It doesn’t come in one bill. It comes in three quiet ones — that nobody flags until year two. Here’s where it goes: Mistake #1: Buying all your licences upfront. ❌ DON’T pay for 100 seats when 40 people are logging in. ✅ DO stage your rollout. Start with core users. Expand only when adoption in that group is real and measurable. A manufacturing firm paid for 120 Enterprise licences from day one. 14 months later, their utilisation report showed 47 active users. That’s $73K in unused seats — per year. Mistake #2: Not hiring an internal admin. ❌ DON’T rely on your implementation vendor for every small change after go-live. ✅ DO hire or train a Salesforce admin by month 3. One certified admin pays for themselves in under 6 months. A financial services company called their vendor for every report tweak, every field change, every user access update. Their “small requests” bill in year one: $94K. A mid-level Salesforce admin costs less than half that. Mistake #3: Letting customisation happen without governance. ❌ DON’T say yes to every “quick request” from department heads. ✅ DO build a simple change request intake process from day one. Every ad-hoc build creates technical debt that costs more to undo than to have done properly. One retail client came to us 18 months post go-live. Their org had 47 custom fields nobody could explain, 12 automation rules that conflicted with each other, and a build that needed a near-full rebuild. Cost: $110K. The original “quick requests” that caused it? Each one was under $2K at the time. The $200K isn’t one catastrophic decision. Which of these three has cost your organisation the most? 👇 Save this for your next Salesforce planning meeting.

The cake. The all-hands. The screenshots of the new dashboards. And then, about 90 days later, the questions start. “Why aren’t the reps using it?”“Why is the forecast still wrong?”“Why does it cost this much to run?” Here’s the uncomfortable truth most vendors won’t tell you before you sign: REALITY: Year 2 routinely costs more than the implementation itself — licences, admin overhead, re-training, and fixes to decisions that were rushed to hit a go-live date. MYTH: Users will just adopt it. REALITY: Without a dedicated change management programme, 60% of features go unused within 90 days. A launch email is not a training plan. MYTH: The data came over fine. REALITY: “Migration complete” means the data moved. It doesn’t mean it’s clean, trusted, or usable. Dirty records don’t stay still — they multiply every single month. MYTH: The vendor handles ongoing support. REALITY: Most vendor contracts end at go-live. By day 32, you’re largely on your own. If your Salesforce implementation is more than 6 months old and the team still isn’t fully using it — the problem isn’t the platform. What surprised you most about the cost of running Salesforce after go-live? 👇

Most of them protect the vendor. Almost none of them protect you. Here are 5 things your contract should say — and usually doesn’t: Real example: A mid-size logistics company paid $400K for a “completed” Salesforce build. Their sales team refused to use it. The contract said go-live happened. It did. No one defined usable. Real example: A professional services firm lost 6 years of account history during migration. It was “included.” The scope of what “included” meant was never defined. Real example: A retail company went live on a Friday. By Monday, the support team had moved to a new project. 11 days of downtime followed. Real example: A $250K project ballooned to $390K. Every business process tweak during UAT triggered a change order. The vendor wasn’t wrong — the contract allowed it. Real example: A company’s lead Salesforce admin left 8 months after go-live. Nobody knew how any of it was built. A $180K re-implementation followed. The best Salesforce implementations I’ve seen had one thing in common: The contract was written like the vendor might disappear on day 31.Because sometimes, they do. Save this. Share it with whoever signs your next technology contract. What clause do you wish you’d had? Drop it below. 👇