Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

Since Salesforce Sales Cloud is a CRM solution, we use it for keeping contact information, opportunity management, sales planning, and accounts planning. We also use the solution's AI functions.

The most valuable features of Salesforce Sales Cloud are opportunity management and metric integration.

The solution's configuration could be improved because getting a purchase order and administrating the right fields can be a real headache for us, especially when the Sales Cloud system enters an error stage. We get explanatory errors, and there's no indication of how to solve those errors. For me, that's just incomprehensible.

The solution's mobile experience and opportunity management should be easier for auto-selecting things.

I have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud for nine months.

As far as I know, the solution experiences downtime only during planned maintenance. I've never experienced an unplanned outage, which is pretty good.

I rate Salesforce Sales Cloud a nine out of ten for stability.

The systematic integration in the opportunity section helps us streamline opportunity management. We used the solution in the first year for account planning and territory management, which was helpful.

I would recommend Salesforce Sales Cloud to other users. Users should be very careful about pulling everything, and they should keep it as simple as possible. If you're going to create something that will produce errors, then make sure that they explain how to fix it.

The solution's mobile experience for our sales team is not good. I rate the solution's mobile experience a two or three out of ten.

With Salesforce Sales Cloud, we have everything in one spot, and the solution's AI function really improves our experience.

Overall, I rate Salesforce Sales Cloud a seven out of ten.

I find the Salesforce Sales Cloud dashboard and analysis reports valuable and easier to use than those of the solution's competitors. 

I don't like the way parent-child relationships work in transactions between records in Salesforce Sales Cloud. NetSuite is a little bit more user-friendly in that sense. Salesforce Sales Cloud requires that you build everything from scratch. I don't like that. It leaves a lot of thinking and solutions to the consultants and the process is more prone to errors.

I think the mission control module is not great. There is room for improvements around that, in addition to the time sheets and project management.

I have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud since 2018. 

I think the solution's stability is good. On a scale of one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best, I would give it a seven or eight. I've never had any issues personally in a company with more than 50 people.

At the moment, we have five people working on the solution in the solution's operations team. 

I would rate Salesforce Sales Cloud's scalability as very good. We have scaled from 30 to 150 within three years without a glitch. 

Additionally, we plan to increase usage but that all will depend on how much access the company wants to give the consultants. 

I think the deployment was carried out by a Salesforce Sales Cloud consultant. 

I use Salesforce Sales Cloud to customise order management and tracking. We also use it for revenue recognition, billing and analytics. Salesforce is our primary CRM.

This solution offers a good user experience. It is easy to learn and use, even for those who are using it for the first time.

I have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud since 2008.

This is a stable solution. When any issues are anticipated from Salesforce, we are notified. We have experienced a 99.9% stability rate. 

This is definitely a scalable solution. They have different types of licensing based on your needs. You can increase and decrease the number of users and access it from anywhere. The users are in business functions including the case management team, revenue team, analytics team, development, and QE. 

The support for this solution is good. If you have an enterprise account, you get access to really good support.

Positive

The company I work for used to use Microsoft Dynamics CRM and they switched to Salesforce because Salesforce was skyrocketing during that period of time.

We generally deploy through packages constructed within Salesforce and we use our own local deployments. We have ANT scripts and we were trying to come up with some CI/CD implementations. Currently, our deployment on Salesforce is out of the box. 

Our engineering team completed deployment. Every release cycle took one to three months. We take at least one day to deploy, because we have other integrations and components closely linked to Salesforce. Salesforce have their own release cycle. If they have any changes or new features they want to implement, they have push notifications to the customers on the features utilize.

The return on investment from this solution is from case management and the way billing information is captured. We have Tableau dashboards to pull up how many orders are created for a particular month. This information is supplied to the business to understand how we can streamline, improvise and improve marketing activities. 

Compared to other CRM solutions, Salesforce is expensive. It is more affordable for enterprise users than for small businesses. 

I would advise those considering Salesforce to first understand their business model and how a CRM would fit in. They should understand their use cases and how their business functions can be changed from a technological perspective. 

The Salesforce Lightning feature is a new concept and we need to understand how it could help our business. We need to understand the usability and user experience for customization and to provide solutions for specific industries.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

It's a centralized dashboard for all our in-house information.

We used to have all of the data in Excel sheets, but with the CRM, we can have all of the information in one place. You have access to all your deals, and all the information is visible to everyone in the company. You don't have to ask each employee to share individual sheets with you. Instead, what Salesforce does is that it gives everybody access to all the information on the dashboard.

Opportunity is a feature that I use very frequently. You create an opportunity when you schedule a call with a client. Within the opportunity, I can log all of the relevant data.

The type of customization that comes with Salesforce CRM gives me a lot of liberty and ease of access to add any information that I wish to add. For example, the name, email ID, designation, the name of the decision maker, when the client joined the company, and the amount of influence he will have on the product.

I also like the type of reports that I can create. Salesforce gives you the option of creating customized reports, which helps me to have a clear view of my opportunities. You don't have to necessarily go and check each and every opportunity, and there are in-built reporting capabilities as well.

I'm a massive fan of the custom integration Salesforce offers.

Salesforce Sales Cloud does not integrate with Slack or WhatsApp, for example. As a result, there is no easy way to directly log a conversation with a client that occurred on one of these platforms. There are a few things that still need to be done manually in these instances.

As for additional features, I would like to be able to link my personal phone to Salesforce so that I can log the records from my personal phone as well. With the current setup, they have to set up your ISP. To ensure that your data is logged into the CRM, you have to have the physical phone integrated with Salesforce Sales Cloud. If used with caution, I think this feature is going to help out. In India, the business model is such that nobody replies to an email. So, you have to use your personal phone or WhatsApp.

I've been using Salesforce Sales Cloud for more than three years.

As a user, I'm happy with the stability.

We have 20 people who use this solution, and we hope to expand. However, at my previous company, the Salesforce integration took six months. Therefore, in terms of scalability if you have to add different departments or new employees, the integration may take a while.

The only challenge that I see is in terms of having to run the cycle, create the account, and contact different teams for different purposes. What could be done better is to have a single point of contact for all your queries, but that is a massive request because there are sales teams, support teams, tech teams, dev teams, etc. However, if you can have a sales engineer who can help with all our questions, then it would be great.

The FAQs are helpful, and the technical support team is very efficient and capable of handling all your questions instantaneously. 

Also, the help that I got during the initial stage is where Salesforce stands out completely. They are not about email, chat, or phone. They are present throughout your entire journey.

I'm a massive fan of the Salesforce technical support team and would give them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We went with Salesforce because most of the employees who joined our company had used Salesforce before and because Salesforce comes with a lot of options.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

The deployment took six months from start to finish.

Salesforce saves time, and I have seen a fair amount of growth in terms of efficiency and accountability.

We have a yearly license, and there are no hidden costs. Considering the Indian market, the pricing is reasonable. I don't consider it to be on the high side.

Have a training module in place because Salesforce is a little bit technical and you need to understand all of the features.

The Salesforce Sales Cloud platform stands out from other products, and I would give them an eight on a scale from one to ten.

We use Salesforce Sales Cloud for customer engagement, CB2, marketing, and forecasting tools.

The most valuable feature of Salesforce Sales Cloud is for teams the ability to do marketing on our page and to manage their marketing leads. You are able to close a deal and do the renewal. For the life cycle management for customer management, we use Salesforce Sales Cloud. The performance of the solution is good.

The user interface could be better in Salesforce Sales Cloud because it feels a little heavy.

I have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud for approximately 10 years.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is stable.

The solution is scalable.

We have approximately 50,000 users using this solution.

The support is good from Salesforce Sales Cloud.

The installation took approximately three months to complete.

We have approximately 300 people that do the maintenance and support the solution.

I would recommend this solution.

I rate Salesforce Sales Cloud a seven out of ten.

This is a cloud solution. Within my company, we have around 150 users.

The user interface is pretty simple.

This is definitely a solution for the younger generation because it's working with the web frontend. There's a lot of new stuff where you can scroll down, use via handheld, and so on. As a cloud solution with web browser, it's different than my classical way of thinking. It's modern, but for older people, maybe it's not that understandable. It could be more user-friendly, maybe with an option to switch between interfaces.

I have been using this solution for the past two years.

Within other companies, I have previously used C/4HANA, which is the SAP product for CRM. From my user experience, I prefer SAP.

I think it's complex and simple. Because it's a cloud solution, you can maybe put in a logo or something like that, but the functionality is provided by the manufacturer, by Salesforce itself.

On a scale of 1 to 5, I would rate the difficulty of setup a 3.

I would rate this solution 6 out of 10.

Salesforce started as pure CRM software. For the CRM environment, this might be pretty good, but imagine when you have to interface this. Regarding interfaces, there could be some improvement.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is used to track and manage businesses sales. The solution can manage the sales team and evaluate how effective their tools have been. It can determine if they are delivering value. 

The sales team populates all their activities on the Salesforce Sales Cloud. We have been given the number of calls to make to new customers that have come in, to track the prospective customers, and many other aspects will be captured. You are able to make direct calls to the customer from inside Salesforce Sales Cloud. We are able to link Salesforce Sales Cloud with a voice-over IP that can make direct calls to customers. The solution is highly versatile and it's integrated with our ERP solution of the company. When the potential customer becomes a customer, it does populate instead of having to start putting new things in the ERP system. It has good compatibility between the CRM, the Salesforce Sale Cloud, and our ERP system.

We try as much as possible to look at how loyal has the customer been. We have some of those KPIs that are coming out from the use of Salesforce Sales Cloud. It's a very great tool that the organization is using to track their business, sales team, sales, and effective management of the customers.

The most valuable features of Salesforce Sales Cloud are ease of use. It is very simple for the sales team to use. You can integrate it with a lot of other systems.

I have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud for approximately eight years.

The stability of Salesforce Sales Cloud is good.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is scalable. However, it depends on the licenses and what modules you require. For example, if you want voice integration, they have it. The ability for you to make your call to the customer directly from the system instead of picking up a phone.

In Nigeria, we have approximately 60. In some other countries, it depends on the number of staff that they have because all the systems have a user license. All the finance team is part of it. We have the marketing team and there are some others, such as the customer loyalty score users. Some of the service users that are rendering technical services, such as customer service staff are also part of using this solution.

The number of users can be quite large. It depends on your operations and the area that you want it to cover. Overall the solution is scalable.

Whether we expand or not depends on the business and how it grows. For example, if the sales teams increase, as a result of the business opportunities that are available in the country, we will increase usage of this solution. However, I am not sure because of the COVID-19 situation. It has impacted a lot of business. The possibility of an increase this year and next year is very slim because most organizations are only getting their sales goals.

Our teams in the head office that manages the entire system may need to escalate an issue based on the request of a country. In this case, they will contact Salesforce Sales Cloud who will advise on what to do.

I have used other solutions in this category, such as SAP. Salesforce Sales Cloud and SAP, are very similar solutions.

The setup of Salesforce Sales Cloud is complex. You need specialists in that area to be able to have a good setup. Once it's set up properly, running it is seamless. That's the most beautiful thing about Salesforce Sales Cloud.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a big system, it stretches across to approximately eight countries for the entire group. The full implementation took approximately six months. It was not done country by country. In my country of Nigeria, it took them close to two months to do the implementation. After it is complete there is a process of improvement. It was approximately two months before everything was finalized and in operation.

We are consultants directly from Salesforce and we have some other consultants from different regions of the country. We have consultants that manage each of the countries' rollout. We did the implementation.

The deployment stretches across different countries and the maintenance is centralized. They have a centralized team at the head office. There are approximately 10 people covering the entire country. We call them the Effectiveness Managers. Each country has what we call the Effectiveness Manager that whose major role is to maintain and look at what is going on in the processes and address any gaps. When they identify something, they report to the central team in the head office.

Then you are talking close to approximately 20 people in the maintenance department. It's a big system for us as far as the capabilities are concerned. It's a big business the team cannot be compared to smaller or medium-size organizations.

The price of the Salesforce Sales Cloud is expensive. We pay monthly for the solution but we are billed quarterly.

The price of the solution could be less expensive.

My advice to others wanting to implement Salesforce Sales Cloud is you have to make sure that you are ready to absorb the price of the solution, it is very expensive. I normally recommend a lower version, such as an open-source CRM.

They have to judge the capability of the financial department of their organization before. The organization has to know their business information well, such as sales, turnovers, the visions, the strategy of the management, and what are they trying to achieve overall.

The business is what will enable me to know whether Salesforce Sales Cloud will be a good fit for them because if they don't have financial strength, the licenses are expensive and they might not be able to afford it. 

I rate Salesforce Sales Cloud an eight out of ten.

I help implement solutions for customers like retailers and the automotive industry. It's used typically to help them with the cold sales process and help them go digital as much as possible into the cloud solutions. That's where we recommend Salesforce solutions based on the discovery we do with customers. We help implement the Sales Cloud platform for the customers. It's a software as a service primarily.

From the company perspective, the benefits would be the quicker return on investment, especially into the sales and service model. It's great for any company deeply into the sales and service model. In terms of investing in Salesforce, which could be Sales Cloud or Service Cloud, two of the offerings that come from Salesforce, the biggest win when I reach out to customers is showcasing to them the quickest way to ROI.

From the customers' point of view, if someone is using this product, Sales Cloud, since it is software as a service, it's pay as you go. The development cost, maintenance cost, everything will be drastically reduced - unlike traditional infrastructure where we maintain everything on our own. With Salesforce being a cloud computing solution, that's less of a headache.

I pay for a number of users who will be using the system in my company. It's license-based and there are various plans available based on the size and type of the organization that I have. That gives a lot of flexibility. You don't need to have strong developers or coders to build something moderately complex. You can do it using a few clicks.

It's really vast. The features that we have and everything else that we can do on the platform are really vast. Salesforce keeps coming up with a lot of new ideas to make sure people can learn this in various ways very easily. They're also targeting importing the admins - not only the developers. They want everybody to be able to click and configure rather than read through some code, et cetera. That's a positive side. Salesforce has been doing a very great job in bringing that to all people as much as possible.

It's a great product and most of the customers are getting a benefit out of using Salesforce.

With the solution being very vast, they need to prioritize features.

So many features being released can be a bottleneck for 90% of the customers. Salesforce has it in their roadmap for the near fix. There are some things that have been on the roadmap for a long time, and there's just so much. You wish they could get certain things out faster. 

One thing that's lacking, especially when I talk to a lot of customers, is the forecasting and revenue capabilities. That's missing from the Sales Cloud itself. You don't have a great way of forecasting or projecting revenue or growth from the information that you currently have in Sales Cloud. That requires a lot of customization and dependencies with a lot of other systems. It would be really great and attract more customers if that becomes readily available out of the box.

I wish the licensing costs and everything else would really become feasible for most of the customers. If it was more affordable, Salesforce would continue to see a lot of customers using their product.

I've been using it quite for some time. It's kind of my day-to-day interaction.

There will be hiccups around releases sometimes. Salesforce releases will be four times a year. Every quarter they do release major upgrades and a lot of new features across the clouds of sales, service, and marketing as well as several other clouds. At times, we see some bugs introduced unintentionally due to the new features or upgrades. In 99% of the cases, Salesforce is quick enough to fix them with an immediate patch or release. In very few cases, they wouldn't be able to and they will take a little bit of time. It may take a couple of months to apply the fix.

Overall, it's great. I have never seen the system being down due to a bug or an upgrade. On the other hand, there could be incidents with the DNS or the network provider - issues with the hardware side that could bring down your sales, for instance, for a few minutes or a few hours. The worst I have seen was one day - and that's in my entire decade Salesforce career.

It's easy to scale. It's 100% scalable.

I happen to work for all types of businesses, meaning startups to large enterprise organizations. Salesforce also offers an unlimited edition which is the premium one. It's a little pricey, however, you get all the features and benefits. Typically, large enterprise organizations will go with the unlimited edition. You can have a professional edition or a couple of other types. People choose enterprise versus professional based on the size of the organization and the number of users who would use the system. 

80% of clients are happy with it and are likely to keep using it. 

Technical support is very good. Tech support comes based on the type of edition that you're using. If you are a premier customer, you have thousands of users and licenses. If yours is the unlimited edition, you will have the A-plus support. If anything comes up, the resolution time is one hour. It goes down based on the type of edition, the type of support package that you have with Salesforce. Overall, it's good. If anything is down in production, they address it within eight hours.

The initial setup is straightforward. They give us some sort of trial log. You take a few weeks and just look around. If you are comfortable, you'll sign the contract and they convert it to the production log, so that trial becomes your sales production.

Typically, unless you are very sure about buying the product, what happens is we recommend, as a consultant, that you can talk to Salesforce and get a trial log. They give you a Salesforce instance. It is not a production instance, it's more of a trial log. The recommendation is you take one or two consultants and set up something really quickly, in a week or two as a prototype, and see if you really like it and your users would like it. You need to ask: are you getting really the benefit of using Salesforce, or not? That would be the quickest way to come to a conclusion, whether this is the right product or not.

Once you want to move forward with Salesforce, we have two options. Either we can get a brand new log, or Salesforce is capable of converting that trial log into your production version so that you can continue to build your stuff there.

One person can do it by themselves in terms of setting it up. You don't need a big team.

There's no maintenance necessary. Once we set it up, it'll be theirs and that's it. You just need to log in and start using it.

Clients have seen very good ROI. Especially users. The data is very good in most of the organizations where we have recommended and implemented Salesforce. That's improving the productivity and they have seen a very good return on investment in several aspects. Some of them are tangible and some of them are soft savings, however, the overall ROI is really good for most of the clients.

You need to pay for the license per user per month. For example, you need to pay $100 per user. If you have 200 users using your Salesforce, that would be multiplied by a hundred, that's $20,000 per month and a quarter million per year. That never stops.

That's a recurring cost. If someone is not ready and hasn't thought through, maybe they would be disappointed in terms of the cost and price. 20% might drop off of Salesforce for various reasons. Mostly, they come to think that Salesforce might not be the right platform for them.

If you get the unlimited edition and a huge number of licenses, the price will go down for sure due to the size of the business. However, if you are starting with really a small fit, it is pricey.

There are additional costs. That depends on, for example, if you have Salesforce Sales Cloud. That's the primary product. After a while, if you decided to enhance or extend it to Service Cloud, you might want to buy a call center product which is Service Cloud.

For that Service Cloud, all you need is additional feature licenses as you already have Salesforce and Sales Cloud on top of that. Some of your users will be part of the call center. In those cases, you will pay a little bit of additional money for those Service Cloud licenses. Again, it depends on the type of product that you're looking for. Those additional features will come with a feature license cost.

We did evaluate other options. We also try to recommend the best product for customers. For example, we go through the requirements and current processes, and everything else as part of the analysis and discovery phase. We see that the phase of the customer and their income and everything else that says the cost that they need to pay for Salesforce. More importantly, we see the day-to-day business that they do. If it is not that heavy, they really don't need Salesforce for what they're doing. In those cases, we recommend building their own solution using Java. It's a one-time investment. They won't have a recurring cost. That's an option for some.

There's also Pega, which is fulfilling Salesforce in the CRM world. There's also ViVA and a few other CRM products competitive to Salesforce, however, they have light pricing and are very affordable. Of course, they're not as super scalable as Salesforce.

We are just end-users. We don't have a business relationship with Salesforce. 

Anyone considering Salesforce should choose the right implementation partner. They should consider choosing a professional implementation partner right from the beginning. It really helps taking professionals that can evaluate and tell you right at the beginning whether Salesforce is the right fit or not. Even if it is the right fit, they will help you build in the right direction. It could go completely wrong if you don't have a very good architect in the first place when designing the system. Once you design and start accessing it, you will create a good number of records and data.

Down the line, in a couple of years, if you realize that this model won't work, then it is a huge cost to be paid if you want to redo the whole thing. I have seen this multiple times with a lot of other clients, where they were not really knowledgeable and screwed up and ended up paying more for rectifying everything. Therefore, invest money and time in the beginning rather than being sorry later.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.