Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

My background is with Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. The product has versions which come in the form of three yearly releases for summer, spring, and winter.

With the new releases, upgrading certain features is not optional, it just happens on a designated date and your application gets upgraded automatically. For the more interactive parts of the upgrades, there is sometimes a need for admin intervention. This requires some sort of back end configuration by a system administrator.

Salesforce's release notes are extremely comprehensive - sometimes too comprehensive as they can top 300 pages per release. Most people should be able to find what they need from the table of contents fairly easily. The organization of the document stays very regular year over year.

I would like to see Salesforce scale back on the new items, and try to fix more of the old broken items, bugs, and enhancement requests. Sometimes, like with the new community templates, there can be obvious bugs that slide by unnoticed and then the end user has to find them as if it were a beta release.

I started using Salesforce when they were on the winter 2011 release.

Premier support costs a lot of money and oftentimes they do not have better information than a good admin could find out on their own. It is great for someone new to Salesforce without an experienced admin to turn to for support.

Don't do it yourself unless you plan to become a Salesforce Admin. Do it right the first time, which does not mean pay the highest price.

Make sure if you are using a consulting company they are as trustworthy as possible, research who your consultant is, previous successes of the individual you work with and not just the company as a whole. Find them on LinkedIn and ask people about them. If you hire someone in-house do the same research. If you are exposing all your company data and the system architecture of the company moving forward to one person's design, it is critical to make sure you have the right person guiding it.

Ask them about why they like doing Salesforce, the values that are important to them and how they picture the beginning, middle, and end of the consulting/work relationship. This should give you some insight into what guiding principles they are likely to follow

ROI depends on how good the guy setting up your Salesforce is.

Do your best to negotiate the cost if you can. Salesforce is one of the most expensive solutions out there.

The ease of customization makes every Salesforce implementation like a strand of company DNA. This can be a top-tier solution for companies who utilize the product with best practices. On the other hand, some companies who have a weak IT department or just are not ready to integrate their business with Salesforce should hold back! This is because the needs of a very young business will undoubtedly change again and again, and when a company takes their Salesforce system along for that roller-coaster ride, the company growing pains leave scars on the system. This causes some people to resent Salesforce as a system. I'm not going to say a young company should not use Salesforce, only that it is critical to have the most experienced system admin you can afford if the business wants to use Salesforce from an early age.

The amount of time you believe it will take to get Salesforce operational for your company, triple that time and then multiply by two. Here's why, say, I think it will take three months to roll this out, with documentation, or finding resources it will take six months and with unexpected delays it will take nine. Now multiply by two again because you should spend nine months planning out who, how, where, when etc. If you want your system to do well you need to do the work to get there. Otherwise you will end up having to redo your entire Salesforce implementation.

We use the product to prepare quotations.

The product’s user interface could be better. There could be an option to change the price list without creating a new quote.

We have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud for four years.

I rate the product’s stability an eight out of ten.

The scalability is good. We have many Salesforce Sales Cloud users in our organization's sales, marketing, and back-end teams.

I rate the initial setup process a seven out of ten. The deployment has certain easy steps and some complicated steps involved.

I rate Salesforce Sales Cloud a seven out of ten. It is a good product for the sales team.

We're using it for tracking sales opportunities and networking with prospects that we're trying to establish business with.

We're leveraging Salesforce's cloud, and we're logging in with our own individual IDs.

Contact records are most valuable.

Its reporting capabilities can be improved. Its reporting interface should be improved to personalize reports.

Shortcut keys for us diehard shortcut key people would probably be helpful. We should be able to perform actions with shortcut keys.

I've been using Salesforce for years. It has easily been a decade-and-a-half.

It's very stable.

It's very scalable. In terms of its users, there are different levels of salespeople inside sales and outside sales. There are about 100 or so users in the company.

It's pretty straightforward for me.

I would advise others to just do their due diligence. I would rate it an 8 out of 10. It does what it's supposed to do with relatively little intervention on my part where I don't have to completely think about everything every step of the way. So, it's more or less intuitive.

The most valuable feature of Salesforce platform is the development model of Customer Facing Implementation/Applications. Salesforce provides a basic data model already prepared for users and allows developers to customize the platform according to their business needs.

Salesforce helps in increasing the productivity, sales, lead-management process (in which every lead is tracked in an efficient manner). The users within the organization are able to track their (and their sub-ordinates') opportunity pipeline. Sales managers have the tools, real-time tracking and instantaneous feedback are by far the best methods and hence they can give more energy to selling and immediately incorporate managers’ instant feedback with deals in motion.

Salesforce is itself expanding at a fast pace for all the partner, customer, and developer community. But as a Salesforce developer, it would be great of Salesforce can step towards the Open Source platform for development and implementation.

I have more than two years of experience working on the Salesforce platform. I have worked on Apex classes, VF pages, REST API, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, etc. for developing and customizing Salesforce for our clients.

While the Salesforce version upgrades are in process, there may be some performance issues (however, Salesforce does inform users about this beforehand).

In terms of scalability, the Salesforce platform is a multi-tenant platform and, hence, it focuses more on the governor limits and scalable applications. But if a company wants to expand the CRM, they can ask Salesforce for the 'unlimited' version which enables a larger limit with a per usage count.

Salesforce provides various levels of technical support for different types of customers based on the version they have purchased.

I have not worked on any other CRM application development platform.

Salesforce provides a basic data model which matches most all of organization models, but there is always a requirement to customize it according to a company's user needs in the most efficient manner. The consultants or the Salesforce developer can help the customers to achieve company-level customization.

We implemented it through a vendor team. I have worked on a Salesforce appExchange product (quick modular application specifically designed for companies to overcome implementation efforts).

The best advice for Salesforce implementation is to check if the feature is provided by Salesforce in the standard version; if not, then search for a Salesforce app on AppExchange which might fulfill the requirements, and if no such app exists, then we might have to develop it ourselves for the particular situation.

Costs and benefits in most cases are hard to determine, but don’t let perfection be the enemy of valuable information. If you are looking for a systematic functioning within your organization, Salesforce is one of your paths towards it.

There are various case studies on Google which suggests the options for choosing the best CRM. It depends on various factors such as cost, productivity, implementation cost, maintenance cost, etc.

You can try Salesforce as a free developer version (with lots of limits). You can contact me at vishal_kdn@yahoo.co.in for any kind of help and advice.

The core features as well as the ability to extend them using ‘click-vs-code’ configurations to drive workflow activities.

We have been able to automate a large portion of the manual processes for our sales activities.

We know that User Interface improvements are coming, as well as improvements to reporting and dashboards.

I have been using Salesforce for four years.

It is possible to use or configure the system in a way that can ‘slow it down’, but deployment, stability and scalability are some of the best features of Salesforce.

The technical support is the one area that Salesforce needs the most improvement. They are slow to respond, and in many cases you don’t get the help you need. There are different levels of support based on the license agreement, so make sure you know what you are getting, but don’t expect fast results except for the most basic questions.

A different solution was used several years ago and was called Goldmine.

The initial setup is very straightforward, and consists of many of the same considerations for any move to a CRM solution. However, the ability to configure Salesforce Sales Cloud is much faster.

We did use a partner for the implementation, but have not used them since. I would highly recommend that you have someone on the team who is close to a salesforce solution/technical architect. They don’t need to be certified, but they should have a track record for successful project management and understand the salesforce technology stack.

Negotiate during the end of the Salesforce year. You will get the best pricing. Review the licensing options to align it to your needs. And ask for help from people you know who are like your company and using Salesforce.

We did evaluate other CRM solutions as well such as Microsoft CRM.

Follow good practices for comparing it, don’t over customize the standard functionality, make sure you understand how you would use it based on your sales processes and which ones you should/could change.

All the features of this product are valuable to me.

It helps our sales organization manage their workload, manage their sales pipeline, and our execs can track performance and perform all relevant sales functions.

I cannot think of anything right now.

I've used it for four to five years.

As it is a cloud computing managed technology, all these headaches are taken care of by Salesforce itself.

As it is a cloud computing managed technology, all these headaches are taken care of by Salesforce itself.

As it is a cloud computing managed technology, all these headaches are taken care of by Salesforce itself.

5/10.

5/10.

No previous solution was used.

It was straightforward.

We did it in-house, but I would suggest enterprise companies to use a vendor team, as there are a lot of minute details with Salesforce. Experienced vendors will help you harness the real power of Salesforce using industry practices and previous experience.

I am a technical person and do not look at those details.

Cloud computing is the future. Many companies are jumping on the Salesforce bandwagon as it integrates and works well seamlessly with other cutting edge technologies.

We primarily use this solution for CRM, process automation, and our operational database.

It has allowed us to bring together functions previously spread across many other packages.

The most valuable features are custom objects, custom workflows, triggering, and integration with other SaaS solutions.

The cost of this solution could be improved. It is pricey, although worth it now that they have bumped up default storage amounts.

We have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud for eight years.