Quarra Salesforce Contract Renewal — 2026

Overview

In January 2026, Salesforce proposed adding a 10,000-contact block to Quarra Stone's Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) contract ahead of a scheduled price increase. After reviewing current usage and the planned 2026 marketing strategy, the add-on was rejected as unnecessary.

This decision was made in the context of a broader shift from lead-gen to ^[1], which requires a smaller, more targeted contact pool rather than broad list growth.

Decision

Rejected the 10k additional contact block add-on.

Lincoln Durham confirmed the decision directly with Salesforce, requesting the add-on be removed before countersigning the renewal contract.

Rationale

Factor	Detail
Current usage	74% of the 10,000-contact base plan (~7,400 mailable contacts used)
Available headroom	~2,500 contacts remaining before hitting the cap
2026 strategy	Shifting to ABM targeting ~200 high-value accounts — well within existing capacity
List hygiene	Active list cleaning underway, which will free additional mailable contact slots
Cost	The add-on was a small incremental cost relative to the ~$15k base fee, but not justified by need

Salesforce's pitch framed the add-on as a way to lock in pricing before an increase. The team assessed this as a standard upsell tactic not aligned with actual usage trajectory.

How Salesforce Contact Blocks Work

A contact block defines the maximum number of mailable contacts in Account Engagement — contacts that can receive marketing emails. Key points:

You can store more contacts in the system than your block allows, but only block-covered contacts are emailable.
Contacts cannot be "rotated" in and out of the mailable pool on a per-campaign basis; the block is a hard ceiling on total mailable contacts at any time.
The base plan includes 10,000 mailable contacts. An additional block would have raised this to 20,000.

Implications for ABM Strategy

The 2026 ABM plan targets:
- 25–50 top-tier accounts (provided by Quarra's sales team)
- ~200 B-tier accounts (lookalike list built by AAG from existing Salesforce data)

Even with the broader B-tier list, total new contacts added will be well within the ~2,500 remaining capacity. The existing base plan is sufficient for the full ABM rollout without any contract changes.

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