Pricing is frequently a key moment for a company in choosing a tool for sales, customer service, or marketing. Salesforce, as the most popular sales automation software, includes different solutions that can suit the requirements of companies of all types and sizes.
The final cost of Salesforce implementation depends on various factors: the number of employees, needed tools, customization level (the usage of out-of-the-box instruments or development of specific ones) and also includes system adaptation or migration, maintenance, and employee training. Broadly speaking, priсing can vary between $10,000 to $50,000. If you need help with the calculation of the value of a Salesforce solution, you can turn to our Salesforce expert to know the preliminary cost.
Let’s consider Salesforce pricing in detail to understand the overall picture.
How is the Salesforce pricing model formed?
In simple words, Salesforce annual payment depends on two criteria:
- the number of employees who will use Salesforce and
- the set of features that are included in a certain edition.
Companies should carefully choose the needed plan because there are some limitations. For example, a company needs a basic set of features provided by Salesforce Essentials, or the first and the simplest Sales and Service Clouds editions, but it has more than 10 employees. So, the company should choose the next plan, Lightning Professional edition, with a higher cost.
Also, as a rule, no matter what Salesforce edition a company chooses (even the Unlimited edition), it can take additional costs to upgrade the system with paid applications. Such costs are called “hidden costs” because they are not immediately visible.
What are the main Salesforce products?
Salesforce provides solutions for different tasks and departments: for sales, customer service, and marketing. So, we can find there:
- Sales Cloud, which helps to organize the sales process, automate routine tasks, generate reports and forecasts.
- Service Cloud, which helps with omnichannel customer support.
- Marketing Cloud, which is good at digital advertising, web-marketing, social network marketing, and emailing.
These products can be enhanced with additional features such as Salesforce CPQ&Billing (for orders and bills managing), Pardot (for the automation of B2B marketing), my Trailhead Pricing (for successful employees learning) and a lot of other applications which are located on AppExchange. Every company has its requirements, so it makes sense to consider the most popular Salesforce pricing options.
Sales Cloud plans
Companies that deal with customer service can choose one of 4 Sales Cloud plans with different pricing and features listing.
#1. Lightning Essentials
The plan costs $25 per user per month and requires an annual contract, but companies can make monthly payments. This is a solution for small companies with no more than 10 employees. It provides a CRM with basic functions, such as account, contact, lead and opportunity management, Salesforce mobile application and integration with Outlook or Gmail is also covered.
#2. Lightning Professional
This option costs $75 per user per month and requires an annual contract. It provides a fully-featured CRM for companies with any number of employees. In addition, it differs from Essentials by two more features: collaborative forecasting and leads monitoring. This is an excellent solution for mid-sized businesses.
#3. Lightning Enterprise
The cost of this plan is $150 per user per month with standard conditions. It includes all previous features plus automation of internal business processes through point-and-click configurations.
This is a choice of mid-sized and large enterprises with several sales departments.
#4. Lightning Unlimited
This option costs $300 per user per month and also allows an annual contract. This plan assumes 24/7 technical support and configuration service, which opens unlimited opportunities for efficient sales.
Service Cloud plans
This Salesforce product also has 4 plans with the same pricing as Sales Cloud.
#1. Lightning Essentials
The price is $25 per user per month with an annual contract. It covers a flexible and intelligent case and knowledge management, a helpful service console, and the most popular telephony systems for a small company with no more than 10 employees.
#2. Lightning Professional
The option costs $75 per user per month with an annual contract. Lightning Professional is designed for an unlimited number of employees and implies the ability to track subscriptions, specific warranties, or maintenance agreements.
#3. Lightning Enterprise
The price is $150 per user per month with an annual contract. This plan as an addition allows the ability to connect external systems to Salesforce with the help of APIs (such as REST, SOAP, etc.).
#4. Lightning Unlimited
This version costs $300 per user per month with an annual contract. It provides a wide range of features that are required for client service plus 24/7 support and access to useful technical resources.
Sales with Service Cloud plans
This multifunctional product will be helpful for sales and customer service agents. They can work in both Sales and Service Clouds and use the features of one of four editions.
#1. Lightning Essentials
This plan costs $25 per user per month and includes basic sales and service functions for small companies or teams, where there are fewer than 10 employees.
#2. Lightning Professional
This option costs $100 per user per month and provides a standard set of functions for an unlimited number of employees who are engaged in sales and customer service.
#3. Lightning Enterprise
Its pricing is $175 per user per month. Such an edition includes sufficient CRM capabilities for sales and customer service departments in mid-sized or big companies.
#4. Lightning Unlimited
This plan requires $325 per user per month and assumes complete sales and customer service CRM with training programs, 24/7 support, and access to the most wanted technical experts and resources.
Such an integrated Sales/Service edition costs $25 more than only Sales or Service Cloud plans except for Lightning Essentials. Such an edition is the solution for companies where the collaboration of sales and customer service departments is a priority.
Marketing Cloud plans
Marketing Cloud includes several kinds of solutions for different types of business and different goals. Similar to previous plans, all Marketing Cloud licenses require an annual contract. So, companies can choose one of the following options.
#1. Email, mobile, and web marketing
There are 4 solutions with a different number of functions:
- Basic ($400 per month for a company)
- Pro ($1,250 per month for a company)
- Corporate ($3,750 per month for a company)
- Enterprise (its price depends on the number of contacts and messages)
This product provides a wide range of services: integration with Salesforce Sales Cloud, functions for creating, targeting, and managing emails and content in the Basic edition with the gradual addition of features in more advanced plans. This way, the Enterprise plan, in addition to these functions, includes the options to send mobile messages, as well as build and manage customer journeys with the help of artificial intelligence.
#2. Pardot B2B marketing automation
This option includes 3 sets of features for the generation and monitoring of Leads, limited to 10,000 contacts:
- Growth ($1,250 per month)
- Plus ($2,500 per month)
- Advanced ($4000 per month)
The functionality of this Salesforce product also expands from basic features (versatile interactions with Leads, personalized emailing, marketing, and sales analytics) to advanced functions powered by artificial intelligence.
#3. Social Studio
This is a set of social media marketing and management tools for enriching sales and customer service and attracting clients via Social Networks. There are 4 plans with different options:
- Basic ($1000 per month)
- Pro ($4000 per month)
- Corporate ($ 12,000 per month)
- Enterprise ($40,000 per month)
All these plans can help you build a powerful CRM on top of Salesforce for creating a content marketing strategy in social networks. Plans differ in the number of monthly mentions (from 20K to over 1,5M) and social accounts (from 2 to over 20).
#4. Advertising Studio
This option has a Professional plan that costs $2,000 per month. This product is designed for building and managing strong and custom advertising campaigns with the usage of targeted information and customer data. Security and access control are also covered.
What are the most popular Salesforce additional services?
Beyond these complicated products, Salesforce has a lot of equally important services that help to establish and enhance the work of the system. We are speaking about the “hidden costs” for the enterprise, not about additional applications, which are also numerous.
Let’s imagine some company that purchased one of Salesforce main products to take a deeper look at what else it would require.
The company requires extended versions of Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service CRM with licenses for 49 users (32 sales reps, 7 service agents, 5 marketing managers, and 5 senior executives). So, the company can choose Lightning Enterprise or Lightning Unlimited (annual costs will be $88,200 or $176,400, respectively).
Let’s consider what services the company can require and how much it will cost approximately. To do this, we take average hourly rates of Salesforce support specialists and developers, the time needed to fulfill the tasks, and their level of complexity.
Salesforce Consulting
The company didn’t previously work with Salesforce, so it needs professional help to achieve good results. To determine the cost of this service, let’s take the average hourly salary of a Salesforce consulting specialist and 2 weeks of working time. In these conditions, the cost of consulting can reach $14,000.
Data migration
Such a service will be helpful if the company previously used CRM and wants to transfer all data to Salesforce. This is not a simple task, but a serious project with several steps:
- to verify data,
- to remove bugs and repetitions,
- to relate data with Salesforce template,
- to import data.
Also, a company can need to develop special tools for data migration, for example, to automate data transfer according to schedule. So, this service pricing could be about $10,000.
Customization
Customization can be realized both with the help of ready-made tools (turn on or off some settings in the way of “point-and-click”) or with the usage of programming code. In case the company requires both configuring and code modifications (adding custom fields, scoring leads, developing distribution rules, implementing an automated discount system), its customization can cost about $50,000.
Third-party integration
The pricing of Salesforce integration with third-party systems depends on the level and number of these systems. For example, the integration with Outlook is implemented with general Salesforce connection channels (API and OAuth 2.0). Integration with the company’s website and SharePoint database integration requires the development of an additional solution. Assuming our company needs, for all these integration types, it should pay about $35,000.
User training
The cost of training users to work with the Salesforce system depends on several factors:
- the way of training: self-training, instructor-led training;
- the hourly rate of a Salesforce instructor;
- the number of users to train;
- the access level of users: simple users, users with a Salesforce system administrator roles.
The company from our example needs to train administrators and different types of users: those who will work with Salesforce Sales Cloud, Customer Service Cloud, and Marketing. So, this user training will cost about $10,000.
Support after system launch
The cost of after-launch Salesforce support includes the time of rendering service and the hourly rate of this support. As a rule, support is needed during the first three months after the launch of the system, so our company should pay about $45,000.
The final cost of Salesforce implementation
If we calculate the costs of all outlined services from our example, such a mid-sized company should pay $252,200 for Salesforce implementation in the first year. When the Salesforce CRM is already implemented, in the next year, a company will pay only for licenses from the chosen edition, and it can be the same or the enhanced version. So, the next year’s final cost will be $88,200 or $176,400.
It is important to notice that every company has its own requirements and conditions, so the total costs for different companies should vary. We hope this article was helpful for you! Stay tuned for more posts.