Salesforce License Cost Optimization and Savings

Are you looking for ways to save money in Salesforce? A great first step is to look at your licensing to ensure the user licenses you are issuing align with your user’s roles and needs. If you don’t have best practices established around licensing and regular audits, you may be paying Salesforce a lot more than you have to each month. This could translate into 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars in annual savings.
Understanding User Roles
Your first step is to understand how users are utilizing Salesforce. How does Salesforce aid in their work process? Talking with users in various roles can help you understand their unique business needs. We never want to downgrade licenses without first understanding the business need.
Understand the Different License Types
Every user has to have a license, and that license gives user access to features within Salesforce. Let’s look at some common ones you’ll likely run across:
• Salesforce is the standard license that gives users access to all features of Salesforce included within the company license
• Salesforce Platform is a limited functionality license. These user can access things like Accounts, Contacts, Reports, Dashboards, and Custom Objects. They will not be able to view standard Sales objects like Opportunities, Leads, Campaigns, and Forecasts.
• Chatter Free & Chatter External gives people access just to Chatter. This is best for those needing to communicate with groups and share files. Chatter Free is for internal users while Chatter External is for external users. Both of these license types are free.
• Force.com licenses are used to access a custom app on Salesforce. It provides read-only access to Accounts and Contacts but no access to Opportunities and Leads.
• Community allows your customers to access the Experience Cloud. This is primarily for external users who need knowledge articles and who would need access to custom objects through your branded portal.
License Clean Up
We should assign licenses based on the user’s job function. Unfortunately, some organizations fall into the trap of assigning the Salesforce license to all users. Members of the back office team, like HR and finance, will probably never need access to sales activity functions like Opportunities and Leads so why not bump them down to the Platform license? This is a much more cost-effective license and helps narrow down the user experience to the areas these users care about. You can save a lot of money by identifying those who operate in collaboration-only roles and moving them to free Chatter licenses. It's important to regularly audit users to identify underutilized licenses so you can downgrade licenses accordingly. Event Monitoring and building custom reports can help you with license tracking and usage.
When it comes time to downgrade licenses, communicate the change to the impacted users, explaining the reason for the change. Test these changes in the sandbox environment first to understand the impact, and then schedule a limited pilot group to test the change in production. This helps us address potential issues on a smaller scale. Depending on the size of the impacted users, it can be good to do scheduled rollouts to the broader team to gauge edge cases and troubleshoot unique situations. Communication and documentation are key throughout this process.
Disable Inactive Users
Also, be sure to run Salesforce Optimizer. It will highlight any user licenses that haven’t been used in some time. The easiest way to save money is to make sure licenses are only issued to active employees. If you had 100 active licenses assigned to former employees, this could mean incurring losses of $150,000 annually. This is also a security hole to have active licenses still issued to past employees. You could even take it a step further by creating a Flow to automatically disable users who haven’t logged in in over 90 days. Lastly, review your employee offboarding procedures to ensure deactivating Salesforce users is a step included in the process. If it already is, dig deeper to understand why it’s getting missed.
Other Things to Consider
Your license cost is negotiable. The larger your organization and the longer the contract you are willing to sign, the more favorable rates you can negotiate with Salesforce on license renewals. Negotiating a 20% discount on 200 licenses could translate into over $60,000 in savings yearly.
Get creative with your licenses. Say the HR team needed read-only access to Opportunities for some reason. You could create a report so they could view this data without having to give the team full Salesforce licenses.
This video is brought to you by Improving. We are an IT consulting firm serving the Americas. If you need an expert to help your Salesforce org run leaner, please reach out to us at improving.com. Our team of talented Salesforce engineers would love to discuss how we can help you optimize costs.
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