Home Goods Manufacturer Saves 23% on Salesforce Contract Renewal & Cloud Swap

In the Fall of 2020, the company team was faced with a difficult but not uncommon situation with their Salesforce renewal, the need to swap products mid-contract.  Community Cloud had seemed like the best choice when they were evaluating which Salesforce Cloud would suit their needs.  As they started to roll it out, they quickly realized that it didn’t have the functionality and features that they really needed, and Sales Cloud was the better option.

Many Salesforce clients whose needs straddle different Cloud types like Sales, Partner, Community and more have found that they ultimately did not choose the best cloud for their needs.  Unfortunately, many clients find this out in the middle of a long term contract.  Some simply give up on their CRM rollout or muddle through with the wrong product, but the talented team at the company knew they had better options, and requested a swap from their Salesforce account manager.

Salesforce is almost always receptive to a swap of products, but they usually treat it as an opportunity to increase the fees they charge.  This means that the new cloud will always cost more than the old cloud, even with the same number of licenses.  Additionally, Salesforce will typically use the opportunity to force a contract extension.  Having seen Salesforce’s first offer for the swap contract, the company decided they needed additional expertise to get the best deal possible, so they hired the Salesforce licensing and contracts experts at Miro to help.

Miro’s first task was evaluating the notorious “offer expiration date” which Salesforce is known to put on all their contract offers to create a sense of urgency at the client.   They want the client to make a quick and sometimes rash decision to buy what Salesforce wants them to buy, at the price they want to charge for it.   Sometimes that expiration date is real and the price goes up after the deadline, and sometimes it’s fake and the exact same offer will be on the table the following month.

While the latest offer had a December expiration date which the Salesforce rep insisted would not be offered in January, Miro advised the company that Salesforce had been struggling with revenue and January was their year end.  This made it very likely that Salesforce would indeed extend the offer till the end of January, and possibly even come back with a better one.  Once negotiations started back up over the holiday break, the Salesforce reps came back with a better offer.

The company also had concerns regarding their support, and their Pardot instance, which would need to be switched from being connected from their old Community Cloud to their new Sales Cloud.  These are potential issues in any Salesforce renewal.  Miro was able to get the Salesforce reps confirm that there would be no issues with the Pardot change over.   Unfortunately while their support level didn’t change, Salesforce “downgraded” that support level to remove certain features.  Miro made sure the company team was aware of this issue before they signed any contract.

Miro was able to identify an additional cost savings opportunity related to Pardot usage charges.  The company team took full advantage of this opportunity by significantly reducing this extra expense without needing to reduce its use of the system.  Miro showed the company team how to make customizations to their existing Community cloud which would enable them to use the Salesforce Data Loader to edit their Accounts and Contacts, which was crucial for achieving those cost savings.

Salesforce was pushing hard for the company to accept both a price increase and a contract extension as part of the renewal.  Miro advised the company to push back just as hard for neither.  With his year end looming only days away, the Salesforce Rep finally came back with an especially generous offer.  If The company was willing to make an additional product purchase, they could get all the terms and conditions they wanted, which was a price hold and no long term contracts. The company was looking at buying Tableau anyway, so by incorporating it into the deal, they were able to come to an agreement with Salesforce.  As per their performance guarantee, Miro was able to help the company find cost savings greater than Miro’s fees.