Salesforce is one of the biggest recurring line items in enterprise tech budgets, and now it’s getting even pricier. With license costs hikes since last couple of years, alongside a maze of products, editions, support tiers, and innovative pricing models, organizations are now waking up to a hard truth: their Salesforce contract could be bloated, fragmented, and poorly negotiated!
If the renewal conversation appears to be a mere formality rather than a strategic negotiation, you are not leveraging its full potential either, as our analysts have explained below.
Reach out to discuss this topic in depth.
The new reality of Salesforce renewals
Salesforce’s pricing model is quite complex. From Service Cloud to Customer Community Plus, Signature Success to Salesforce Shield, every Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) comes with its own units of measurement (UOM).
We recently partnered with a large government organization staring down a fragmented Salesforce portfolio across multiple business units. Different representatives. Different rates. Different Terms and Conditions (T&Cs). Low visibility. Low leverage. Sound familiar?
They weren’t just worried about price hikes either. They were unsure if they were using the right editions. And that’s where most clients fail, you can’t negotiate what you don’t understand.
What we did — And what you should be doing
This wasn’t just a price benchmarking exercise. We analyzed their Salesforce portfolio and gave them insights and levers to turn a complex renewal into a controlled negotiation.
Here’s what moved the needle:
- Exposed price inefficiencies across business units: We analyzed pricing across various sub-organizations and normalized it against volume bands. The variance? As high as 30% for the same SKU
- Forecast-informed pricing models: Using real data, we helped them structure incremental volume-based negotiations, not just flat rate talks
- T&C red flags: We built a contract terms dashboard that dissected clauses across buyer-, seller- and neutral-friendly terms, turning a legal black box into a negotiation asset
- Unlocked strategic leverage: We created a unified Salesforce roadmap across departments, something the vendor hadn’t seen coming, and used that scale to push deeper discounts
- Some negotiation levers that we suggest to our clients during assessments
- Assess the Salesforce portfolio across the enterprise, as pricing often varies by business unit due to different reps or acquisitions. A consolidated roadmap and longer contract terms can help unlock better discounts through larger, strategic deals.
- Opting for higher-tier editions, like Unlimited, often yields greater discounts on core Salesforce modules compared to Enterprise or Essentials editions.
- Adopt a proactive approach to Salesforce negotiations
Salesforce (like most vendors) will come to the table armed with internal data, pricing models, and playbooks designed to extract max value. You need to come with more.
A disjointed Salesforce portfolio isn’t just inefficient, it’s also expensive.
We’ve seen clients waste 15–25% of their spend simply by not asking the right questions during renewal. That’s not a cost issue. That’s a strategy failure.
Are you still negotiating software contracts in the dark? If so, you’re paying for it, whether you realize it or not.
Let’s change that today.
Join our upcoming LinkedIn Live event https://www.everestgrp.com/events/linkedin-live/from-chaos-to-clarity-the-art-of-software-license-renewal-management.html, in which we will deep dive into the key challenges observed in software license renewals and share proven negotiation strategies to ensure that renewals are well aligned with market standards. Whether you’re preparing for a major renewal or looking to strengthen your negotiation posture, this session will provide valuable guidance on how to make software renewals work for you — not against you.
If you found this blog interesting, check out our Nine Tactics That Can Improve Salesforce Contract Negotiation | Blog – Everest Group, which delves deeper into another topic regarding Salesforce.
To discuss more about software contract negotiation or for a detailed analysis on the topics in the blog, contact Rahul Gehani ([email protected]), Duttatreya Jena ([email protected]) and Manan Arora ([email protected]).
