Do you know how many Salesforce seats you are paying for but nobody is using?
Most enterprises renew Salesforce on the number their account executive puts in the order form — not on what their org actually consumes. The gap between the two is where 20% of your Sales and Service Cloud spend quietly lives.
LDS runs an auditor-grade review across your entire Salesforce estate — Sales, Service, Experience, Data Cloud, Agentforce, Tableau, Slack and MuleSoft — so you walk into your renewal with your own numbers instead of Salesforce's.
Recover unassigned and dormant seats before you renew them for another term.
Move light-touch users onto restricted-use licenses instead of buying full CRM seats.
Close storage, API and add-on overages before Salesforce finds them at true-up.
Salesforce is the easiest enterprise contract to overbuy
Seats are provisioned in minutes and deprovisioned almost never. Sales, Service, Analytics, CPQ and Maps stack onto one order form. Departments buy Tableau and Slack independently. By the time the renewal lands, nobody in the building can produce a single defensible number for what the organization actually needs.
Sits on the shelf
Seats purchased on the order form that were never assigned to a user profile.
No login in 90 days
Assigned, billed, and functionally dormant — usually leavers and role changes.
Applied by default
List-price increases compound on quantities you never validated in the first place.
Per global org
Regional paper means entitlement totals rarely match what the org has provisioned.
Add-on SKUs are the quiet killer. CPQ, Maps, Territory Planning, Event Monitoring and CRM Analytics login packs are negotiated as a bundle sweetener, deployed to a pilot group, and then renewed at full quantity for years. Meanwhile data storage and API consumption drift past entitlement without anyone watching — and those overages are exactly what Salesforce reconciles at true-up.
- ✓ A seat-by-seat effective license position across every SKU on your paper
- ✓ Named lists of dormant and unassigned users your admins can action
- ✓ A right-sized quantity you can defend line by line in negotiation
- ✓ Agentforce credit consumption modeled before you commit to a pool
- ✓ Old-SKU to new-SKU mapping so you can compare last term to this one
From order form to defensible position in five moves
Our analysts are former software auditors. We reconcile your Salesforce paper against what the org actually reports — not against what a reseller dashboard estimates.
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1
Entitlement normalization
Every order form, amendment and regional contract consolidated into one entitlement baseline.
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2
Consumption extraction
User licenses, permission set licenses, usage-based entitlements, storage and login history pulled from the org.
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3
Reconciliation
Subscribed versus assigned versus actually used, per SKU, with the delta priced at your contracted rate.
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4
Optimization modeling
Harvest lists, restricted-license reclassification, edition right-sizing and credit sizing.
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5
Renewal support
The quantity argument, the SKU translation, and the evidence pack you take into the negotiation.
Compliance first, then cost
Salesforce License Position Assessment
What are you entitled to, what have you deployed, and where does the org consume more than the paper allows? Run 9–12 months before renewal so there is time to correct without buying your way out.
Where exposure hides
- ● Data storage consumed above purchased GB blocks
- ● Experience Cloud logins exceeding monthly login packs
- ● API call volumes against contractual limits
- ● Sandbox tier usage beyond entitled refresh rights
- ● Permission set licenses assigned without a base entitlement
What you receive
- ✓ Effective license position workbook, SKU by SKU
- ✓ Shortfall register with priced exposure
- ✓ Surplus register with recovery value
- ✓ Remediation plan with owners and sequence
Salesforce Optimization & Renewal Assessment
Now that the position is accurate, how much of it do you actually need to buy again? Harvest, reclassify and re-tier before the quantity conversation starts.
Harvest
Named user lists — not percentages — for unassigned seats and assigned users with no login in 90 days, each priced at your contracted unit rate.
Reclassify
Profile actual object and feature usage, then map each user to the cheapest license class that still supports their work.
Re-tier
Test each SKU's real deployment footprint and recommend the edition and quantity the usage actually supports.
Restricted-use licenses: the largest avoidable cost in the estate
Salesforce prices a full CRM seat for full CRM access. Most of your population does not have full CRM needs. The cost avoidance is not in negotiating the seat price down — it is in never buying that seat class at all.
| Restricted license type | Typical user profile | Replaces | Key limitation to test |
|---|---|---|---|
| Salesforce Platform | Works inside custom apps and objects; limited standard-object access | Sales or Service Cloud seat | No access to Opportunities, Cases, Forecasts, Campaigns |
| Experience Cloud — Member | Regular external partner or customer users | Full internal seat issued to a contractor or partner | Object access limits; per-member monthly pricing |
| Experience Cloud — Login | Infrequent external users, seasonal or campaign-driven | Member-based licenses bought for occasional users | Logins consumed monthly; overage is billable |
| Salesforce Integration | System-to-system API accounts, middleware, ETL | Full seats consumed by service accounts | API-only; cannot be used by a human through the UI |
| Identity | SSO and identity-only access to Salesforce-hosted apps | Full seats issued purely for authentication | No CRM data access |
| Analytics / CRM Analytics only | Dashboard and report consumers | Full CRM seats issued for read-only reporting | Consumption-only; no transactional record edit rights |
| Chatter Free / Chatter Only | Collaboration-only participants | Full seats issued for internal comms access | No CRM object access at all |
License availability, entitlement rules and pricing vary by contract, edition and region. LDS validates every reclassification against your specific order form and the user's actual object-level activity before it is recommended.
We cover the whole Salesforce portfolio — not just the CRM
Tableau came in through analytics, Slack through IT, MuleSoft through integration, and Data Cloud through a marketing project. Reviewing them separately is how organizations end up paying for the same capability three times.
Sales Cloud
Edition fit, seat harvesting, forecasting and territory add-ons, Sales Engagement.
Service Cloud
Agent versus supervisor licensing, digital engagement, Field Service dispatch and contractor seats.
Experience Cloud
Member versus login economics, monthly login pack consumption, partner community sizing.
Tableau
Creator, Explorer and Viewer mix, Server versus Cloud, dormant author seats.
Slack
Pro, Business+ and Enterprise Grid tiers, inactive member reclamation, guest accounts.
MuleSoft
vCore allocation versus consumption, environment sizing, Anypoint edition fit.
Data Cloud / Data 360
Credit consumption modeling, ingestion and segmentation volume, storage tiers.
Agentforce
Flex Credit sizing, action volume baselining, per-conversation versus per-user modeling.
Global commerce and shipping technology company
A multinational with roughly 3,700 provisioned Salesforce users across AMER, EMEA and APAC, running Sales and Service Cloud Unlimited alongside CRM Analytics, CPQ, Maps, Tableau and a partner community — on three separate regional order forms.
in annual savings identified — $1.27M over a three-year term, against $3.54M of annual Salesforce spend.
Within the Sales & Service Cloud line alone, 653 of 3,702 seats were either unassigned or dormant — a recoverable value of $524,542, or roughly 18% of that product's annual cost.
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Sales & Service Cloud Unlimited 3201 / 3702
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CRM Analytics Plus 651 / 700
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Partner Community logins 131 / 200
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CRM Analytics community logins 43 / 600
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Maps Territory Planning 3 / 80
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CPQ Plus 0 / 100
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Tableau (Creator + Viewer) 0 / 335
Sales & Service Cloud Unlimited licenses purchased on the order form and never provisioned — $402,443 per year.
Assigned, billed and dormant. Delivered as a named list with manager and business unit — $122,099 per year.
CPQ Plus at zero deployment, Maps Territory Planning at three of eighty, 557 unused CRM Analytics logins.
Consumption of 571 GB against 460 GB entitled — an exposure the client would have met at true-up.
Contracts across three regions evidenced 2,754 seats while the org had 3,702 provisioned.
Measured, evidenced and reported per SKU — replacing an assumption that had driven three prior renewals.
What clients take into the renewal room
Illustrative outcomes from enterprise Salesforce and SaaS optimization engagements.
"We renewed the same seat count three years running because nobody could prove we did not need it. LDS gave us the named list, the unit price and the storage exposure in one workbook. The renewal conversation changed completely."
"Our contractors and portal users were all sitting on full Service Cloud seats. Reclassifying them to restricted licenses removed an entire growth tranche from our renewal before we ever started negotiating price."
"We had committed to an Agentforce credit pool based on a workshop estimate. LDS measured actual action volume and showed we had bought roughly twice what our rollout would consume in year one."
"LDS aggregated Salesforce consumption from eight orgs scattered across business units, right-sized the estate and moved 200 users from Unlimited to Professional Edition. Three-year subscription cost fell by over $800K."
"Three regional order forms, one renewal date and no single source of truth. The normalized entitlement baseline was the first defensible number our procurement team had ever taken into a Salesforce negotiation."
"Service accounts and middleware were consuming full CRM seats. Moving them to Integration licenses was a two-week change that paid for the engagement several times over."
Frequently asked questions
Everything procurement and platform teams ask before scoping a Salesforce review.
Find out what you are actually using
A short scoping call establishes your renewal date, product footprint and data availability. From there we tell you what a review would find — before you commit to anything.
