Salesforce prices: How much does a Salesforce project (really) cost?

Salesforce is priced from $80 to $500 ex VAT per user per month, with a minimum commitment of 1 year. So, on an annual basis, Salesforce costs between $960 and $6,000 per user per year.

With this high price positioning, it’s not surprising that Salesforce is aimed primarily at large enterprises.

But, because there is a but: in 2023, Salesforce launched an offer specially designed for SMEs and startups at…$25 per user per month. Starter includes access to the entire Salesforce suite: Sales, Marketing and Service Cloud. The offer is therefore particularly attractive. More details in the article.

Please note that the cost of a Salesforce project is not just the price of the license. The second part of the article details all the costs to be anticipated, to help you estimate the real cost of Salesforce.

Salesforce Starter: a package for SMEs at 300 per workstation per year

Salesforce isn’t known for being the most affordable CRM software on the market, to say the least. The American giant is known as a costly solution targeting the lucrative ETI and large enterprise segment.

But that was before Salesforce launched an offer for SMBs in the summer of 2023, priced at $25 ex VAT per month per user. This new offer, dubbed “Starter”, is undoubtedly one of the highlights of 2023 in the CRM market. With Starter, Salesforce is aiming to win over SMBs, and has some good arguments to put forward. With its Starter offer, Salesforce positions itself as a direct competitor to CRMs such as Pipedrive, Monday.com and Zoho.

The launch of the Starter offer echoes HubSpot‘s offer of the same name. And it’s no coincidence: the two CRM giants are waging war to consolidate their leadership positions and capture a share of a CRM market that is expected to reach 157 billion euros by 2030, with annual growth in the double digits.

Designed to appeal to SMEs and startups, Salesforce Starter is priced at $25 ex-VAT per user per month, with a mandatory annual commitment. This works out at $300 per user per year. For a sales force of 5 people, this works out at $1,500 a year. Salesforce offers a 30-day trial period to test the formula before committing (or not).

The big advantage of the Starter package is that it gives access to the full range of Salesforce sales, marketing and customer service products, all from a simplified user interface to better meet the needs and constraints of small and medium-sized businesses. You can use Salesforce Starter to manage :

• Your sales activity, your sales pipeline, your prospects, your customers, your reporting.
• Your marketing campaigns, your lead nurturing.
• Your omnichannel customer support, customer ticket management and knowledge base.

Of course, this offer for small and medium-sized businesses does not give access to the full functional scope of the Salesforce suite. For example, on the marketing side, you can only manage email campaigns (which is the main thing, by the way). You have no access to other marketing communication channels (sms, push), nor to the Journey Builder (the marketing automation scenario editor). At that price, you can’t have everything. Another important clarification: the Starter offer only gives access to online documentary resources. No “human” customer support.

In short, Starter is an entry-level offering designed for small teams (up to 5 salespeople) with fairly straightforward CRM needs. Details of the features included in the Starter package are available here.

Salesforce is highlighting 2 useful add-ons to complement the Starter offer:

• Slack Pro, at $7.25 ex VAT per user per month, which gives full access to Slack (which, as a reminder, was acquired by Salesforce at the end of 2020).
• Premier Success Plan, which provides “human” assistance and support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The fee is equal to 30% of the Starter subscription price. So, for example, $450 per year if your team has 5 CRM users.

Of course, as your business and needs evolve, you can switch to a more comprehensive plan than the Starter package at any time. This makes the transition to the next section.

Salesforce pricing: a closer look at other subscription packages

If you’re looking for Salesforce pricing information, chances are you’re looking for a sales CRM. “Sales Cloud is Salesforce’s historic and core product, designed to help companies manage their sales processes and relationships with prospects and customers.

Salesforce Sales Cloud, because of its relatively high cost, is aimed primarily at small and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, but can also be of interest to SMEs with large, complex CRM challenges.

4 Salesforce Sales Cloud subscription packages

Salesforce offers 4 different plans for its Sales Cloud product (or 5, if we include the Starter offer which gives (limited) access to Sales Cloud):

A few general remarks on these offers to begin with:

• All plans are sold with a renewable annual commitment. Clearly, you can’t unsubscribe after 3 months; signing up for a Salesforce product means signing up for a minimum of 1 year. All prices shown do not include VAT.
• The pricing model is essentially based on the number of users, as is the case for any commercial CRM.
• You can switch from one price plan to another at any time, from Enterprise to Unlimited for example, as your CRM needs evolve.
• In terms of customer support, the “Premier Success Plan” package, which gives access to human customer support, is only available from the Unlimited plan upwards. If you choose a lower plan and want human support, you’ll need to subscribe to the Premier Success Plan, which costs 30% of the Sales Cloud subscription price.

Offers tailored to company size and scope of needs

Let’s take a closer look at the content of each plan:

• The Professional offer, at $80 ex-VAT per user per month, for mid-market companies with a simple product catalog and a single sales force. This plan gives you access to all the basic functions: account management, contact management, prospect management, opportunity management, sales pipeline management and simple reporting. You can also manage quotations, orders and contracts.
• The Enterprise offer, at $165 ex-VAT per user per month, for large SMEs or ETIs with major productivity challenges, giving access to Sales Automation functionalities (workflow automation) and more advanced sales pipeline management.
• The Unlimited offer330 per user per month, for large companies or companies with complex needs, which unlocks Salesforce’s artificial intelligence functionalities (Einstein), enables the use of a test environment and gives access to advanced functionalities in contact management, lead scoring and reporting. This offer includes access to Premier Success Plan, with a dedicated account manager and 24/7 support.
• The Unlimited+ offer, at $500 ex VAT per user per month, which unlocks Slack’s integration with Salesforce at no extra cost and access to all document resources.

You’ll find the full list of Salesforce Sales Cloud features on this official page.

How to negotiate the cost of a license?

It is possible to obtain a discount margin ranging from 15% to 50% on your Salesforce contracts. In our experience, the most successful negotiations focus on a win-win compromise rather than a lower price.

• Discounts thanks to organizational growth: the need for additional licenses is the best lever a company can use to negotiate discounts.
• Discounts through product expansion: if you haven’t planned for organic growth, you can create leverage by adding new Salesforce products to your initial offering. This can also happen when Salesforce launches a new product like Einstein and offers massive discounts – you can even leverage these discounts to get more on your base license.

Some modules offered by Salesforce to complement Sales Cloud

Additional products are invoiced separately and on quotation. Prices are not public.

The complementary products to Sales Cloud are :

• Sales AI, which lets you use Salesforce’s AI functionalities (Einstein).
• Sales Programs, which allows you to intelligently share training and other content with your sales force, helping them to become more productive and efficient. For those in the know, this is known as Sales Enablement.
• Revenue Intelligence, an AI and analysis tool that provides valuable insights into your business. For example, the product provides access to a predictive sales analysis tool.
• Revenue Lifecycle Management, for centralized management of revenue flows. The tool automates collection, pricing, quotations, order management, invoicing, contract production and more.
• Partner Relationship Management, used to manage the sales of your partners: distributors, brokers, resellers, etc.
• Slack Sales Elevate, which provides access to Slack and connects it to CRM.

What about the price of other Salesforce products?

Salesforce is more than just a product. It’s a suite of solutions that can usefully complement the core product, Salesforce Sales Cloud.

Without going into too much detail, here’s a quick overview of the prices offered by Salesforce for its other flagship products:

• 
  Service Cloud
  to manage customer support. Same number of plans and prices as Sales Cloud. There are 5 offers: $25, $80, $165, $330 or $500 plus VAT per month and per user, depending on the plan chosen.
• 
  Marketing Cloud
  to manage your marketing campaigns and scenarios. Offers are difficult to read and in any case difficult to summarize in 3 lines…. In fact, Salesforce offers 3 different products, each with several plans (prices are the same regardless of the number of users: this is a marketing tool, not a sales tool, so it makes sense):
  • Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, from $1,250 excl. tax per month with annual commitment, which is the B2B version of Marketing Cloud (Lead Scoring, Lead Nurturing, campaign management, reporting).
  • Marketing Cloud Engagement, from $1,250 excl. tax per month with annual commitment, which is the B2C version of the Marketing Cloud product.
  • Marketing Cloud Personalization, from $100,000 per year, which gives access to all advanced functionalities: web personalization, segmentation, A/B Testing, product recommendations…

• 
  Pardot
  the B2B marketing automation tool, which automates certain marketing actions, notably lead generation. Prices on request.
• 
  Data Cloud
  Salesforce’s Customer Data Platform (CDP), which centralizes and unifies customer data. Prices are not public.
• 
  Tableau
  your business analysis and reporting tool. Expect to pay between $15 and $75 per user per month, depending on the plan chosen (there are 3 to choose from).
• 
  Platform
  the tool for creating customized applications: there’s a $25/month/user offer that lets you create 10 applications, and a $100/month/user offer that lets you create 110.
• Community, the tools that put you in touch with other companies like you :
  • Self-service: you pay either $2 per connection or $5 per member per month for Community, or $6 per connection or $15/member for Community plus, which lets you go even further in sharing roles and delegating tasks.
  • Partner Relationship Management: Partner Community costs $10 per connection or $25 per member per month, and enables you to manage your indirect sales teams, resellers and distributors.
  • Quip, the collaborative tool: $100 per user per month.

  There’s also the Salesforce AppExchange marketplace, where you can buy or download a wide range of plug-ins to customize your Salesforce installation.

  Going further

  To make your life easier, take a look at our comparison of Salesforce AppExchange applications.

  Salesforce project costs according to your company profile

  Once again, the cost of a Salesforce project is not just the price of the license.

  To help you see things more clearly, we’ve provided a summary table showing three types of company:

  • Small business with a complex sales organization and many customer interactions (B2B service) – 5 licenses
  • Medium-sized company with a real sales hierarchy, a marketing team and a few indirect sales partners – 40 licenses
  • Large company with several sales outlets, a direct sales website, and a network of partners who distribute the solution – 120 licenses

  See our budget estimate for these three types of company:

  	Simple needs	Intermediate requirements	Advanced needs
  Definition	For small & medium-sized businesses looking for an easy-to-use CRM solution to ensure better lead follow-up. Estimate for 5 licenses	For more advanced SMEs looking for a true lead management solution, with advanced reporting. Estimate for 40 licenses	For the most advanced SMBs & SMEs looking to homogenize the customer experience across multiple channels, teams, … Estimated for 120 licenses.
  CRM software prices	25 per month per user	80 per month per user	165 per month per user
  Customer service	Basic	Basic	For better customer service, Premier offer (+30% of the license)
  Integration	5000	50000	250000
  Adds-on: 500 MB more storage capacity		125 per month	500 per month
  Adds-on: Salesforce mobile	50 per month per user	50 per month per user	50 per month per user
  Total cost year 1	7 100$	99 560 $	585 580 $
  Total cost year 2	2 100$	49 560$	335 580 $

  Salesforce cost items

  Implementation costs

  The standard version is included in the license, but to gain access to discounts on Salesforce training courses (offered by Salesforce) or even a pro-active account manager, you need to opt for one of the accompanying packages: Premier or Signature.

  For the Premier offer, add 30% to the license price. Signature rates are available on request only.

  

  The cost of integration

  Salesforce is an ultra-complete solution that supports an impressive number of marketing and sales functions. This makes it infinitely customizable – which can be expensive to integrate.

  In concrete terms, this means that to implement Salesforce software in your company, you may need to call on an integrator to optimize it as much as possible and adapt it to your business processes.

  It’s not compulsory: companies can decide whether they want to handle the integration themselves, use Salesforce’s services (by adding them to their contract), or use a third-party consultant. All these solutions have their advantages and disadvantages.

  A typical Salesforce CRM implementation process includes business process analysis, data transfer from previous systems, custom development (if required), user testing and quality assurance, deployment, and ongoing user training and support. This is a daunting task, even for large companies.

  Going further

  See our comparison of Salesforce integrators.

  The ecosystem of CRM integrators can be difficult to grasp, but it’s just as important as the choice of CRM itself. The integrator’s role is to deploy your CRM software, but above all to integrate it with the tools you use.

  There are three types of CRM integrators:

  • Digital Services Companies (ESN) with technical profiles, or consulting firms.
  • Integrators specializing in CRM software, here Salesforce.
  • Experts in CRM, but also in broader areas such as ERP, payroll management, accounting and financial management, etc.

  On Salesforce specialists, note that Salesforce training and certifications are numerous, expensive and difficult, and that there are relatively few Salesforce-certified consultants (which makes them even more expensive). Prices for independent consultants can range from 500 to 900 euros per day.

  In reality, it’s estimated that Salesforce integration will cost you at least $5,000 for a single user in the first year, and you could pay up to $50,000 a year for a relatively small sales team. This wide range varies according to the size of your organization, the sector in which you operate, the type and complexity of your operations, and your business objectives.

  Le conseil Salesdorado

  Salesforce est à mon avis le logiciel CRM le plus complet et emblématique de la catégorie. Si vous cherchez un CRM, vous pouvez regarder une vidéo de démo de Salesforce gratuitement en ligne. C'est un très bon moyen de mieux se rendre compte des possibilités d'un outil CRM, et de mieux estimer ses besoins, et ses non-besoins. Si vous le souhaitez, vous pouvez aussi essayer gratuitement Salesforce pendant 30 jours pour voir le logiciel en action.

  Voir une démo de SalesforceEssayer Salesforce gratuitement pendant 30 jours

  Customer support

  Salesforce provides basic support in its start-up plans, such as a two-day response guarantee and a gateway to the Salesforce community. Sales managers are often reluctant to buy a first-class plan, without really realizing the importance of customer service and support to the success of their CRM implementation.

  To get the most out of Salesforce, you need 24-hour phone support, developer support, fast response times and success support. And to access these privileges, you need to purchase plans: the Premier Success plan, priced at 30% of the license price, or the higher-end “Signature” plan, available on request.

  Salesforce’s hidden costs

  In the case of CRM software, we often expect the price to skyrocket with licenses. But in fact the price will go up with hidden costs, notably by limiting various functions – and this is exploding much faster than you might think.

  The volume of data available

  Although crucial, data and file storage is virtually the most expensive additional option, whatever Salesforce license you choose. The basic storage limits granted by Salesforce are as follows:

  • 1 GB of data storage: accounts, item types, contacts, Google documents, tracks, etc.
  • 10 GB file storage: for all documents and attachments used by the organization.

  If you purchase Professional or Enterprise at extra cost, you’ll have access to 20 MB of data storage per user, 612 MB of file storage per user and 120 MB of data storage if you buy the unlimited edition.

  But as your business grows, you’ll need to buy additional storage: this is available in the form of data storage blocks, of 50 and 500 MB, at a price of $125 per month for 500 MB. File storage can be purchased for $5 a month.

  Something to keep in mind

  As this storage is no longer billed per user, but per quantity of data used, be prepared to pay an exorbitant amount, far in excess of the license price.

  The limit in API calls

  API call limits literally decide the future of your CRM.

  Salesforce limits the number of API calls, i.e. the total number of system interactions, such as queries between your CRM and external data sources: the limits are 15,000 calls per 24-hour period.

  It sounds like a lot, but every request made is an API call, and the total number of requests from all your applications in Salesforce can reach this limit faster than you can imagine.

  In this case, you may need to purchase more user licenses or upgrade all users to the most expensive level, Salesforce Performance Unlimited.

  Offline access to Salesforce

  This is another crucial aspect to consider when analyzing the cost of Salesforce. Offline access to CRM is essential, as you may need to access your CRM information on the move, even if you don’t have an Internet connection.

  Salesforce offers a function called briefcase, which is an online and offline edition of Salesforce CRM. It’s free for Enterprise and Unlimited customers. But if you want to buy the Professional edition, be prepared to pay 25 euros per user per month.

  The complete mobile application

  If you want to access Salesforce CRM on the move, you can do so with Mobile Lite, a free mobile solution provided by Salesforce. But this service has limited functionality and doesn’t include key features such as custom objects, configuration customization, etc.

  Alternatively, you can purchase the full version of Salesforce Mobile Lite, so you can customize the whole solution to your liking. If you are already a Salesforce Unlimited customer, you can take advantage of this free service. But for Professional and Enterprise plans, you’ll have to pay an additional upgrade fee of 50 euros per user per month.

  Le conseil Salesdorado

  Salesforce est à mon avis le logiciel CRM le plus complet et emblématique de la catégorie. Si vous cherchez un CRM, vous pouvez regarder une vidéo de démo de Salesforce gratuitement en ligne. C'est un très bon moyen de mieux se rendre compte des possibilités d'un outil CRM, et de mieux estimer ses besoins, et ses non-besoins. Si vous le souhaitez, vous pouvez aussi essayer gratuitement Salesforce pendant 30 jours pour voir le logiciel en action.

  Voir une démo de SalesforceEssayer Salesforce gratuitement pendant 30 jours