Preparing for Salesforce Executive Business Review: What to Bring

The Strategic Importance of the Salesforce EBR: Shifting the Power Dynamic

An Executive Business Review (EBR)—sometimes referred to as a Quarterly Business Review (QBR)—is a routine event in the lifecycle of any enterprise Salesforce contract. Ostensibly, Salesforce presents the EBR as a collaborative session designed to celebrate customer success, review platform adoption, and showcase upcoming product roadmaps. In reality, a vendor-led EBR is a highly calculated sales qualification event. The Salesforce Account Executive (AE) and Customer Success Manager (CSM) utilise this meeting to gather commercial intelligence, identify new department budgets, and pave the way for contract expansion and upselling at renewal.

If a customer enters an EBR unprepared, allowing the vendor to dictate the agenda, they will be subjected to a highly polished marketing presentation. Salesforce will highlight high-level usage numbers (such as total logins) as proof of immense business value, while glossing over system inefficiencies, storage overages, or unutilised licences. This vendor-led narrative places the customer at a distinct disadvantage when negotiating upcoming renewals, as it establishes the premise that the organisation is highly dependent on the platform and eager to purchase more seats.

To protect corporate capital and ensure maximum return on investment, procurement leads and COOs must **flip the power dynamic of the EBR**. Rather than attending as passive recipients of a vendor sales pitch, the customer's platform leadership team must take complete ownership of the meeting. By preparing a data-driven, customer-led EBR presentation, you transform the session into a rigorous vendor governance audit. You present the hard facts of platform adoption, showcase technical debt, highlight areas of license waste, and establish a clear position for upcoming commercial negotiations.

Successfully shifting this dynamic requires three core inputs: a thorough programmatic technical audit, a clear value-realisation business case, and a disciplined commercial negotiation framework. Armed with these materials, you can guide the partnership on your own terms.

Preparing the Technical Audit: Standard and Custom Licensing Metrics

The foundation of any successful customer-led EBR is an indisputable, quantitative audit of your Salesforce tenant's technical utilisation. Before meeting with Salesforce, your administrative team must execute a series of programmatic checks to identify exactly how many user licences, permission sets, and storage blocks are actively consumed versus what is contractually provisioned.

The first critical check involves analysing active user login patterns. Salesforce AEs frequently point to high "active user" counts as evidence of strong adoption. However, a user record that is marked active in the database but has not logged into the system in 90 days represents immediate financial waste. To identify these inactive accounts, administrators must run an active user audit using custom developer tools or a targeted SOQL query.

Here is a production-grade SOQL script that queries the standard User table to identify active users who have not logged into the platform in the last 90 days, grouped by their assigned Profile:

SELECT Profile.Name, COUNT(Id) InactiveCount 
FROM User 
WHERE IsActive = true 
  AND LastLoginDate < LAST_90_DAYS 
GROUP BY Profile.Name

By executing this query in the Developer Console or running it via an automated script, administrators can generate a precise list of candidates for licence reclamation. For a large enterprise org with 1,000 Sales Cloud Enterprise licences, discovering that 150 users have not logged in for three months provides immediate leverage to demand a contract downsize or licence conversion at the next true-up.

Beyond basic login tracking, the technical audit must examine the assignment of premium **Permission Set Licenses (PSLs)** (such as CRM Analytics, Field Service, or Shield Encryption). Run a relational query on the PermissionSetLicenseAssign table to aggregate consumed entitlements against contractual caps:

SELECT PermissionSetLicense.DeveloperName, COUNT(Id) AssignedSeats 
FROM PermissionSetLicenseAssign 
GROUP BY PermissionSetLicense.DeveloperName

If your contract allocates 100 CRM Analytics seats but only 12 are assigned to active users, you have a massive under-utilisation rate of 88%. Bringing this data to the EBR allows you to challenge the value delivered by those premium features and propose converting those unutilised licences into resources you actually require, such as extra data storage or core platform seats.

Defining the Business Value Case: Adoption, ROI, and Under-Utilisation

Once the technical utilisation audit is complete, the platform team must translate those database metrics into a clear business value case. Salesforce licensing costs are significant operating expenses; therefore, every seat must be justified by quantifiable business value. In the EBR, you must demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) that the platform is delivering, while also exposing areas of operational under-utilisation.

To construct an authentic value case, you must look beyond simple login metrics. Logins merely prove that a user opened a browser tab. Real **Adoption** is measured by transactional execution—the volume of critical business processes successfully conducted within the system. You must track and report KPIs such as:

• Sales Productivity: The ratio of closed-won opportunities relative to the number of active Sales Cloud seats.
• Service Efficiency: The average case resolution time and the volume of cases closed via automated omni-channel routing relative to Service Cloud licensing spend.
• Automation Yield: The volume of process actions executed by Apex triggers, Flows, and integrations, demonstrating how much manual labor the platform has eliminated.

Contrast these success stories with the reality of **Under-Utilisation**. A common administrative error in enterprise orgs is "Licence Over-Provisioning"—assigning full, high-tier CRM licences to staff who only require basic read/write access to custom tables or simple data entry. For example, if a group of logistics staff only use Salesforce to check Account addresses or log basic Task records, they do not require a full Sales Cloud Enterprise licence (£120/month). They can be easily transitioned to a standard Salesforce Platform licence (£30/month) with zero loss of operational capability.

Compiling this value case ensures that your organisation is not viewed as a captive customer that will blindly accept price increases, but rather as a highly disciplined buyer that continuously measures software costs against clear operational outcomes.

Preparing the Commercial Negotiation Framework: Cost Protections and Renewal Baseline

The ultimate goal of the customer-led EBR is to lay the groundwork for upcoming commercial contract negotiations. Salesforce contracts typically run for 3 to 5 years, with standard clauses that allow the vendor to enforce automatic **annual price increases of 7% to 10% at renewal**. Without a rigorous negotiation framework, you will face severe budget creep.

Before entering the EBR, your procurement team must establish a comprehensive "Commercial Target Sheet" that outlines your current spend baseline, identifies areas of licence waste, and details your negotiated targets. This sheet acts as a guide, ensuring that your negotiation team remains aligned and does not yield to standard vendor pressure tactics.

Let us examine a typical multi-year contract negotiation framework, contrasting Salesforce's standard renewal proposals with a customer-led target position:

By presenting this commercial framework during the EBR prep, you signal to the Salesforce account team that you are fully aware of their pricing levers. You establish that any contract renewal must be built on optimised licence volumes, flat unit pricing, and a fair support model, putting you in a strong position for formal contract discussions.

Building the EBR Presentation: Standard Dashboard, Agenda, and Checklists

With your technical audits, value cases, and commercial frameworks compiled, the final step is to construct the physical Executive Business Review presentation deck. To maintain control of the meeting, **you must share your presentation first**, establishing the narrative before the Salesforce AE has an opportunity to load their upsell slides.

The presentation must follow a highly structured, professional agenda designed to demonstrate complete governance of the platform. Here is the operational checklist of the slide-by-slide structure that your EBR deck must follow:

To run the meeting smoothly, ensure you have the following agenda and materials prepared:

1. The Pre-Meeting Alignment: Circulate the technical audit results among your internal executive sponsors (CFO, CIO) to ensure absolute alignment before the review.
2. The Structured Agenda: Dedicate the first 25 minutes of the hour-long session to your customer-led deck, 15 minutes to open dialogue, and reserve the final 20 minutes for Salesforce to present their roadmaps—on your terms.
3. The Live Audit Dashboard: Have a live Salesforce dashboard ready during the virtual meeting. Feature real-time gauge charts that display licence utilisation, inactive accounts, and storage caps, proving that your metrics are fresh and accurate.

By executing the Executive Business Review with this level of analytical rigour and structural discipline, you transform a potentially vulnerable compliance event into a powerful strategic opportunity. You protect your corporate capital, optimise your database footprint, and ensure that your partnership with Salesforce remains a balanced, mutually beneficial relationship engineered to deliver real business outcomes.