Professional & Enterprise

Salesforce Professional and Enterprise Editions

Congratulations! You just made the decision to utilize Salesforce as your company’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform! Now you are presented with the daunting task of trying to determine which edition is the best fit.

Salesforce is an extremely flexible platform, not just in terms of functionality, but also in terms of editions and pricing. First thing’s first: determining which product(s), aka “Cloud(s)”, your company is looking to purchase. For instance, Sales Cloud provides sales force automation and CRM, Service Cloud provides complete CRM customer service solutions, and Marketing Cloud helps build and manage 1:1 customer journeys. For the purpose of this discussion we will stick with Sales Cloud.

The pricing structure of Sales Cloud is broken into four tiers starting at the Group Edition (SalesforceIQ Starter) with retail pricing at $25 per user per month* all the way to the Unlimited Edition at $250 per user per month*.

Salesforce Editons

Without fully understanding everything Salesforce has to offer, it can be challenging to determine which level is right for you.

Questions from Current Clients

Most of my clients work with Professional Edition or Enterprise Edition, and for those on Professional Edition, the most common questions I get are: “What are the differences between the two editions?” and “Should we upgrade?”

Professional Edition is a nice entry point into Salesforce, especially for more cost conscious customers; the list retail price is about half of what the Enterprise Edition costs. However, you don’t get to take advantage of some great features that the Enterprise Edition has to offer. There is a reason that it is the most popular edition of Salesforce, and in my opinion the better value between the two!

Maximize Value with Enterprise

With Enterprise Edition, you get all of the features you have available to you from Professional Edition, plus some great new features, which can add real value to your organization.

1. You get access to profiles and page layouts, which allow you to segment your users and grant them different access and views depending on their role in your company.
2. You get the ability to open up an API, which is just a fancy technical way of saying that you can access your Salesforce data directly without going through the log in screen. (This is important because it opens up new and better ways of loading data into Salesforce.)
3. You also get access to workflow and other business logic tools allowing you to automate processes, improving your users’ experience and data accuracy.

Plus many more features not listed above!

While the Professional Edition of Salesforce is a great option and I have clients who are very satisfied with this version, there are many additional features in Enterprise that are worth exploring. Features that can improve usage and adoption of Salesforce and make the overall experience better.

* Prices listed are based on the Salesforce Editions-Pricing page as of September 2015 and can change at any time. Contact Salesforce directly for details on pricing.

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