Salesforce Platform Reviews

Our team is using it for tracking sales and following sales conversations.

I'm pretty indifferent towards the solution. I don't use it for anything personally, although the company itself makes use of it for sales. My background is Microsoft and even then I don't really use Dynamics for anything.

It's a core component of any CRM, and just having the ability to journal the conversations happening is great from a sales perspective.

I like that I can subscribe to the chatter surrounding an opportunity, as my sales team doesn't actually call anybody or follow up with anybody. Yet, if they paste bogus numbers on the pipeline, I can follow it to see that they didn't do the job. It's nice to have that transparency.

Salesforce is a phenomenal application. It's very diverse. 

It does need very specific resources to help deploy it and buy in from the users. It's one of those items it's pretty disruptive and if it's not deployed properly and if it doesn't get utilized efficiently, it won't be effective.

Salesforce doesn't seem to be a really great document repository like SharePoint and SharePoint is backed in behind Dynamic CRM. Therefore, in most cases, generally speaking, it seems like it makes more sense to go the Dynamics route, assuming that the customer understands that if they're already using Exchange, Teams, and Azure Active Directory, they're using role-based access and controls for security and compliance. They have SharePoint as the underlying solution for document collaboration.

Salesforce at that point doesn't make a whole lot of sense for many Microsoft users. For example, with a customer I work with, they have this kind of disparate entity, and they select Salesforce as they say it's the one that pops up on Google when you search and that's likely why they went with it. You can't go wrong with picking Salesforce, however, you also need to have an on-site sales resource such as a Salesforce admin to manage it as nobody can figure it out. It's pretty complex. On top of that, the connection to Teams and SharePoint is so far away.

We would like it if it were possible to record a meeting on an MP4 and be able to upload that into Salesforce as something the sales team can track. There might be third-party plugins that allow for that type of usability, however, I'm not too familiar with them. 

While my company has likely had the solution for years, prior to my involvement, they have recently made a mandate to sign into the product daily. That has been as of March.

The solution is pretty rock solid. There doesn't seem to be issues with bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

While I can't say exactly how many people at my company use it, I know it's a large amount and we have 500 staff members. 

We also use Teams for our video conferencing and meetings, and I've been using Team's folders to save assets, notes from OneNote, video recordings, and stream recordings from the Teams sessions. I saved them all into the Teams file, however, the larger population of the Salesforce team doesn't even know how to use Teams and doesn't know how to log into Teams even if it's for meetings.

I didn't handle any aspect of the deployment process. We have a guy on site that kind of manages it and he seems kind of stressed about it. He supports it for the entire organization.

I am not sure which version of the solution I am on at this time. 

There's a Google disruption going on here in terms of how to share content and paste it back into Salesforce. I've just tried to put the link in there. Now I'm kind of on the journal conversations. If I've added an activity or event, or I just paste the notes or link to whatever else inside the journal conversation, there seems to be payback if other users pay attention to it.

I'm kind of a Microsoft guy. However, if someone's having a look at it, I would advise that they really look at what they're trying to accomplish and what the rest of the tech stack looks like. Maybe it is the best for what they're trying to do, however, from a Microsoft perspective, most folks have exchanged Teams and everything else, and it goes hand in hand, with your Active directory and the rest of those identity services.

When you start with a disparate CRM, it's kind of against the grain and it's not quite as cohesive. On top of that, when you have meetings and everything else, you have content and collateral that's created so you need to know where are you going to store those assets.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It's a good solution, however, it's not something I would personally pick. 

We primarily use the solution for customer invoicing. We also use it for telling the customers about the regional upgrades and patches that we're rolling out.

I'm not sure what the most valuable aspect of the solution is, but I can say that their finance and auditing systems are quite impressive. You can audit in different invoices right to procurement. It's all quite seamless. 

The user interface is very good.

I haven't used that much of the solution, so I can't speak to what would need improvement. For me, for now, I'd say it works pretty seamlessly.

There have been some minor issues here and there, but they've gotten them under control.

The solution offers upgrades at a slower pace. The solution needs to keep up with competitors.

I've been using the solution for nearly nine months.

The solution is quite stable. I haven't faced any issues in relation to the stability of the product.

The scalability is very nice once the solution has been implemented.

Currently, we use our own services for technical support. If a team member from our support needs to contact them, they do.

Our central ID services team handled the implementation of the solution. They'd be better able to discuss what the implementation was like. However, it's my understanding that it was pretty straightforward. I'm not sure how many people were involved in the deployment process.

In terms of maintenance, there's an ICT team that handles not just this tool but several tools for us. I'm not sure how many engineers on that team are dedicated to Salesforce.

The pricing of the solution is fine. The enterprise purchase was for our entire organization.

We're partners with Salesforce.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're currently using.

We're a sizeable company and have 3,000-4,000 people using the solution currently.

We're moving towards a different cloud due to a corporate mandate we'd like to have the opportunity to implement it there.

There's a lot of training that needs to be done to get used to the solution and to get to understand all of the features on offer. To tackle this, we have asked the task force training candidate members to get everyone trained. Getting a good handle on the solution is very important.

Before Salesforce, we used to use four to five disparate systems to manage all the customers. With Salesforce, we have been given one central source of tools. There are several departments that used to target customers separately and each of them was using their own systems for tracking. Now, with this one tool, there's only one type of invoice. It's streamlined everything in terms of billing and customer outreach.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Fast speed to delivery of new solutions; fits Agile development model; easy integration and mashup with other SaaS/PaaS offerings; combination of configuration and coding; easy to learn and get up-to-speed quickly for developers; no waiting for hardware & other environments to be ready; scales up immediately

We went from 1 or 2 CRM enhancement releases per year to a minimum of 8 per year by moving from on premise CRM to cloud CRM. Automation of process steps have saved us millions of dollars by removing manual steps/activities. We have reduced our average speed to respond to customers by >4000% through automated routing/workflow. Most importantly, our users actually love the system (how many times have you heard that?).

We have also built custom applications on the platform for such things as faculty attendance tracking, HR compensation review and exception processing, and text based poling for use in meetings or classroom settings. These were all relatively small applications that never seemed to be "big enough" or "prioritized enough" to get IT resource dedication. However, with the ease of the salesforce platform, IT was able to quickly and cheaply build these applications. Without such a flexible and easy to configure/code platform, I'm not sure these would have gotten attention.

Hard to negotiate ability to scale down; integrations with back-office systems is still complex unless you have robust SOA platform already in place at your organization; doesn't fit for heavy graphics or multimedia apps; could benefit from other than per-user pricing; reporting tools are not great and you usually have to use a 3rd party reporting tool for any complex report or reports which also need to source data from outside your CRM (which many of ours do), and to get any historical data analysis (e.g. need data warehouse).

Managing test and dev environments is certainly easier than on-premise, but there still are challenges synching changes between environments and synching data. Additionally you will have to negotiate for multiple "full data" environments if you have multiple parallel path releases going since salesforce usually only gives you one of these environments.

Since 2009

We did with reporting. We did not sufficiently test our reporting tools, built with a combination of salesforce and cognos reporting, and there were too many discrepancies in the numbers being reported such that we had to immediately put a tiger team together to address. This had nothing to do with the platform, and more to do with our process for adequately testing large scale reporting before rolling out to 4,000 people.

Having said that, the reporting tools are still just ok. We usually end up extracting data out of salesforce to report on elsewhere, primarily because it's easier to extract salesforce data and merge with data from other systems as opposed to putting data from other systems into salesforce just for reporting. The good news is each year the reporting/analytic platform gets bettter.

Nope, it's been more stable than any on premise software we've ever had.

We did have issues when we originally launched, due to us exceeding certain API thresholds that exist by default by salesforce.com. The good news is they were able to increase them for us relatively quickly.

Solid. No issues. They really try and work with you to ensure you know how/where/why you are using or not using all aspects of the platform. No, of course, they do this level of reporting to you so that you use more, but it's still good data to inform where you have opportunity to better leverage what you are already paying for.

Very good. As usual, if you run into anything serious, escalate quickly. They have channels for escalating, so use them. Don't let your technical teams try to solve themselves for too long.

We previously used Oracle CRM on premise. We switched because we spent too much time applying patches and upgrades and regression testing such that we were unable to respond to changing business conditions and put in enhancements. Now we never deal with patches and upgrades and we only focus on enhancements.

Much of it was straightforward, with the only complex areas being areas that we wanted to customize for items like inquiry routing (our rules were very complex) and analyzing how we wanted to configure the data best to allow us to also report they way we wanted to for operations, executive and historical comparison reporting. Thinking those concepts through was difficult and I'd suggest spending more time on those activities than anything else during design, and test your design concepts early so you can adjust if it turns out your assumptions don't work out the way you thought they would when you see real data being put through the system.

We used Appirio as our implementation vendor. They did a solid job. As usual, with consulting, it's the strength of the team they field for you, so that is what you should evaluate the most.

We have a case study on our implementation on salesforce.com website that you can read, under DeVry.

Negotiate HARD on ability to reduce licenses if business conditions dictate you have to shrink or divest yourself of divisions/departments. They won't want to do this, but that should not stop you for negotiating what's right for your business.

If you desire, you can get them to agree to create custom types of licenses that are specific to the way you plan to use the platform or the tools (sfa, crm, marketing), so this might be worth exploring if you have unique business requirements that don't fit the standard pricing model.

Yes, we also looked at RightNow Technologies, which was later bought by Oracle. We actually used RightNow and Oracle CRM, so we had experience with both.

The hardest part of using the system is finding the technical resources to do the customization and configuration. I'd recommend getting going with a good contracting firm, but make sure you interview and lock in the resources. After that, I'd recommend you find internal business people who know your processes and happen to have a technical aptitude and get them trained up to be admins and developers. We did that and it worked out great...but be prepared to give them significant raises, promotions, and/or long term incentives to keep them with your company.

We are predominantly a Salesforce consulting company and we do Salesforce implementation for various types of clients.

We are in the implementation business and we help our clients. Most of our services are in the nonprofit public sector and CPQ.

In terms of a CRM or a BAR, Salesforce is absolutely great from a client standpoint.

The completely out-of-the-box service is absolutely great.

The process and the workflows are amazing.

Integration with a few of the other products such as Spring Boot is a problem. 

Integration needs improvement. We have found that there are some issues with integration. 

DevOps is lagging in Salesforce development practice. We are looking for a better understanding of DevOps for Salesforce.

I would like to see automation DevOps in the next release.

It's a 14-year-old company and we have been using Salesforce Platform for nine months.

We are using the latest version. We have been working with both public and private clouds.

There have been some issues with the stability of the Salesforce Platform, but it's very minor compared to other applications.

The scalability of the Salesforce Platform is amazing. There are no issues with the scalability of this product.

We have 1,000 employees who use it.

As partners with Salesforce, we are dedicated and in touch with Salesforce all of the time.

The technical support is good.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is quite easy.

The price varies depending on the cloud.

We are exploring multiple different tools at this point.

Within our company, we haven't developed automation practice so far, which is the reason why I have been doing research to identify the most suitable tool exclusively for Salesforce functional automation.

I would recommend this solution to others. This is the right time to look into Salesforce, so it's going to be huge in few years.

I am totally in love with this solution. Any issues it may have for example with integration are all minor when you compare it with the performance, scalability, and ease of use. I would definitely rate it a ten out of ten.

Our primary use case is as a CRM. The goal is to create an easy and organized way of collecting and reporting on data. There are many pros and cons but overall, this is the best CRM that I have used.

I have utilized at least five different CRMs over the last five years and although HubSpot was the easiest to use, it was not as robust as Salesforce. Salesforce inches above the rest as my favorite. I feel like some things are complicated just to be complicated and that takes away from the overall productivity it is creating for my team.      

Salesforce has created an easy way to track customer interactions and has simple reporting functions. I feel like some things are overly complicated for no reason, as there are much simpler ways to achieve the same goal.

The ability to customize things is great, as we can create an environment that is more conducive to how we do business. This allows us to be more efficient as a team and allows me to monitor their productivity without micro-managing them.

I can also set tasks for them when things get missed, as a friendly reminder. 

The most valuable feature is being able to track the activity of my team and report results.

It is easy to add accounts, contacts, and opportunities.

The integration with different applications makes quick work of tracking activity.

The ability to customize things is great, as we can create an environment that is more conducive to how we do business. This allows us to be more efficient as a team and provide quick and easy reporting for our management team and customers.

I also like the automated alerts, to catch things people miss so that things stay updated correctly. 

Easier bulk updating would be appreciated. 

We need more flexibility with building processes and workflow automation.

Better flexibility in editing emails created from templates would be great, and being able to add hyperlinks in emails for scheduling meetings would allow us to automate more.

I would also like more flexibility in being able to designate both default and override values, as I feel like every time we have a new process, we have to add more fields to accommodate exceptions to the norm.         

We have been using the Salesforce Platform for five years.

Salesforce is easily scalable.

I have only used the online resources and found them to outdated sometimes. Our Salesforce admin takes care of all this now. 

I have used several different CRMs and my least favorite was Microsoft Dynamics. It was bulky, not user-friendly, and reporting was not ideal.   

In terms of whether the initial setup was complex, I would say Yes and No. You definitely want to pay for assistance and support for set-up if you don't have an internal Salesforce admin. There is a learning curve that can be time-consuming. 

We had a vendor to start with, and now we have an in-house team.

Using this solution makes our company more agile and efficient, and prevents information silos.

My advice is that if you are going to use a CRM then use it correctly, get licenses for everyone, and demand compliance. Having only one department use it and not others will devalue the tool and its ability to provide effective solutions. 

Not at this company but in previous companies yes.   One declined Salesforce because it was not easy to get out of should they need to change their mind, and they were penny pinchers to a fault, so it was best they did that as I had issues with data loss in past when leaving Salesforce and going to a new CRM.  

We use the Salesforce Platform for all the CRM activities in the organization.

Salesforce Platform could improve by having better integration with Microsoft Azure. For development, we use Microsoft Azure and there was proper integration between the two solutions. We had issues with the customer and they were logged into the Salesforce Platform. We did not have any good way of integrating those issues into the R&D. The R&D mainly uses Microsoft Azure.

I have been using the Salesforce Platform for approximately four years.

Salesforce Platform is stable.

The scalability of the Salesforce Platform is good.

We have 2,000 to 5,000 users using this solution. The product management uses it extensively.

We have used the support and I have not heard anyone complaining about the level of support.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Salesforce Platform a nine out of ten.