Salesforce Announces 9% Price Increase Effective August 2023

Salesforce announced in a statement yesterday, that they will be increasing list prices by an average of 9%, across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Industries, and Tableau. 

Although price increases are never good news for consumers or businesses, Salesforce’s last price increase was seven years ago, and since this time, have included many new features across all Salesforce clouds.

New List Pricing for Salesforce Products

This new list pricing for some Salesforce products will go into effect from August 2023, and will only apply to new customers or existing customers purchasing new clouds. Salesforce have announced the following pricing changes for their core Sales and Service Cloud products:

• Professional Edition will increase from $75 to $80
• Enterprise Edition will increase from $150 to $165
• Unlimited Edition will increase from $300 to $330 

Similar list price increases will also go into effect for Salesforce Industries, Marketing Cloud Engagement, Account Engagement, CRM Analytics, and Tableau.

Salesforce have justified their price increase in the statement, by explaining that since the last price increase seven years ago, they have delivered 22 new releases and thousands of new features. This also includes recent generative AI features that Salesforce are integrating into their existing products suites, including AI Cloud, Einstein GPT, Sales GPT, and Service GPT.

Although Salesforce is already one of the most expensive CRM’s in the market, it is also the undisputed leader in CRM, with the most powerful and scalable platform available in the market.

If we look back seven years ago since the last price increase, there has been a huge amount of development on the platform, including a now fully integrated Lightning Platform, embedded Einstein AI features, DevOps Center, native Slack Apps, Flow, and features such as Pipeline Inspection.

Whilst times are tough for the global economy, Salesforce still has to deal with activist investors circling, which I imagine could have played a part in this pricing decision. Although, since better than expected quarterly results in February and May, activist investors have cut Salesforce some “Slack”.

Summary

Salesforce price increases will come into effect for new or existing customers buying additional clouds in August 2023. This increase conveniently arrives at the start of a new quarter, which will most likely push many slow deals over the line this month to avoid any price increases in the future.

In addition, it’s important to note that this is a list price increase, and depending on the size of your company, and how many Salesforce clouds you have purchased, your company will probably have a healthy discount off of the list price.