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:
- Go-live is not the finish line. It’s the starting gun.
- MYTH: The project cost is the total cost.
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.
- The organisations that get real value from Salesforce did one thing differently:
- They treated go-live as the beginning of a programme — not the end of a project.
- They had an internal owner on day one.
- They budgeted for adoption before launch, not as a crisis response after.
- They defined what “success in year two” looked like before anyone wrote a line of configuration.
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? 👇
