What is our primary use case?
I am a Salesforce consultant for multiple clients, and we have different scenarios wherein the Salesforce Sales Cloud has been used. Use cases include different scenarios and different industries, so from banking to automobile industries, to NGOs, nonprofits too.
One use case is for a client in the automobile industry. There is a sales process, sales funnel, that has been built for the particular company, according to the region. When there is a lead that comes into Salesforce, according to the region, they will be assigned to a particular salesperson. If the lead is converted, then an opportunity has been created and the opportunity is nurtured through Salesforce. There are different tasks that will then be allotted to the particular salesperson in each opportunity stage.
How has it helped my organization?
Sales Cloud in particular is a very, very powerful tool, and we can build on top of the existing platform for the requirements each company has. So if there is a particular workflow that we need to build, particular validation, or there is a particular scenario that we need to capture which is not there in Salesforce, or not in the inbuilt system -- then Salesforce is a very powerful tool that helps us to build that through tools like Process Builder or Flows, or even write code to achieve these scenarios. It's a very dynamic system.
What is most valuable?
One valuable feature with Sales Cloud is the opportunity for nurturing leads, and there are different sales processes that we can establish in Salesforce to do this. Having different sales processes helps us to diversify the whole system for different regions or different products. The same processes will help a lot in managing or helping out the salespersons to nurture those opportunities.
What needs improvement?
I've been totally into Salesforce, and almost everything can be achieved through either the configuration part or doing customization. One area that needed improvement though was with the record views. The record views were not aligned, and they have no split views. So to see each record, we had to go back and then select another one from the list, but that has been fixed. One current issue is the system requirement for running Salesforce Lightning. For current computers, it works fine, but for people who are using old systems, there is a lag in loading the Lightning pages. Lightning is the new interface that Salesforce has for the records and seeing the whole data. So if there is an old system used, or if the infrastructure is not correct, then customers are having an issue and it's taking a lot of time to load.
An additional feature that could be added is the email templates. At the moment, it is actually still not a feature to set up email templates. There are two views in Salesforce, the Classic and the Lightning. To set email templates and have those processes, we have to go back to Classic and then do the whole process. It would be beneficial if everything was happening in Lightning itself so that people don't have to switch back and forth. But I think that's down the roadmap of Salesforce to have everything in Lightning.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been working with Salesforce for the past five to six years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
With the cloud infrastructure, the stability of the solution is pretty good. There has not been much downtime, or I've never seen any downtime happening in my experience with Salesforce at all. They are evolving in performance, too. The transition from Classic to Lightning was a major shift they had, and that has increased a lot of performance. The solution has been more powerful since it was transitioned to Lightning. If you don't have the right infrastructure, then we see performance issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Salesforce is super easy to scale. If you want to add users, you just need the licenses. If you want to add additional features, scalability is not an issue with Salesforce.
The solution is suitable for every sized company. It makes things easier, even for small companies. The amount of manual work can be reduced if they have a proper automated system in place.
How are customer service and support?
We've been in contact with technical support multiple times. They're very responsive and it seems we get an immediate response back from the technical team. In the case where the issues has not been resolved from the lower level, they escalate it to the technical team. I would say they say the technical support process is quite good. But for that too, there is a package I think needs to be bought for high-end technical support. For regular users, there is a certain level of technical support that Salesforce offers, and then if you need more, we need to have an engagement for that.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We have some experience with Zoho CRM, but I wouldn't say it is as comparable as Salesforce. It has a different set of Salesforce setups in Zoho.
With adding multiple sales processes or more fields to the layouts, Salesforce is more flexible and bigger than Zoho.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup of Salesforce is pretty straightforward. The deployment process is quite easy. With that being said, I would say there are a lot of instances where this pretty straightforwardness has been misused. There need to be some guidelines or DevOps processes in place so that people don't just push things to production.
The solution does not require any onsite maintenance; since it's cloud, the maintenance is done automatically. Since the platform is evolving, there are cases where they add in a few security points or depreciate a few old processes. Then we might need some enhancements done to the work that we did.
What about the implementation team?
Just one developer can have test classes built in and then push it over to production. There have been cases where we see that even one admin team in companies just does the whole end-to-end, adding the component, then pushing to production. It is not an extensive, manpower-required process.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Pricing wise, I'm not sure how affordable the solution is, because for each market it's different. For small companies, I don't know how the pricing point works, but feature wise, I would say it is a very useful tool for all sized companies.
What other advice do I have?
My advice to any company implementing any product is to have their processes lined up, at least on paper first, rather than going to a system. I've seen this happen with a few clients. Their structure is not set, but they come into the CRM and then they build on the go, which creates a lot of best practice issues when they do that.
Before implementing any CRM, I would suggest that any company should have a proper sales process or their processes lined up, and have a clear idea of what they want to happen in the system so that that can be translated easily onto the system.
I would rate Sales Cloud a nine out of ten because I'm totally into Salesforce and I appreciate the product a lot.
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