The Question
Should I buy Salesforce Premier Success?
The Short Answer
No, most businesses really shouldn’t make this investment.
While I am a Salesforce Consultant, I think it’s only right to give you a Salesforce Premier Success Review based on my lived experience.
At roughly 30% of your total license costs, Salesforce Premier Success is an expensive guided tour through Salesforce tools and resources.
People don’t really understand this during the sales process and when they find out it isn’t actual help inside their org they are usually very disappointed.
It can absolutely accelerate learning for technical people:
- Consultants
- Admins
- Architects
- Technically curious operators
…but that’s a very different thing than “someone is going to help run and improve my Salesforce environment”.
Those are not the same product.
That misunderstanding is where most of the frustration begins.
How Salesforce Premier Success Actually Works
Salesforce Premier Success is similar to a guided tour for Salesforce “Assistance”.
Instead of fiddling around for articles or tutorials yourself someone from Salesforce will help you do it.
For 30% of your net license fees you get fast track help for:
- Pointing you to resources.
- Narrowing down issues for troubleshooting
- Coaching
- Adoption Guidance
- Success Path
- Health checks
- Instructor Led Training
Officially, Salesforce positions Premier Success as an accelerated support and enablement layer designed to help companies:
- Adopt Salesforce faster
- Reduce support friction
- Improve platform utilization
- Gain access to more responsive help
You can review the official positioning here –> Salesforce Success Plans
And to be fair the product does provide value in certain scenarios.
The problem is that many customers misunderstand what kind of value it actually provides.
Why It Looks the Way It Does
Salesforce Premier Success exists because Salesforce itself is an enormously complicated platform with:
- Thousands of features
- Multiple clouds
- Constant releases
- Varying configurations
- Wildly different customer environments
Salesforce cannot realistically place a dedicated technical expert inside every customer org.
So Premier Success was created as a scalable middle layer for faster support access, educational resources, escalation paths, and troubleshooting assistance.
It’s fundamentally a support acceleration and enablement product.
It is not:
- Managed services
- Implementation ownership
- Hands-on administration
- Consulting
- Custom configuration work
That distinction matters a lot.
What People Think They’re Buying
This is where things quietly go off the rails.
A lot of buyers unconsciously think Premier Success means:
- “Salesforce will help us run the system”
- “Someone will fix issues for us”
- “Someone will configure things”
- “Someone will tell us exactly what to do”
- “Someone technical will jump in and handle it”
That’s not really what this is.
What you’re mostly buying is access, guidance, escalation, education, and troubleshooting assistance.
That may sound subtle.
In reality it’s a gigantic difference.
Especially for non-technical companies.
The 30% Number Gets Real Very Fast
This is another area people don’t fully appreciate during the sales process.
30% sounds small until you apply it to actual license costs.
Examples:
- $50,000 licenses → ~$15,000 Premier Success
- $100,000 licenses → ~$30,000 Premier Success
- $250,000 licenses → ~$75,000 Premier Success
At some point you start drifting into the cost of hiring an actual person to help.
That’s where many customers start questioning the value equation.
Especially when they realize that the cost doesn’t include.
- Configuring their org
- Cleaning up automation
- Fixing reporting
- Redesigning processes
- Improving adoption
You are essentially paying for elevated guidance and access.
Not ownership.
This is one of the reasons we strongly prefer fixed-cost operational support models because companies need ongoing operational help (not just documentation and troubleshooting).
Where Salesforce Premier Success Is Actually Useful
To be fair there are environments where Premier Success can be useful.
Especially if someone in your environment technical, eager to learn, willing to put in cases, and willing to spend time troubleshooting.
It’s useful to technical people (consultants and admins) in the following ways:
1. Diagnosing Issues That Are False in the Software
Sometimes standard functionality simply doesn’t behave correctly.
Premier Success can help narrow down whether it’s configuration, known issues, product limitation, or an actual platform bug.
That’s valuable.
2. Diagnosing Error Messages
Technical people sometimes hit obscure errors and oddities.
Premier Success can help explain:
- What’s actually happening
- Where to investigate
- How to save time fixing an issue.
3. Known Product Issues
This is one of the genuinely useful parts.
Sometimes Salesforce internally knows that products or functionality are broken.
However, it’s not the sort of thing you will find plastered all over the home page.
Premier Success resources are often more upfront about:
- Active issues
- Roadmap limitations
- Workarounds
- Platform constraints
That can save a lot of time.
Real Example — AWS Voice Implementation
We experienced this directly during a Service Cloud Voice implementation.
The expectation from the configuration guide was:
- Connect voice
- Transcribe calls
- Recommend knowledge articles automagically
Sounds great.
Except the transcript recommendation logic didn’t actually work correctly in practice.
The user still had to manually listen and type in the appropriate keywords to trigger functionality (which defeated the entire purpose entirely).
We went through the configuration guide exactly as instructed.
It still didn’t function the way it was described.
The customer had an elevated level of Premier Success so we were able to get on the phone with a Salesforce resource.
To their credit they came clean immediately.
It was a known issue.
There was no magical hidden fix.
The recommendation was essentially to double the cost of the project outsourcing to a developer to make it work.
That interaction itself was useful.
But notice what did not happen. Nobody from Salesforce:
- Fixed it
- Configured it
- Developed the solution
- Owned the implementation outcome
That distinction matters tremendously.
Who Actually Gets the Most Value From This?
From what we’ve seen Premier Success adds value for:
- Experienced admins
- Consultants
- Enterprise technical teams
- Large internal Salesforce teams
- Organizations with dedicated platform ownership
Those people can actually leverage the guidance, make sense of the information, and execute on the recommendations.
For others without strong internal technical ownership?
It often becomes expensive access to information they don’t fully know how to operationalize.
The Bigger Salesforce Ecosystem Problem
This is also part of a larger issue in the Salesforce ecosystem.
There’s often a huge gap between:
- How products are sold
- How products actually behave operationally
We’ve written about this before in 6 Reasons Companies Regret Buying Salesforce
A lot of the ecosystem relies on the intersection of expectation, aspiration, and platform possibility.
The operational reality is usually much messier.
Premier Success falls squarely into that category for many buyers.
Closing Thought
Salesforce Premier Support is a polarizing subject.
I personally understand why Salesforce sells it.
It’s a very high margin offering (30% of license costs), for access to things people are not very likely to exhaust.
Once you put in a case (where you may be asked to recreate the issue… always fun) you get some decent guidance.
Due to the nature of the Salesforce ecosystem (variable build by org) it’s not feasible for a rep on the phone to go into your org and configure anything.
This is where it falls flat for people aren’t technical.
They find out that what they are paying for is access to information, guidance, and troubleshooting assistance.
Not fixing problems, building solutions, and operational ownership.
That can be quite jarring and off putting.
Understandably.
If you’re struggling with Salesforce Premier Support and need help we can get you on the right path.