How Much Does A Salesforce Implementation Cost?

So, you want to start using Salesforce! Smart move! But you may be confused by Salesforce Pricing and all the available products. No doubt, Salesforce is as successful as it is due to the flexibility and the customizations it offers. However, customization involves additional fees, so you must research before budgeting. And while Salesforce implementation is very straightforward, knowing the total Salesforce Cost can be a bit of a mystery. The Salesforce License can cost you anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000. And yes, that's quite a broad range. Let's see if we can narrow that pricing down a little. Like many other business software programs, the price depends on the number of users and the level of functionality chosen. Salesforce comes in a variety of basic configurations.

The Salesforce Pricing Model

Generally speaking, across the Salesforce product line, there are four different levels of each offering: Salesforce Essentials, Salesforce Professional, Salesforce Enterprise, and Salesforce Unlimited. Note that only some options are available for all Salesforce products. In addition, there are the Clouds. Salesforce CRM is a cloud-based service that provides connectivity for all team members via the various Clouds.

Essentials - $25 per user per month, billed annually.

• Essentials offer a simple set of default features catering to basic sales needs:
• Lead management (including web-to-lead capture).
• Account, contact, and opportunity management.
• Sales tasks and event (customer calls and meetings) management.
• Sales reporting with configurable reports and dashboards.
• Employee collaboration using Chatter (the inner Salesforce chat).
• Mobile access to Salesforce CRM with Salesforce 1 Mobile app.
• Sales process automation with the Process Builder (5 processes per organization).

Among the default features unavailable in the Essentials but valued by mid-sized and large companies are the Products and Price Books features that specify different pricing options for products and services sold to other customer groups like individuals and small and mid-sized businesses.

Also, there are no features for managing contracts, orders, and quotes, which are important for efficient sales operations in companies with an affluent customer base.

There's also no way to create User Profiles, Roles, and Permission Sets that help to control which fields users see within records and define role-based access to CRM data.

Professional - $75 per user per month, billed annually.

Need specific CRM functionality for managing products and price books, quotes, orders, and contracts? For a sales team with more than ten members? The Professional edition will suit you better. The list of the edition's default features includes the same features as for Essentials, plus:

• Rule-based lead scoring.
• Contract management.
• Products and Price Books.
• Quote and order management.
• Lightning Sync (to synchronize contacts and calendar events between any Microsoft Exchange-connected device and Salesforce).
• Sales forecasting (including the mobile forecasting app).
• A developer sandbox is used for developing and testing new functionality in a different environment without impacting the production environment.

The functional limitations of the Professional edition are similar to those of the Essentials edition, which lacks the opportunity to customize the solution with code and to automate sales-related processes with code. Salesforce integrations with third-party systems via APIs are possible. However, enabling integrations requires an additional $25 per user/month. This makes the Professional edition a costly option for mid-sized and large companies.

Another helpful feature for significant businesses that the Professional edition lacks is Enterprise Territory Management. The feature helps sales managers to organize groups of accounts and the sales reps assigned to those accounts based on the territorial criteria. It allows the creation of a territory management system, which is extremely helpful for large companies selling their products/services worldwide.

Opportunity Teams and Opportunity Splits are two more features not present in the Professional edition but are essential for mid-sized and large businesses with a few sales teams. The former enables team selling and record access which eliminates the manual sharing of information.

Unlike the Essentials edition, it's possible to create two user profiles per org, two user roles per org, and ten permission sets, which still provides rather limited opportunities to control role-based user access to CRM data and may not be the option for the companies with tens of CRM users.

Enterprise - $150 per user per month, billed annually.

Enterprise has all the capabilities of the Professional edition plus:

• Workflow and approval automation.
• Opportunity Teams to enable sales reps' collaboration on one deal.
• Opportunity Splits to share revenue from a chance between the sales team members, based on their contribution to the deal.
• Enterprise Territory Management.
• Advanced reporting features (cross filters, joined reports, history tracking).
• Unlimited automation capabilities with Process Builder (a point-and-click tool for automating linear workflows).
• Unlimited automation capabilities with Flow Builder (a point-and-click tool for automating complex workflows).
• The unlimited number of user-profiles and page layouts.
• The unlimited number of user roles and permissions.
• The unlimited number of record types per object.
• Lightning Platform to build and manage applications with point-and-click tools or code.
• APIs for integrating Salesforce with third-party systems.
• One hundred developer sandboxes for developing and testing new features.

Functional limitations of the Enterprise edition do not impede large-scale organizations from choosing it and are mostly related to customization capabilities. For instance, a limit of 25 Lightning apps can be built on the Salesforce Lightning Platform to make using a Salesforce solution easier for different user groups.

Unlimited - $300 per user per month, billed annually.

The Unlimited edition has extensive capabilities for process automation, customization with Apex code, and integration via APIs available in the Enterprise edition. What makes the edition stand out is the access to Salesforce support and training services, like:

• 24/7 toll-free support.
• Access to premier success resources (a knowledge base, interactive webinars).
• Access to configuration services performed by a dedicated Salesforce admin.
• Access to one-on-one coaching sessions with a Salesforce expert.
• Developer support.

Limitations of the Unlimited edition include the inability to create more than 2000 custom objects, 800 custom fields per object, 200 report types, and 500 validation rules. These limits can hardly hinder the attempts to customize a Salesforce solution for a large-scale enterprise to the needed extent. Still, knowing about them saves you from a misbelief that the edition has truly unlimited capabilities, as its name implies.

In addition to these offerings, the Cloud is an added expense. The Salesforce Service + Sales Cloud adds $25 per month to the above charges.

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud also has additional features and expenses.

Suite 1 for Email, Mobile, and Web Marketing.

The prices depend on the contact and message volume, support email marketing campaigns, and build personalized mobile and web customer journeys.

Suite 2 for Social Media Marketing.

From $1,000 per month for the basic edition to $40,000 for the most advanced version. They are used for improving content marketing and customer engagement in social media.

Suite 3 for Advertising

The price depends on the number of advertising audiences and contacts and is used for targeted advertising, customer segmentation, and using customer data to create and manage powerful one-to-one campaigns.

Suite 4 for B2B Marketing Automation

From $1,250 per month for the basic edition to $40,000 for the most advanced version. It is a toolkit that allows automation, lead generation, tracking, and nurturing.

The Cost Of Salesforce Implementation Services.

Maybe now you think you've got a handle on the Salesforce Implementation services and their cost. To make sure, let's go over the nuts and bolts in a general way.

Take a medium-sized company that plans to implement Salesforce for managing their sales and customer service. They need user licenses for the following:

• 5 C-level executives (Sales Cloud subscription).
• Two sales managers (Sales Cloud subscription).
• Thirty sales reps (Sales Cloud subscription).
• One customer service manager (Service Cloud subscription).
• Six customer service agents (Service Cloud subscription).
• Five marketing managers (Sales Cloud subscription to support their marketing activities with the info on the state of sales).

With the current pricing of Sales and Service Cloud editions, which fits the company's scale and the needed level, the company's total annual fee to Salesforce would probably be:

• $88,200 for the Lightning Enterprise edition.
• $176,400 for the Lightning Unlimited edition.

This is just the annual fee. To implement these services, in other words, take the out-of-the-box Salesforce package and get it up and running. The cost of Salesforce Certified Consultants, Developers, and Support Specialists is a rough estimate. The breakdown is as follows:

Consulting

The hourly rates of freelance consultants would be the approximate cost of a two-week consulting job, maybe $14,000.

Data migration for users with legacy CRM

You'll need data migration services if you're already using a different CRM and want to switch to Salesforce. Data migration is instead a costly affair since it implies several activities before the data import itself. It is necessary to check the data's accuracy first, purge the duplicates, correct the errors and map the data into the Salesforce fields. A conservative estimate might be as high as $10,000.

Customization

The level of customization will depend on the complexity of the company's internal processes. Modifications with point-and-click tools are significantly cheaper than changes introduced with code. The cost of customization is estimated to be around $50,000.

Integration with third-party systems

Let's say the company needs to integrate its Salesforce solution with a SharePoint-based document management system, Outlook, and website. To incorporate all of those third-party systems successfully, the company may need an investment as high as $35,000.

User training

self-learning or instructor-led training, the number of users, their type (end users or technical users, like Salesforce admins), and the hourly rate of a training provider. The training budget is estimated at $10,000.

After-launch support

On average, support continues for three months after the implementation. Again, using the average hourly rates of providers, a reasonable estimate for help comes in at around $45,000.

The Total Cost of Salesforce

With all the annual expenses on the products and implementation services, the total Salesforce implementation cost would be around $252,200.

If these costs seem high, consider that the Return on Investment for Salesforce has been documented to be over 65% in the first year of use. And the second year, all of the implementation costs disappear. So the ROI in the second year is even greater.

Connect With Rely Services For Better Salesforce Implementation

The benefits far outweigh the costs when considering all the advantages of running Salesforce as your Customer Relationship Management tool. And remember that no single sales tool is as flexible, robust, customizable, or contains anywhere near the abilities of Salesforce CRM. But find out for yourself. Call or contact Rely Services, Certified Salesforce Consultants, for a demo of what Salesforce can do for you and what Rely Services can do to make it a more valuable asset.