I sell competitive solutions, and I am an end-user of the Salesforce Platform, which is our CRM. We use this solution to keep track of customers, prospects, and associated contacts.
Solution Consultant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Easy to scale, good reporting, but they need more data quality
Pros and Cons
- "The reporting capabilities are pretty user-friendly."
- "They should provide access to data quality tips and tricks to make it better."
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
The reporting capabilities are pretty user-friendly.
What needs improvement?
They should provide access to data quality tips and tricks to make it better.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been at my current job for five years, and I've been using it for that time. I have also used salesforce at other companies as well.
We are using the latest version, it's called Lightening.
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's a stable solution. We have not had any issues with the stability of the Salesforce Platform.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is easy to scale. It is, of course, the original software as a service.
We have 300 users in our organization who are using this solution, who are mainly Sales and Sales Management.
How are customer service and support?
I haven't used technical support. We have our own first-line support for our company. I've never had to actually reach out to Salesforce themselves.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previously, I hadn't used any other solution. I have used Salesforce at this job and at my previous two jobs.
How was the initial setup?
I was not a part of the initial setup, it was already in place and done for me.
What other advice do I have?
The solution is good.
It's only as good as the company that you are working for, who sets it up, and that monitors it and dates it. This is one of the biggest challenges with customer relationships.
Management Software such as the Salesforce Platform ensures data quality.
The tool can be great, but if you don't enter enough accurate data and keep it up to date then the CRM tool functionality cannot be leveraged.
I would advise having a data quality manager for this solution. If you're going to be using it to manage sales over time and for marketing efforts, if you don't have up-to-date complete information in there, then you don't get the value out of the solution.
I would rate Salesforce Platform a seven out of ten.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
BG lead at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Very stable, has all the features, works well, and useful for tracking activities and opportunities
Pros and Cons
- "The activities, opportunities, follow-up of the opportunities, and business tracking are valuable features. It provides everything that we need. It works pretty well."
- "In terms of features, for our business needs, we have more than enough right now. There is nothing that we are missing or would like to add. They can maybe share some best practices so that when you are starting, you can stick to a good process, and you don't have to think so much about the process that you want or your CEO or CMO wants. The process should not be based on one person in the company. Having some best practices will make it easier to get started. These best practices can be based on what has worked for others. Its basic version is pretty simple, and the customizations are up to the companies, which can make startups like ours lose a lot of time in figuring out what all stakeholders want rather than what would work."
What is our primary use case?
We are using this solution for follow-up of sales opportunities. We are using Enterprise Salesforce.
What is most valuable?
The activities, opportunities, follow-up of the opportunities, and business tracking are valuable features. It provides everything that we need. It works pretty well.
What needs improvement?
In terms of features, for our business needs, we have more than enough right now. There is nothing that we are missing or would like to add. They can maybe share some best practices so that when you are starting, you can stick to a good process, and you don't have to think so much about the process that you want or your CEO or CMO wants. The process should not be based on one person in the company. Having some best practices will make it easier to get started. These best practices can be based on what has worked for others. Its basic version is pretty simple, and the customizations are up to the companies, which can make startups like ours lose a lot of time in figuring out what all stakeholders want rather than what would work.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is very stable and works very well.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have scaled it, and it works pretty well. It has good scalability. We have around 50 people in our organization who use this solution.
How are customer service and technical support?
I have not used technical support. It is very stable, and most of the issues were at the user level. Therefore, I did not need any advanced technical support for this.
How was the initial setup?
It is pretty easy to set it up. The first version came out in two weeks.
What other advice do I have?
Before using this solution, you must make sure that your processes are very clear. You should know what do you want from the CRM and what outcome you are expecting. The CRM itself is very easy to use and deploy, but you can also make mistakes while going back and forth. If you don't have complete clarity of what you want from the business standpoint, you will lose valuable time in customizing the stuff that is not required. You will end up measuring stuff that you don't really care about. That's why you need to know your needs and the outcome that you're expecting.
I would rate Salesforce Platform a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Salesforce Platform
November 2024
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Client Manager at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Powerful platform with massive scalability potential
Pros and Cons
- "It has definitely improved how we function."
- "Salesforce is a pretty cumbersome product. It's a product that you need to spend quite a bit of time customizing to your unique business model. Unless you have somebody in house that knows it really well, you're better off spending money with a consultant to get what you need."
What is our primary use case?
We have five sales people, we are primarily using Salesforce to manage opportunities.
How has it helped my organization?
It has definitely improved how we function.
What needs improvement?
Salesforce is a pretty cumbersome product. It's a product that you need to spend quite a bit of time customizing to your unique business model. Unless you have somebody in house that knows it really well, you're better off spending money with a consultant to get what you need. It's a very powerful platform. You can do a lot with it, but you need to spend the time with it.
That's not necessarily a negative. It's just a large, monolithic application that you need to spend time customizing. You could be in the middle of updating something and think, "Wow, it'd be really nice if I had this widget or if I had this drop down." Because none of us are experts on it, somebody may go off and spends exorbitant time to find out how to implement this feature or make that customization.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the Salesforce platform for six months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Salesforce is a stable solution. We have not had any issues with it.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Salesforce has massive scalability potential.
How are customer service and technical support?
We have never had to use the Salesforce tech support.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was pretty straightforward.
What other advice do I have?
The advice I would give regarding Salesforce is plan to spend customization money on it. You have to really customize it to make it work for your business.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Unemployed
Useful customization, features rich, and scalable
Pros and Cons
- "he solution has improved over the years and the inputting of opportunity information is done a lot better and the GUI is good. The ability to customize dashboards and other elements was useful, we were able to move things around, for example, the forecasts. Most of the cells and input places were set, but we can customize the view and what we were looking at, such as on a daily, or weekly basis."
- "I have found it takes an exceedingly long time to put opportunities or clients in the system. If I have an opportunity that I need to put in the system it could take approximately 10 minutes. This is a lot of time when you have multiple opportunities to put in. There are other tasks to do that are required by supervisors, such as forecasts. What I have done to save time is I did not input as much detail as I could have because I knew it was going to take me an hour to get five leads in."
What is our primary use case?
I was using the Salesforce Platform for forecasting, client opportunity creation, tracking, and client input and tracking.
What is most valuable?
The solution has improved over the years and the inputting of opportunity information is done a lot better and the GUI is good. The ability to customize dashboards and other elements was useful, we were able to move things around, for example, the forecasts. Most of the cells and input places were set, but we can customize the view and what we were looking at, such as on a daily, or weekly basis.
The solution is comprehensive, there is a wide range of features available. There are features that have been available from the beginning I am just learning about them now.
What needs improvement?
I have found it takes an exceedingly long time to put opportunities or clients in the system. If I have an opportunity that I need to put in the system it could take approximately 10 minutes. This is a lot of time when you have multiple opportunities to put in. There are other tasks to do that are required by supervisors, such as forecasts. What I have done to save time is I did not input as much detail as I could have because I knew it was going to take me an hour to get five leads in.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used Salesforce Platform for approximately four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability of the solution was good. There were some bugs or glitches but nothing substantial or out of the ordinary that took us down for the day or prevented functionality.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The solution is easy to scale. For example, adding new employees.
We have approximately 1,000 people using Salesforce Platform in my organization. This includes managers, sales teams, and other employees.
How are customer service and support?
In general, we would log calls into our company technical support for issues, and then they would escalate it as needed to the Salesforce team.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have used other solutions similar to Salesforce Platform, such as Microsoft Dynamics. As a standard, the past three or four companies I have worked for have been using the Salesforce Platform.
What about the implementation team?
Our IT did the implementation of the solution.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The price of Salesforce Platform is very expensive. There are other solutions that are similar that cost a quarter of what Salesforce Platform does, such as HubSpot.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I have evaluated HubSpot and it does 85% of the functionality of the Salesforce Platform.
What other advice do I have?
I would advise those wanting to implement Salesforce Platform to have a dedicated Salesforce administrator who is used to have all changes go through them. Everything has to go through one person or it can get really complicated to manage.
Salesforce Platform is very good at what it does. However, it is still cumbersome, but then again, all the solutions I have used that are similar are all cumbersome. They all are asking for a lot of information in order to capture good realistic data. I have been doing technical sales amongst other things for 30 years and I do not know how these solutions can be made less cumbersome and still capture accurate information out of it.
I rate Salesforce Platform a seven out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Consultant at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
The technical support is effective and fast and the program is very stable
Pros and Cons
- "We haven't had any issues with stability so far."
- "I would like to have integration with Google."
What is our primary use case?
Our primary use case for Salesforce App Cloud is to make assertions that I personalize, based on the information that the companies have in their systems.
What needs improvement?
I would like to see an improvement in the price - it could be cheaper. Also, I would like to have more integration with Google.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Salesforce App Cloud for three to four years now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We haven't had any issues with stability so far.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I believe Salesforce App Cloud is a scalable solution.
How are customer service and technical support?
The technical support is very good and they respond very fast.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is really straightforward. You can deploy it yourself, or you can make use of a consultant.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend this solution to others and I will recommend that they use all the other SalesForce products. If their primary business use case is covered by Salesforce App Cloud, they should start there. If they have other business cases, they should definitely use other Salesforce products to see if that is covered.
Additional features that I would like to see included in the next release is more integration with Google. On a scale of one to ten, I will rate this solution a nine.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner.
Industry Analyst at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Salesforce Takes on Mobile App Development Cloud-style
Salesforce today announced ‘Salesforce Platform Mobile Services’, its response to the market opportunity around mobile application development.
Salesforce Platform Mobile Services should smooth the development of mobile enterprise app creation and comes with support for analytics, secure access control (single-sign on based on Salesforce Identity) and other libraries of tools.
As part of the ‘Mobile Services’ offering, Salesforce is rolling out a new Mobile SDK (availability announced for June) and what the company calls ‘Developer Mobile Packs’, an enriched set of Mobile APIs based on open source (ie popular JavaScript frameworks) that should enable developers to access real-time Salesforce data.
-- Value & Differentiation --
PAC believes that the integration and access of real-time Salesforce data is a key benefit and strategic differentiator for the company against other emerging mobile application development environments (eg IBM, SAP, Oracle).
The ecosystem and marketplace developed around the AppExchange platform gives Salesforce substantial competitive advantage. The company already has a very lively ecosystem of ISVs and developers building on its platform. So far, over threee million custom apps have been developed on the Salesforce Platform, a significant number irrespective of the level of depth of enterprise functionality put into these apps. This is particularly relevant as Salesforce’s app development environment is Cloud-native, giving it an extra advantage over other enterprise-grade mobile SDKs.
-- Placement in Portfolio --
Salesforce Platform is not yet a monolithic platform, consisting of sub-branches like force.com, Heroku, database.com, AppExchange, etc. PAC learned that Salesforce Platform Mobile Services will be an extension of force.com.
-- From Apex to Open Java? --
The emphasis on open source signals that Salesforce may gradually move away from Apex, its proprietary Java-based variant, towards a more open Java environment. The development activity seen on Heroku may influence the transition to open Java for force.com in the future. Out of the 3 million custom apps developed on Salesforce’s platforms, 2.7 million were developed on Heroku, and 360,000 on force.com. This may indicate that the odds may be in favor of open Java versus Apex in the long term.
-- Mobile Apps vs Traditional Apps --
Of the 3 million custom apps built up to now on the Salesforce platform, it is not easy to quantify the proportion of mobile apps. Salesforce used to look at this market in a holistic manner, partly because many apps have been developed for multiple-device / universal environments. The ‘Mobile Services’ offering should help Salesforce differentiate between mobile apps development and traditional application development, as mobile and non-mobile application experiences will diverge more and more.
-- Pricing --
It is still an early stage for ‘Salesforce Platform Mobile Services’ and not all of its parameters have been clearly set. Interesting questions arise as to how/if the company will monetize mobile application development (e.g. would it charge for app development as in Heroku’s PaaS environment) and what revenue opportunities could Salesforce derive from ‘Mobile Services’ (e.g., charging for development and integration, charging for hosting and secure mobile app control/ management, etc).
-- Channel & Services --
In order to get traction in the Consulting & Integration arena, Salesforce plans to support adoption of ‘Mobile Services’ with a dedicated training program for the channel. The program already features some of the strongest names in the SI space like Accenture, Capgemini and Deloitte. With such partners on board, Salesforce’s credentials in mobile app development should be reinforced with large enterprise clients. In addition, as these providers have a global presence, the message should get through in all relevant geographies.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Associate Lead Account Manager Full-time at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
CRM used to surface trends and inform decisions on events and marketing campaigns.
Pros and Cons
- "We also use Salesforce to find trends to make informed decisions in terms of events and marketing campaigns."
- "The reporting for Salesforce could be approved. It is a manual process and it would be useful to have a guide or videos on how to generate reports or any other cool things that you could do with the platform."
What is our primary use case?
We use this solution to maintain the information of our existing customers. We generate reports and analyze how customers have been interacting with the company. We also use Salesforce to find trends to make informed decisions in terms of events and marketing campaigns.
What is most valuable?
This solution is accurate.
What needs improvement?
The solution is not completely user-friendly, but it is user-friendly enough to support our day to day work. The Lighting version could be more smooth. We keep opting for the Classic version because it seems that it is least likely to get stuck. The Lighting version needs to be faster and easier to be able to get the information that we want.
The reporting for Salesforce could also be approved. It is a manual process and it would be useful to have a guide or videos on how to generate reports or any other cool things that you could do with the platform.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for one and a half years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
This is a stable solution. The Lightning version is a tad slow but the Classic version is more user-friendly.
How was the initial setup?
The solution comes ready to use and there was nothing that we needed to do to get started. It was a matter of accessing the application and logging in using our credentials for our day to day work. As a first time user, the training that we were given helped us understand how to navigate the platform.
What other advice do I have?
From an employee point of view, I would recommend Salesforce. It is user-friendly.
I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
WWT at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
CRM solution successfully used for forecasting and tracking sales contacts and opportunities
Pros and Cons
- "It is an easy product to use and does great things for our company. It keeps track of all of our sales activity."
- "A company needs to carefully consider how they set up Salesforce in order to ensure it benefits them."
What is our primary use case?
We use Salesforce for all of our customer resource management, forecasting and tracking our contacts and opportunities. We also use it to make internal requests.
What is most valuable?
It is an easy product to use and does great things for our company. It keeps track of all of our sales activity.
What needs improvement?
A company needs to carefully consider how they set up Salesforce in order to ensure it benefits them.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Salesforce for 16 years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
This is a stable solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
This is a scalable solution due to the fact that it is cloud based. We have 3000 users on Salesforce.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
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