Salesforce has become the market-leading CRM platform that promises a better way to connect with customers and manage sales, service, marketing, and more. With that popularity, the belief often exists that Salesforce should be inexpensive and simple for organizations of all sizes to implement. The reality is that migrating over to this platform is not free, nor an overnight timeline. The platform consists of multiple cloud offerings, complex implementation, integration requirements, enablement for adoption, and oftentimes the need to hire new personnel certified in the platform itself. The costs in adopting a new org or migrating to Salesforce can add up quickly, but the process itself doesn’t have to be painful.

In this series, I’ll uncover and dive into many of the anticipated costs associated with a Salesforce implementation. High-tech companies are some of the perfect customers—ready to leverage Salesforce for richer customer experiences. If you go into the process prepared and aware of the requirements outside of licensing, then reaping the value out of Salesforce can be rather straightforward.

In this first article, we will explore the hidden costs behind the dream future state for your organization and how building a proper journey now will save both time and money later.

Pricing the dream

Cloud software is marketed as being cost-effective because users can flexibly pay by the month or annually, but not incur the exorbitant costs of managing the infrastructure. This method also allows a company to tap into timely and consistent software updates based on user and market demands.

However, with the benefits of the cloud, Salesforce is not just a few basic plans with a few add-ons. There are about 1,700 products. You can easily go from $300/user/year to much more with even an edition or multiple-cloud subscription. High-tech companies often find that what they thought was a plan for a few hundred dollars is now a few thousand. This is why it is hypercritical to…

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