Salesforce Licence Assessment: 20-Point Expert Checklist for CIOs

Use Salesforce Setup → Company Information → User Licences, combined with a SOQL query on the User object (LastLoginDate, IsActive, Profile, UserType) to produce a complete baseline. This baseline is the foundation of every subsequent assessment step. Expert note: Many organisations have never produced this baseline report outside of a Salesforce audit. Running it internally and in advance of your renewal gives you control of the data before Salesforce's account team produces their own version. Their version will be framed to support renewal upsell; yours should be framed to identify reduction opportunities.

Users inactive for 45 days are strong candidates for licence reclamation. Segment findings by licence type — Sales Cloud Enterprise, Service Cloud, Platform, Tableau, Marketing Cloud — and calculate the annual licence cost attributable to each inactive segment. Expert note: Industry assessments consistently find that 15 to 25 percent of Salesforce users are effectively inactive at any given time. For a 1,000-seat Sales Cloud Enterprise organisation at $150 per user per month, 200 inactive users represent $360,000 per year in recoverable licence cost. Document findings before the renewal window opens.

Employee offboarding frequently fails to deactivate Salesforce accounts, leaving former employee licences active and billable. Export all active Salesforce users and compare against your HR system's active headcount. Any Salesforce account without a corresponding active employment record is a security risk and a recoverable cost. Expert note: Organisations with high turnover, recent acquisitions, or large contractor populations routinely find 5 to 12 percent of active Salesforce accounts belong to individuals no longer with the organisation. Each one represents a recoverable licence, and — more urgently — an active access risk that should be deactivated immediately regardless of renewal timing.

Salesforce Platform licences ($25 per user per month) provide access to custom apps, reports, and dashboards, but not to core CRM objects. Users whose actual Salesforce usage is limited to custom applications, approval workflows, or reporting — and who do not create or edit Leads, Opportunities, or Accounts — are Platform licence candidates. Expert note: Shifting 200 users from Sales Cloud Enterprise ($150) to Platform ($25) saves $300,000 per year. This is the single highest-ROI classification change available in most enterprise Salesforce estates. Run a transaction audit — using the Login Forensics feature or a custom SOQL query on event monitoring logs — to confirm which users have genuinely not accessed standard CRM objects in the past 90 days.

Salesforce Unlimited is priced at a significant premium over Enterprise — typically $100 to $150 per user per month more, depending on negotiated rates. The Unlimited premium buys additional API calls, enhanced support SLAs, expanded storage, and unlimited customisation capacity. For users who do not consume these additional resources, Unlimited is pure overspend. Expert note: Check API call consumption per user via event monitoring, storage usage by user, and support case submission rates. Any user who has not submitted a priority support case, consumed above-baseline API calls, or required the additional Unlimited storage in the past 12 months is a downgrade candidate. The saving per 100 users downgraded from Unlimited to Enterprise is $120,000 to $180,000 per year at typical enterprise pricing.

Salesforce's cloud-specific licences — Sales Cloud and Service Cloud — are sometimes assigned based on team name rather than actual function, resulting in users holding the wrong licence type. A sales operations user classified under Service Cloud may be missing features they need; a service representative classified under Sales Cloud may be paying for CRM capabilities they never use. Expert note: Review licence assignments against actual job role and Salesforce functionality used. Corrections may be upward (requiring additional cost where under-licensed) or downward (recovering cost where over-licensed). Document all findings — both directions — to present a complete and credible position to Salesforce at renewal.

Salesforce add-ons are frequently purchased as part of bundle negotiations and then never fully deployed. For each add-on entitlement, determine: Is it activated? What percentage of entitled users have logged in? Is it embedded in any active business process? Expert note: The most common Salesforce add-on shelfware in enterprise accounts includes Einstein Analytics purchased but superseded by Tableau or Power BI, Revenue Cloud (formerly Salesforce CPQ) licensed for a rollout that stalled, and Pardot – now Account Engagement – provisioned but operated by only a fraction of the licensed user base. Each unused add-on carries ongoing maintenance cost. Document usage rates for every add-on before the next renewal.

Marketing Cloud is one of the most expensive Salesforce products and one of the most frequently over-licensed. Seat counts are often based on projected marketing team size that never materialised, and business unit licences are provisioned for brands or regions that are not actively operational. Expert note: Marketing Cloud pricing is complex — Contact Builder contacts, send volumes, and business unit licences all contribute to cost. Conduct a contact database audit to identify whether you are paying for contacts who have not been emailed in 12 or more months. Removing inactive contacts from your billable contact count is one of the fastest Marketing Cloud cost reductions available, with potential savings of 20 to 40 percent of annual Marketing Cloud spend.

MuleSoft is priced on vCores, API calls, and management plane entitlements. Enterprise accounts frequently over-provision MuleSoft capacity based on a broad integration programme that was subsequently descoped or delayed. Review deployed vCore consumption, active API manager configurations, and integration platform usage against your contracted entitlement. Expert note: MuleSoft's vCore-based pricing means that unused cores represent a direct, quantifiable maintenance cost. Organisations that reduced their integration programme scope or moved to alternative integration platforms after signing MuleSoft contracts may hold significant over-entitlement. This is recoverable at renewal if supported by consumption data.

Tableau licences are tiered by role — Creator, Explorer, Viewer — at significantly different price points. Creator licences (full authoring capability) are frequently assigned to users who only view published dashboards and never build workbooks. Expert note: Review Tableau usage logs — available in Tableau Server's Admin Views — and reclassify Creator users who have not published or edited a workbook in 90 days to Explorer or Viewer. The cost differential between Creator and Viewer is substantial; moving 50 users from Creator to Viewer can save $30,000 to $75,000 per year depending on your negotiated rates.

Salesforce integration licences are used by external systems connecting to Salesforce APIs. Each integration user typically holds a Salesforce licence that continues to be billed even if the connected system or integration is decommissioned. Expert note: Integration users are often overlooked in licence assessments because they do not appear in standard user activity reports. Query connected app OAuth tokens, integration user last API call dates, and named credentials to identify integration user licences for decommissioned or dormant integrations. Each dormant integration user is a recoverable licence cost.

Salesforce CPQ licences are expensive and frequently provisioned optimistically, before the CPQ implementation is complete. If your CPQ implementation is in progress, partially deployed, or delayed, the full complement of CPQ user licences may be active but not fully utilised. Expert note: CPQ licences should be reviewed against the three user categories — CPQ Standard Users, CPQ Plus Users, and CPQ Admin Users — and the current scope of deployed CPQ functionality. If your CPQ rollout covers only a subset of the original business scope, negotiate a corresponding reduction in CPQ user licence counts at renewal.

Field Service Lightning (FSL) licences are provisioned for field technicians, dispatchers, and mobile workers. Mergers, acquisitions, and operational restructuring frequently change the field service headcount without corresponding licence adjustments. Expert note: FSL licences are typically priced per user per month at rates above core CRM licences. Run a field service active user analysis — reviewing FSL mobile app logins and dispatcher console usage — to confirm that current licence assignments match active operational headcount. Any FSL licence assigned to a technician no longer in the field, or to a decommissioned service territory, is immediately recoverable.

Enterprise Salesforce estates often include multiple production orgs — created for M&A activity, regional autonomy, or legacy reasons — each with its own licence overhead. Org consolidation can reduce total licence cost by eliminating duplicate entitlements and administrative overhead. Expert note: Org consolidation is a significant technical project, but the licensing benefit is substantial. If multiple orgs include overlapping user populations, duplicate add-on entitlements, or separate support SLA entitlements, the consolidation ROI should be assessed as part of your next enterprise contract negotiation.

Salesforce charges for data storage beyond the included allocation — typically 1 GB per 10 users for file storage and a similar formula for data storage. Many enterprise accounts over-provision storage based on initial estimates and then implement data archiving that reduces actual consumption well below the provisioned level. Expert note: Check Salesforce's Storage Usage report in Setup and compare against your contracted storage allocation. If you have purchased additional storage licences beyond the included allocation, but your current storage usage is below your base entitlement, those additional storage licences are recoverable at renewal.

Experience Cloud licences are priced per community member or as a capacity-based Customer Community or Partner Community licence. Enterprise accounts frequently over-provision Experience Cloud capacity based on projected community growth that has not materialised. Expert note: Pull Experience Cloud login analytics from the Community Management console. Compare actual monthly active users against licensed capacity. For Customer Community licences priced on a per-login or per-member basis, active user counts directly determine renewal scope. Document the gap between provisioned capacity and actual usage as a negotiation input.

Einstein AI features are often included in Unlimited licences or purchased as add-ons. Activation rates are typically low — organisations that intended to build predictive models or AI-assisted workflows have often not progressed beyond pilot. Expert note: Einstein AI features that are licensed but not deployed beyond initial configuration represent cost that can be renegotiated at renewal. If your org has Einstein Prediction Builder provisioned but no active predictions deployed in production, or Einstein Bots enabled but not serving live customer interactions, document these as non-utilised entitlements and present them as reduction opportunities.

Salesforce includes Sandbox entitlements based on your production org licence, but additional sandboxes — particularly Full Copy Sandboxes — are licensed separately at significant cost. Review which sandbox environments are actively used in your development and testing lifecycle and whether any can be decommissioned or downgraded to lower-tier sandbox types. Expert note: Full Copy Sandboxes are the most expensive sandbox type and are often provisioned for large-scale testing that has since concluded. Each Full Copy Sandbox that can be replaced with a Partial Copy or Developer sandbox represents a recoverable cost at renewal. Review sandbox refresh frequency and active CI/CD usage to identify dormant Full Copy environments.

Salesforce licence waste accumulates when procurement decisions are disconnected from actual deployment timelines and business adoption. A governance process that requires a licence impact assessment before any Salesforce expansion, new user provisioning, or add-on activation eliminates the structural conditions that create over-entitlement. Expert note: Best-practice Salesforce licence governance includes quarterly reviews of user activity against entitlements, a clear process for deactivating users within 24 hours of departure, a licence type decision matrix for new user provisioning, and an annual add-on utilisation review timed to occur 90 days before renewal. Embedding these reviews into IT change management means that licence decisions are always made with current usage data.

Salesforce renewals are negotiated over a period of weeks to months before the contract expiry date. Organisations that enter this window with a documented, quantified licence reduction register — specifying exactly which users, add-ons, and entitlements they intend to remove — consistently achieve better terms than those who negotiate on price alone. Expert note: Your licence reduction register should include: a user count reduction by licence type, a list of add-ons for removal or downsell, storage reclamation quantities, and the total annual savings sought. Present this to Salesforce's account team as your opening position at the beginning of the renewal window — not at the end. Organisations that do this consistently achieve 15 to 30 percent cost reductions at renewal.