How to use Salesforce: a 30-day plan built from what the vendor publishes

Most Salesforce guides start with where to click. That is the wrong place to start, because the most consequential decisions in a Salesforce implementation are made before anyone logs in, and the expensive mistakes are structural rather than procedural.

This is a 30-day plan built entirely on what the vendor publishes: the trial terms, the edition limits, the quota rows in the comparison table and the learning platform. We have not used the product ourselves and we are not pretending to. Everything here is a decision you can make from documents, which is exactly the part most guides skip.

OUR TAKE: You get 30 days and up to 10 users on Starter Suite. Spend the first week deciding which of the five editions you are actually buying, because the trial does not run on the one most buyers want. Spend the rest proving your process fits, not exploring features. And get three things in writing before day 30: the edition, the AI add-on price, and whether the API surcharge applies to you.

## Day zero: establish which product you are evaluating

Salesforce sells five editions in two blocks on one page. Starter Suite at $25 per user per month and Pro Suite at $100 are suites, bundling sales, service, marketing and commerce. Core at $195, Advanced at $395 and Max at $550 are Sales Cloud.

The trial runs on Starter Suite. So if your shortlist is really Core, the trial is a test of a different product with the same brand. That is not a reason to skip it, but it is a reason to know what it proves. It proves your team can work in the interface and that your data imports. It does not prove anything about sandboxes, storage ceilings or the AI layer, none of which exist at the tier you are trying.

Write down the edition you intend to buy before the trial starts. In writing. Every decision below depends on it.

## Week one: the data, and only the data

Import your accounts, contacts, opportunities and whatever you call a lead, before configuring anything.

Two reasons, both from the review corpus rather than from theory. Data and migration come up in 8% of the English Trustpilot reviews we read, and setup, admin work and consultants in 11%, both at an average of barely above one star. Those are the two work streams where implementations go wrong, and they go wrong together: a configuration built around clean example records collapses when real records arrive with their duplicates, their missing fields and their inconsistent naming.

So import first, deliberately messy, and look at what breaks. Your duplicate rate, your field coverage and your naming inconsistencies are the real specification for the configuration work. Discovering them in week one costs a week. Discovering them after go-live costs a quarter. Import first. Configure second. That order is the whole lesson.

Check your storage position while you are here. The suites and Core are allocated 10GB per org, with Core adding 20MB per user. Advanced and Max switch to 1GB per user. If your org has years of history and attachments, that basis change is a budget question, not a technical one, and it is better asked in week one than in month nine.

Week two: one process, end to end

Pick the single process that carries your revenue and build only that. For most sales teams it is lead to opportunity to closed deal, with whatever qualification step your team actually performs.

Starter Suite names what you get for this: lead, account, contact and opportunity management, built-in sales flows and lead routing, and automatic syncing of emails, events and contacts. That is enough to model one honest pipeline. Pro Suite adds quoting and forecasting, which is the first thing many teams discover they needed.

Resist the instinct to model every process at once. The reason is structural: configuration in this product compounds, and so does misconfiguration. Each automation you add before validating the first one makes the next change harder to reason about, and the review corpus is full of accounts of implementations that became too complex to maintain.

If quoting or forecasting is central to how your team sells, note it now. It sits on Pro Suite and above, and it is one of the clearest reasons to skip the cheapest card.

## Week three: integrations, and the surcharge to ask about

Connect the two or three systems your sales process genuinely depends on. Email and calendar first, since Starter Suite already syncs those. Then your quoting, support or finance system, depending on where your handoffs are.

Here is the item to raise with your rep before you commit. The editions comparison table marks Web Services API as an additional $25 per user per month. API access is what every integration, sync and custom tool runs through. We could not read from the rendered page which editions carry the charge, because the table's checkmark cells contain no text, so the question has to be asked directly: does this quote include API access for all our users, and at what cost.

Two more rows matter at this stage. Slack is mapped to editions one for one, with Slack Free through Pro Suite, Business+ at Core and Advanced, Enterprise+ at Max, so if your company already pays for Slack, check the overlap. And AgentExchange access is named on the Pro Suite card, which is where the extension marketplace enters the picture.

Week four: prove the exit, then decide

Before day 30, do two unglamorous things.

Export your data and look at what comes out. A CRM you cannot leave is a CRM you cannot renegotiate, and the review corpus is unambiguous about this one: contracts, renewals and cancellation appear in 19% of the English reviews we read, at an average of one star. Knowing your export works is cheap insurance.

Then read the commitment terms. Monthly billing exists only at Starter Suite. Pro Suite, Core, Advanced and Max are annual only, with no monthly toggle anywhere on the page, so the decision you make at day 30 is a twelve-month decision for any edition except the one you are trialling. And if you are staying on Starter Suite with commerce features, note that the vendor's small-business pricing page states transaction fees apply to that rate, while the sales pricing page does not mention them.

## Sandboxes, and why they change the plan

If you are buying Core or above, the sandbox rows are the part of the comparison table that should shape your rollout.

A Partial Sandbox is included once per org from Core upward. A Full Sandbox is a purchase at Core and included once per org at Advanced and Max. A sandbox is where configuration changes get tested against realistic data before they reach the people who sell for a living.

The practical consequence is that at Core, with one Partial Sandbox, your consultant tests against a subset. At Advanced, with a Full Sandbox included, they test against a copy. If your implementation is large enough to need the second, the edition decision is already made, and it was made by a quota row rather than by a feature list.

Training, which is the part this vendor does well

Salesforce runs Trailhead as a first-party learning platform rather than a documentation site, with structured modules including a quick-look path for Starter Suite^[4] aimed at teams new to CRM. It is free and it is the reason a new administrator can become competent without a consultant on retainer.

Use it in week one, not week four. The single biggest difference between implementations that work and implementations that stall is whether somebody on the inside owns the system. Trailhead is how that person gets made, and the material exists whether or not you have bought anything yet.

While you are setting up, the security hub publishes an MFA section for Salesforce products^[5]. Turn multi-factor authentication on during the trial rather than after go-live, when it becomes a change request affecting everyone.

## The five editions as a decision tree

Most of the edition advice you will read is a feature comparison. Here is the shorter version, built from the rows that actually force a choice.

If you need sales, service, marketing and commerce in one box and your process is standard, you are choosing between Starter Suite at $25 per user per month and Pro Suite at $100. Pro Suite is the one that adds quoting and forecasting, plus AgentExchange access.

If you need Sales Cloud, the question is sandboxes and storage, not features. Core at $195 includes a Partial Sandbox per org and 10GB per org plus 20MB per user. Advanced at $395 includes a Full Sandbox and moves storage to 1GB per user. If your implementation needs a full copy of production to test against, or your data history is large, the decision is made for you.

If you are buying for the AI, the question is credits. None in the suites, 500 thousand per org per year at Core, 1 million at Advanced, 2.75 million at Max at $550. Agentforce for Sales is an add-on from $125 per user per month below Max.

And if your sales team works through partners or resellers, Partner Relationship Management is priced separately from $10 per login per month, which is the only per-login item on the page.

Notice how little of that tree is about features. In this product the edition is usually chosen by a quota, and the feature list is what justifies the choice afterwards.

Who needs to own what, in the first month

Implementations stall for organisational reasons more often than technical ones, and the review corpus reflects it: setup, admin work and consultants appear in 11% of the English reviews we read, at an average of 1.1 stars.

Three roles need names before the trial starts. Actual names. Somebody owns the data, meaning they decide what a duplicate is and which fields are mandatory, and they have the authority to make that stick. Somebody owns the process, meaning they can say what a qualified lead is without convening a committee. And somebody owns the system, which means they are working through Trailhead and will still be here in a year.

The third role is the one companies skip, and it is the one that determines whether you are calling a consultant for every change. The vendor's own support structure assumes it exists: Premier Support is an add-on on the Pro Suite card, and Premier Success arrives with Core at $195 per user per month, so at the cheaper editions the in-house owner is your support plan.

What goes wrong in month three

Three failures are predictable from the published limits, which means you can plan around them during the trial rather than discovering them later.

Storage. A fixed 10GB per org sounds ample until attachments and email sync accumulate. The teams that hit it are the ones who imported years of history, and the fix is an edition change rather than a cleanup.

Credits, if you bought AI. The Flex Credit pool is annual and shared across the whole org rather than allocated per seat. One team running agents enthusiastically in month two can leave the rest of the company without an allowance in month four.

Support expectations. Support is the second-largest theme in the English reviews we read, at 26% and an average of one star, and the structure explains much of that: buyers on the suites did not buy the support tier the vendor treats as the real one. Decide during the trial whether you are budgeting for Premier, or for a person inside the company who knows the system.

Two measurements worth taking during the trial

Take both in week one and keep them. First, your duplicate rate on import, as a percentage of records. It is the single best predictor of how much configuration and cleanup work your implementation will need, and it is a number you can quote to a consultant to get a realistic estimate instead of a hopeful one.

Second, if you are testing the AI, credits consumed per completed task. The allowance is published by edition but the per-action consumption is not, so your own measurement is the only basis for sizing the purchase. Both numbers cost you nothing to collect during a trial and both are expensive to guess at after signing.

The three things to get in writing

Which edition the quote covers, and whether it is a suite or Sales Cloud. What Agentforce for Sales costs on top of these seats, given that it is an add-on from $125 per user per month below the Max edition. And whether the $25 per user per month API surcharge applies to your users.

All three are answerable from published pages, which means a rep who will not answer them in writing is telling you something useful.

## What this plan deliberately leaves out

Click paths, field-by-field setup screens and keyboard shortcuts. We have not used this product and we will not describe an interface we have not seen, because a guide that invents steps is worse than no guide: it sounds authoritative right up to the moment it wastes your afternoon.

What we can tell you with confidence is which decisions cost money, which quota rows force upgrades, and which questions a rep must answer before you sign. Trailhead covers the rest, from the people who built it.