How to get your biggest bonus check ever...

Reprint of Salesforce Saturday 1/13/24 Newsletter

Happy Saturday Everyone :)

The biggest single bonus check I ever received was for $68,000.

Earlier that year, I had asked for a huge salary increase from my boss and was denied.

I said, "Well, if I can't have that big a salary, could at least have a percentage of any savings I find in the business?"

He agreed.

20% of any savings I found would be added as a bonus to my check.

In retrospect this turned out to be extremely lucky.

And that's the first key takeaway from this story.

Look for ways to add a "commission" or "performance based incentive" to your pay.

It might take some time, and maybe considering another employer, but having an uncapped upside on a portion of your earnings is a big deal.

It's a form a leverage. You want to break the "time for money trade" and find a "value for money" trade.

If you provide more in savings value than you take in cash value, there isn't a limit to how much you can earn.

You'll be adding profitability with every transaction.

If you offered to put $350,000 in my pocket right now, on the condition that I have to pay you $68,000 to do it, why wouldn't I make that deal?

Not only would I make it, I'd hope you could find even more ways to repeat the process!

So, with my savings arrangement, I had the right incentive.

I was going to find a lot of savings!

I remembered that our previous year Salesforce Contract came out to over $500,000.

If there will be big savings anywhere, I figured I might as well start with the biggest line items I was aware of.

Turns out, there was a lot of excess billing in our contract.

We were paying for licenses and services we weren't using.

I started a list of everything I thought we could get rid of or ways to save money.

• Move some users from regular licenses to platform licenses
• Building our own membership website to save on partner community licenses
• Remove extra line items for API Calls, Data Storage, unused Knowledge Licenses, Premium Support, and other services we simply weren't using

Next, I reviewed App-Exchange apps and other expenses.

I found a few apps to remove and added them to the list.

I reviewed other expenses, one of which were external consultants.

We were paying a development team to build a custom application which cost a significant amount of money each month (close to $20k).

Added them to my list.

I compiled all the changes we could make to reduce our contract, replace the consultants, and use new (cheaper) apps.

Then for roughly 6 months, I led internal sprints to slowly remove these extra expenses without hurting normal operations.

It worked!

And so when the second quarter ended in 2020, my team and I had been able to save over $450,000 - and I got my biggest bonus check by far.

I took the team out to a 5-star steakhouse, and gave them their own surprise bonus checks based on the extra savings we found.

It was awesome.

But the total dollars saved is less important than where I was able to find savings.

The second key takeaway from this story is that your Salesforce contract probably also has items your company is not even using.

Find them!

Every Salesforce System Admin can view their companies Salesforce Contract from inside Salesforce.

I recommend you review it regularly.

You only get the option to remove items once a year during your contract renewal.

Preparing a little bit each month throughout the year will position you perfectly to cut costs when the opportunity arises.

And if you've set up a deal where you get to capture some of those savings, you could absolutely get your own biggest bonus check too.

I know it's repeatable, because in my role as a consultant I've reviewed dozens of other contracts and routinely found $100k line items that companies weren't even using.

Salesforce is so good at selling to C-level executives that there is bound to be unneeded services in almost every contract.

Capitalize on them! 

Best,

Nick