Salesforce is a really awesome and powerful tool that can really drive businesses in the right direction with their sales and service teams. With so many options for automation and customizations, this tool can really move the needle forward and streamline your processes.

However, this tool can get pretty pricy for your org depending on which parts of salesforce you’re looking to utilize in your organization and how many people you are wanting to utilize this tool. The base for the unlimited edition of salesforce (the one which most people go with and has the ability to do fantastic automation) is approximately $150 per user.

When you are trying to decide if salesforce is worth the cost, ask your organization a series of questions to help make the decisions that would dictate whether or not you’d need salesforce.

Do the alternatives meet the qualifications for a better price?

Salesforce is not the only option you have when it comes to a CRM. They are the most popular and have the largest market cap, but they might not be the best option for the organization you work for and its needs.

Hubspot

Two main competitors to Salesforce come to mind. The first is Hubspot. Hubspot is known in the CRM world as the ‘free’ version of salesforce. They have pretty much all you need when you are a boots on the ground type of organization. In my expereince, salesforce starts to become a better option when you hit 15-20 users. Then you need the customization that hubspot just cannot provide.

Hubspot free allows for reporting, deal tracking, and pipeline management on the sales side. However, they are a better option when it comes to content management and project management when compared to salesforce. They have an out of the box solution, where with salesforce you’ll need to build out part or most of the implementation. So, depending on the need for your organization you could choose hubspot.

One thing to note about Hubspot, is that they are more marketing focused, where as salesforce is more sales focused. This is important to understand, because the development teams at both hubspot and salesforce will be focusing the majority of their development resources to their main focus.

Now let’s move on to hubspots pricing, they do not base their pricing in the same way that salesforce does. Salesforce has a per user cost basis and hubspot has a per contact cost basis. Again, the 15-20 user mark salesforce becomes the better option. The average lead per month for an SDR (sales development representative) can very between 150-300 per month. If you had 10 SDRs all hitting their targets that would mean you’d have between 1,500 -3,000 leads coming in a month. Making your Hubspot cost around $890 a month. The same amount of SDRs on salesforce could be $1500 a month. However, once you cross the 10,000 marketing contacts Hubspot increases up to $3,200+ a month.

In our experience, this is when you need the customization that salesforce provides for your sales process. You may also need other tools for your growing team and Salesforce can make seamless transitions from SDRs to AEs (account executives) all the way to the customer success teams.

Monday.com

The second solution that could work well for your organization is Monday.com. Like we mentioned previously some tools were initially developed for a certain aspects of business. Salesforce for sales, hubspot for marketing, and Monday.com for Project management.

Monday.com has declarative build-out tools similar to salesforce that helps you customize the sales process as needed and allows for some automation. You are also able to use lead capturing, lead automation, and use a sales pipeline to track your sales deals and understand what’s coming into the business.

Monday.com has the lowest per user pricing model. However, they have tiered pricing for products on a per user basis and for their CRM the pricing may be different than their basic pricing layed out on their website. However, the lowest plans start off at free, scale to $8 a user and go up to enterprise.

Depending on what you need you might be able to find the solution for a far better price and help your company scale faster and allow you to grow faster without the hefty price tag of a salesforce implementaiton.

With whichever tool you choose one of the best things you could do is to negotiate with the sales rep on your price per user. I’ve seen companies often talk down the price per user significantly by knowing what the best tactics were to negotiate down that price or get free tools and addons.

Are there any unique solutions Salesforce can provide?

This brings us to the next point. Salesforce has some fantastic solutions and you can easily build out a custom implementation. You can also use a product that is unique to salesforce. Tools that are really awesome are salesforce knowledge, communities, and CPQ. These are tools that you can have outside of salesforce, but having them conveniently in one place goes a long way!

Another unique quality about salesforce is that they can conveniently hold just about everything that you need for the business and you are able to integrate what is not held in salesforce. Salesforce really prides themselves on being the single source of truth for all business dealings.

If this does not sound like the solution your organization needs, then exploring other options may be the best solution. You could have an organization where the only tool you need is a place to track leads and manage a pipeline. This where you’d want to explore other options.

Do you have the time and capital for the initial implementation?

Another great point when deciding if salesforce is really worth the cost is both the time and the capital for the intial implementation. Most organizations I’ve worked with need an initiail implementaiton. This helps them get up off the ground and running with automations and processes in place.

You can have a slow grow approach however, this may take years depending on the salesforce professionals in place. You could easily hire an admin and a developer to be in-house and work together for the organization. The best approach from our experience is to hire a consulting firm for the initial build and hire additional professionals for the up keep.

This last option can be expensive. So if you decide to go with salesforce, keep in mind that one of these two options are likely needed.

What’s my Return on Investment?

A final question to ask is if it’s worth the investment. Investment is a multi-faceted issue that should be considered carefully. Keep in mind the initial cost of the software, the initial upfront labor cost for the salesforce professionals you’ll need, the on going cost for Salesforce professionals, and the time to get up and running.

If all these costs make sense and are worth it to your organization, then Salesforce would likely be the CRM to purchase and implement for your organization. It’s really up to your pipeline to determine if this is the best way for your organization to go.

Final Thoughts

To wrap things up with Salesforce costs. It might not make the most sense for your organization and thats alright. Salesforce is a great tool for those who choose to use it and the organizations that are willing to put the resources to it. However, if its not a great fit then you can resent the tool and it can and will become a hassle.

If you’re still unsure of which tools is the best for you, look at your companies growth plan. Sometimes it makes sense to grow into the tool. However, don’t push the tool if it is not a great tool for your company.

Connect With Us

Hey there! We would love to have you join our little family at Call Cloud Consulting. You can find us on LinkedIn here.

You can also contact us for our consulting services and see what our company can do for you!