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What percentage of Salesforce.com's revenue does their premium support / success plans offerings represent?
Hello! Thanks for your question about what percentage of Salesforce.com's revenue comes from their premier support (also known as success plans) offerings. The short version is that after searching extensively through company data, trusted media sites, user reviews and forums, government filings and documents, industry reports, and other sources, I couldn't find the figure you're looking for, nor could I find enough high-quality data to accurately triangulate an estimate. However, I was able to learn that Salesforce has 150,000 customers and $8.39 billion in revenue, 93% of which comes from subscription services and support, and that premier support typically costs about 15% of the user's licensing fees. You'll find a deep dive of my research below.
METHODOLOGY
To respond to your request, I began by looking for a clear figure to answer your question from the most obvious sources, particularly company press releases, annual reports, regulatory filings and other publicly-available documentation, as well as third-party sources such as industry reports and trusted media sites. It became clear from this process that the data wasn't publicly available; the company simply may not publish this information.
Next, I tried to find a way to triangulate an estimate with the data that was available. The most obvious way to do this is to find the number of customers using premier support, and the average cost.
However, I wasn't able to find how many, or what percentage, of Salesforce's customers use the service, despite extensive searching; only that the company has 150,000 customers. Nor could I find information on how much the service costs. The only available data I could find on that indicates that it's about 15% of the licensing/subscription fees. Even the Salesforce website doesn't give pricing details, preferring that the client contact them directly.
I did learn that subscriptions and support account for 93% of Salesforce's revenue. I tried to figure out how this breaks down - how much is product subscriptions specifically, versus support, but again, this just wasn't available from any source I could find. The only break down of that number was into the four main SaaS products Salesforce offers, with the support services lumped in with those products.
Additionally, I tried to look more broadly at what's typical in the industry to try to at least get a benchmark. For example, what percentage of SaaS customers usually pay for extra support services. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any benchmarks that were helpful. After trying these approaches and every other one I could think of, I finally determined that it wouldn't be possible to provide the figure you're looking for because there is not enough publicly available data.
HELPFUL FINDINGS
While I'm not able to directly and accurately answer your question, I was able to gather some information on the topic. I don't want to leave you empty-handed, but the best I could come up with is a very, very rough estimation that is largely based on speculation and educated guesswork, so bear with me. Salesforce's FY17 revenue was $8.39 billion. We know that 93% of that is derived from subscription services and their accompanying support, which is what we're interested in, so that's $7.8 billion.
If we take a wild guess that 10% of Salesforce's subscribers pay for the premier support, and we assume that ratio also holds true for revenue (in other words, 10% of subscription and support revenue comes from premier support customers), that would mean we're looking at $780 million as coming from premier support customers. Now we just have to figure out how much of the $780 million comes from support, based on what we know that premier support usually costs 15% of the customer's subscription/licensing fees.
The math here is a little hard to explain: just for the sake of finding a ratio of premier support to subscription fees, we can think of the total revenue ($780 million) as $100. Out of $100, $87 would be coming from subscription fees, and $13 would be coming from premier support, because $13 is 15% of $87, and the two equal the total, $100. In other words, for every $87 the customer pays in fees, they would pay $13 (15%) for premier support. Now, if we think of those as percentages, for every $100, 87% comes from subscriptions and 13% comes from premier support.
So, applying that ratio to the actual total revenue, 13% of $780 million comes from premier support in this scenario, which is $101.4 million in revenue. Going back to your original question, that would mean that premier support accounts for 1.2% of Salesforce's total revenue of $8.39 billion. As I've already mentioned, take this very lightly, as it's speculative. But, it hopefully gives you a very rough idea of what we're looking at in terms of Salesforce's premier support revenue. Moreover, this is a demonstration of what a triangulation would look like, and the same approach could be used if the proper data points were available.
CONCLUSION
To wrap up, after searching extensively through company data, trusted media sites, user reviews and forums, government filings and documents, industry reports, and other sources, a direct answer to your question is not publicly available, nor could I find enough data to accurately triangulate an estimate. However, I learned some interesting facts about Salesforce and was able to demonstrate what a triangulation could look like with the right data. I hope this information is helpful to you! Thanks for using Wonder, and let us know if we can help you with anything else.