons behind why your company has purchased SKUs, and push back when no one gives you solid answers. Save your company money, even if its 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 going on at the big picture level, even if all you’re doing most days are reports, dashboards, and rearranging fields on Lightning Record Pages.

Transparency, Ownership, and Accountability are the keys to better efficiency for your users, and 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.