Salesforce license types: Which one to choose?

In this post, we discuss Salesforce license types and how to choose the most cost effective one for your organization.

What do you know about Salesforce licensing?

Generally speaking, all license types can be divided into two groups: organization licenses and user licenses. Salesforce Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Force.com, etc. would be considered an organization or company license. Salesforce, Salesforce Platform, Community and so on would all fall into the category of user licenses.

The whole Salesforce platform is built on the idea that every user should have their own license. This way, the Salesforce Administrator for your organization will always know who is logging in, when they’re logging in and what changes were made by this particular person. For extended functionality, the Salesforce Administrator can authorize additional licenses to certain users based on predetermined roles and business needs.

Licenses vs. Permissions

While every user should have their own Salesforce license, not all users should have the ability to perform any action within the system. Some users may require more functionality than others. The Salesforce Administrator is able to grant certain “permissions” to specific users in order to perform such tasks as Create/Read/Update/Delete, Create/Read, Read Only, etc.

How to save money on licensing?

Consider this scenario:

Mr. Johnson owns a company that manufactures furniture. He wants to implement Salesforce into his Sales and Logistics departments with a total number of 200 users. He purchased the Sales Cloud Enterprise Edition which cost him $150 per user per month. However, the Logistics department is only using custom objects, so they don’t really need the full Sales Cloud functionality. Instead, Mr. Johnson could have selected a standard platform license for 100 users at the lower cost of $60 per user per month, which would amount to a monthly savings of $9000!

When planning your Salesforce licensing selection, here’s what you need to do in order to get the best deal:

Review functionality

What users will require what types of functionality? Create an organizational chart of all users that drills down to their exact roles and responsibilities when it comes to using Salesforce. Not all users will require all levels of functionality.  

Move to Force.com

The Force.com platform is much less expensive and provides the same functionality for those users who only need access to contacts, accounts and/or custom objects.

Review users and roles annually prior to contract renewal

Perform a thorough audit annually of all users before contract renewal in order to fine tune your overall Salesforce use. There may be several employees who are no longer using the application and there is no reason for you to continue paying for those licenses.

The Syntegrico team can perform a comprehensive audit of your Salesforce solution and provide you with a detailed game plan to optimize your experience. Contact us right now to find out how we can make Salesforce work better for your organization while reducing overall costs.