Salesforce To Hike Prices In August By Average Of 9 Percent

The CRM software vendor previously increased list prices seven years ago, according to a Tuesday statement. In those seven years, Salesforce has launched 22 new releases, thousands of new features and invested more than $20 billion in research and development.

Salesforce will increase list prices across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Industries and Tableau by an average of 9 percent per user, per month in August, the company said Tuesday.

The San Francisco-based CRM software vendor previously increased list prices seven years ago, according to a Tuesday statement. In those seven years, Salesforce has launched 22 new releases, thousands of new features and invested more than $20 billion in research and development.

This year, amid a push by multiple vendors to introduce new offerings around generative AI, Salesforce has introduced Einstein GPT, Sales GPT, Service GPT, AI CLoud and other related offerings.

[RELATED: Salesforce Enters The Generative AI Race With EinsteinGPT]

Salesforce Price Increases 2023

In an email to CRN, a Salesforce spokesperson declined to comment beyond the statement.

Peter Nebel, chief technology officer for applications at Denver-based Salesforce solution provider AllCloud – a member of CRN’s 2023 Managed Service Provider 500 – told CRN in an interview that with the state of the economy and high levels of inflation, a lot of customer chief financial officers are still scrutinizing spending.

However, Nebel has noticed more project sponsors within customer businesses willing to go to executives to ask for budget spending, he said.

“There’s definitely still the scrutiny that the budget is sacred – it can’t go up this year,” he said. “So we can’t add to it. So you have to find those dollars. Or beg, borrow and steal. It’s curious to me that they’re choosing to increase the price list at this moment given there’s still a lot of discounting happening, and a lot of quarter end deals and discounts happening.”

The state of the economy has helped build interest in a Salesforce insights tool AllCloud has in beta to help customers see which Salesforce products are used and not used to improve customer spending, Nebel said.

“A lot of the teams that we work with and existing orgs that have been around five, six, 10 years, they have a lot of … tech debt,” he said. “We can help flush that out and build a plan to remediate those so that they can start to use Salesforce for what they intended, which is realize ROI (return on investment) from a strategic growth tool rather than something that they’re just trying to keep the lights on. So we’re seeing some good positive movement on that. We’re seeing really good conversations around the output. And that leads to some engagements that in this economic environment are a little bit more desired because they’re smaller engagements to get the job done. And then we can move on to the strategic stuff later.”

As for seizing the generative AI moment, AllCloud introduced a paid two-week assessment offer that comes with executive visioning, education and data source auditing for model building, he said.

“Our position is that Salesforce is the system where the end users are going to engage with the business application – service and sales and marketing users,” he said. “So certainly Salesforce has a big leg up on owning that market of getting generative AI in the hands of the end users.”

The New List Prices

The new list price goes into effect for new and existing customers buying new cloud products. The price changes include:

*Professional Edition up $5 to $80 per, user per month, an increase of about 7 percent

*Enterprise Edition up $15 to $165, an increase of about 10 percent

*Unlimited Edition up $30 to $330, an increase of about 10 percent

At this time, Salesforce’s starter package costs $25 per user, per month. Upgrading to Professional Edition adds pipeline and forecast management, lead registration, one custom application per organization, meeting digest, the forecasting mobile app, sales orders, products and price books, quotes, chatter, five flows an organization can build and other features.

Enterprise Edition adds more campaigns per opportunity, custom opportunity fields in forecasting, opportunity splits, enterprise territory management, advanced reporting features, unlimited flow building, unlimited customizable profiles and page layouts, and other features.

And Unlimited Edition’s additional features include sales insight, premier success plan, lead scoring, conversation insight, developer pro sandbox and one full sandbox per organization.

Salesforce did not disclose the price increase for Industries, Marketing Cloud Engagement and Account Engagement, CRM Analytics and Tableau, only saying that these products will see “similar list price increases.”

For now, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement plans range from $1,250 a month to $15,000 a month. Marketing Cloud Engagement plans start at $1,250 a month, according to the vendor.

Tableau plans range from $12 per user, per month to $70 per user, per month, according to Salesforce.

Economic Variables

British group ITAM Review reported in June that multiple vendors have increased software prices worldwide.

IBM increased prices in January for Passport Advantage-eligible offerings, with increases ranging from 19 percent for the Canadian dollar to 24 percent for several currencies, according to the report. Back in October, IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna encouraged partners to raise prices as well during an event at CRN parent The Channel Company’s 2022 XChange Best of Breed Conference.

In April, Microsoft brought prices in line with the U.S. dollar, resulting in increases ranging from 9 percent for the pound to 20 percent for on-premises software in Japan, according to the report. Microsoft also increased the price of SQL Server 2022 by 10 percent worldwide in January. And SAP increased support costs by 3.3 percent in January.