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.
- It’s the licence nobody reviewed.
- The vendor call that should have been an internal fix.
- The customisation that seemed harmless in Q1.
- The companies that avoid this aren’t smarter. They just had someone in the room asking the uncomfortable questions early.
- That’s the job.
Which of these three has cost your organisation the most? 👇
Save this for your next Salesforce planning meeting.
