Raj Khera’s list above/below is a great one and I can’t add any more value to it.

Just one meta-learning: guide your customers to buying the right edition for them.

Most customers want to be told — in a nice, non rip-off-y, fair way — which edition to buy. Most customers don’t want to be ripped off, but they also don’t have too much energy to game the system. They want to quickly find a fair price for the version of the product best suited to them.

Maybe let your F500 prospects know that sure, they can buy a single seat. They can. We still want you. But … the Global Edition (or whatever max edition) is the right one for them and what we recommend.

Salesforce below says:

  • up to 5 users can use the much cheaper Essentials CRM (which is fairly crippled / limited) at $25/user. This says to big companies, this edition ain’t for you. Which Essentials absolutely isn’t. You cannot run any meaningful sized sales team on Essentials. This isn’t super clear to a newbie but it’s clear enough to minimize friction in the sales process.
  • Professional is the entry point for “real” Salesforce CRM (but it is also limited and missing key features bigger companies will want) at $75/user. You’ll later find you’ll bump up against many of its limitations and gaps. But it is an OK place to start.
  • Enterprise is the Most Popular at $150/month. Most Popular is indeed accurate and tells the prospect a lot. Because Enterprise basically does everything an ordinary organization “just” wanting to run Sales Cloud would need. But you can indeed start with Professional and migrate to Enterprise later to save short-term money. It’s OK.
  • And there is also an edition for the Power User at $300/month that you’ll end up wanting if you build a bunch of custom apps on the platform, among other things. It’s not initially clear why you’d want to pay that much, and in fact that’s OK. You’d have to have deployed Salesforce before to understand the benefits of Unlimited. But if you have, you might well pick Unlimited.

Is this perfect? Nothing is. Is it perfectly clear? No. But it guides the buyer to more or less the right edition up front, without telling them they cannot buy a different or a lesser one.

The sales rep then fills in the gaps.

Most prospects will naturally gravitate toward the right edition if you guide them there. Most of the rest, the sales team if trained properly will get them there. A few will buy the wrong edition anyway. It’s OK if you help them nicely upgrade later.

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