The $100/Month Business Case: Proving the ROI of Essential Salesforce Software

This is probably the quickest business case you will ever build to justify enterprise software licensing. But to do it, you need to consider two critical questions:

• What are the top 3 jobs that are strategic and important, and that Elements can help you do better (faster, more accurately, deeper insights)?
• How long does it take to break even on $100/month that you spend on an Elements.cloud Editor?

Activities made better by Elements.cloud 

If we consider the use cases that Elements.cloud can accelerate, improve or avoid risk for an Admin, here are the top 3:

Understand the org and implications of changes

Sync your Org to Elements.cloud in a few clicks and unlock an up-to-date metadata dictionary with full impact and dependency analysis. Plus, you can get an email with any changes that have been made to your Production and Sandboxes Org. It’s like an insurance policy for your most critical system.

Example activities

Without Elements.cloud, each of these activities would require you to spend time in Salesforce Setup, building a spreadsheet to capture the results:

• Changing a picklist value and not realizing that it kicks off a flow
• Cleaning up a page layout by removing a field that doesn’t seem to have data, but is being used in a formula
• Identifying that the New Button on a related list allows users to bypass the Screen Flow, which has all the data validation
• Validating that all the fields used in reports that support dashboards are correct

Costs saved

It is not just the Admin time spent on analysis of the Org, but it is also the time wasted by users when the Org is down because it has been broken. And then the time to roll back, analyze what went wrong, and then correct.

You can see the impact a change is going to have before you change it to address those “hidden” gems. A must-have in the admin arsenal. – Gina Marques, Director CRM and Business Systems & Salesforce MVP, OwnBackup/Salesforce

Automatically documenting a business process based on metadata (and identifying potential for agents!)

Configuration Mining draws data models and UPN process maps using the Org metadata. Agent Finder can then identify agent opportunities from the UPN diagrams.

Example activities

Without Elements.cloud, you would need to understand the Org in detail, interview the business users to understand how the Org was configured, or consult any Org documentation or specifications created by the project team:

• What is the opportunity lifecycle from creation to closed won/lost?
• How is the case object used for technical support?
• How do commissions (custom object) work?

Costs saved

The effort in analysis and then drawing diagrams. But there is also the time wasted getting consensus with individuals who all have a different perspective on how the Org is configured vs the design vs the documentation vs how it is actually configured. And then identifying agent use cases and writing business requirements.

“We spent 6 months and $500k with (SI) and you’ve done it in 5 minutes.” – Platform Manager, Global Insurance company

Reducing permissions/profile risks

The Permissions Explorer provides a very granular analysis of the current permissions and profiles. This highlights the minimum permissioning and a migration path to a more secure and easier-to-manage security model. The volume of permissions data that needs to be analyzed is staggering

Example activities

Without Elements.cloud, each of these would require you to spend time in Salesforce Setup, building a monstrous spreadsheet to capture the results, to answer questions like:

• Why does Jane have write access to the Case object?
• What permissions are overlapping and by what percentage, and could be consolidated?
• Peter has changed roles and departments. What security settings need to be changed?

Costs saved

The effort is working in Setup to build a complex spreadsheet of permissions/profiles by role and individual, which could be 100,000s of rows.

“Gives us the clarity, the connectedness, and the governance we need at our scale.” – Chief Product Owner, Bosch

Calculating the ROI

So how much time has to be saved for any of the above activities to break even on the $100 monthly Editor license for Elements.cloud? Let’s look at the hourly rate for an Admin. The recent SalesforceBen Admin Salary Guide shows that the salaries for Admins range from $75k – $115K based on seniority in the US. In Europe, the lowest salary is $35k – $85k when converted to US dollars. But this is just the salary cost. The true cost to the company is 1.25-1.4 times that by the time you have added tax, office, laptop, and software licenses. 

Assuming 220 working days a year and 8 hours a day, the Admin’s hourly loaded cost is

• In US – $55-85 per hour
• In Europe – $25-$60 per hour

So the breakeven PER MONTH Elements.cloud is saving:

• In the US the most junior admin needs to save only 1 hour 50 mins, and the most senior 1 hour 10 mins.
• 4 hours for the most junior admin in Europe and just 1 hour and 40 minutes for the most senior.  

What is your breakeven?

To work out how many hours a month you need to save using Elements.cloud, simply take 140,800 and divide by your annual salary. Here is the calculation:

“This is beyond world class. One of the best tools I’ve ever personally used. Ever.” – VP IT, enterprise software company

Bonus use case: Agentforce

If you want to be successful in designing, building, and governing Agentforce agents, you need to have the following in place:

• Process: A strong, shared understanding of your business processes so that you can identify agent use cases, and then design the agents.  Elements.cloud has multiple features that help: Configuration Mining or AI-generated process diagrams help you hit the ground running. Agent Finder identifies use cases and writes the business requirements for you. Agent Designer is the governed agent design canvas that generates the instructions
• Data Governance and Data Quality: Configuration Mining documents the data journey through the business process as a diagram. It also creates the data model (ERD).
• Metadata Documentation and Dependency Analysis: Agents are metadata, but also use metadata. You need to understand how agents use metadata, which could be shared across topics and actions. Without it, a change could break agents or your org without you even knowing it.

“Process-led approach delivered reliable agents 90% faster.” – Miriam McCabe, Head of Global Innovation Design, Salesforce