Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

I primarily use the solution for persuing sales. You can follow up on opportunities very easily when you use it. I also use it for case tracking.

The product offers sales best practices. If I establish a funnel and I've got four salespeople, and the average conversion rate of new leads is 18% and one person's at 30%, I could ask them what they're doing and I could get them to show me their pitch. Then I could teach the other salespeople to imitate them. I could quickly look at that in the forecast year and go, okay, I don't know what that person's doing, however, they're converting to the stages at a higher rate so let's ask them what they're doing and then orient all the other salespeople to follow that best practice. That way, all numbers could go up as well.

The aspect I found most valuable was the conversion rates. As a new business, we figured out by filling out the funnel that we can convert 18% of stage one. Therefore, if you could use that math, you can say "if I want to make a million dollars in sales this year, and I make $20,000 a sale, I will need X number of people." You can work backward and project, for example, this is how many people you better have on the file. It's helpful sales forecasting.

While they've done a really good job of being a CRM tool and being, in my case, a sales forecasting tool, if they could integrate with other enterprises' IT aspects - like SAP and ERP - it would be great. A little bit of integration across the corporation would be helpful. If they could have convenient APIs into the other parts of the corporation that I wish to share data with, that would be helpful.

I've used the solution for around ten years or so. 

The stability is very, very good. There are no bugs or glitches. The performance is great.

The solution can scale massively. I've been quite impressed.

In my one organization, we went from ten to 40 people with no issues. 

The solution is being extensively used. I haven't looked back at the competition and had to make a new purchase evaluation, however, my perception is Salesforce took over the space.

It's one of those solutions where you can just start using the product immediately. You don't really need to do any setup or any thinking. You just start using it. After using it for three months, you probably will never go back.

I did use technical support in the past. They walked the talk on CRM. They're one of the companies that eats their own dog food. They're super knowledgeable with the support that was clearly ahead of the game. Whoever I called could quickly pull up my account and know who I was and what my company was. They were using a lot of their own business intelligence and things in the back end.

Overall, I was impressed with the level of support.

I mostly use Excel, however, for clients, I tend to use Salesforce and ZenDesk as well.

The move to Salesforce was mostly due to the fact that it was super easy to use. The best sales guys also recommended it. They liked it as they were always selling and always making money and always on the road. The sales team hated the idea of coming back into the office and doing their stats. The fact that they could update it on the road, and I could just go in and look at it every week and talk to everybody from their phones and say, here's the story was ideal for their sales process. They hated pushing their money to this big enterprise product that seemed not to create any great insight and forced them to have a meeting on site. Everyone preferred Salesforce's ease of use and remote updates.

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. 

I'm not sure of the exact pricing. My understanding is that it was super cheap on RAM - a lot like Jira. If you're at a really small startup and you have 10 people, the licenses are practically free. Their theory is, as you grow, you're going to scale and hit 50 pretty soon and then they'll start charging more.

I'm not sure which version of the solution I'm using. It's mostly set up by the client.

I'm familiar with the cloud and on-premises deployment models. Most clients are on the cloud now. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. They have an excellent reputation and live up to it. 

I use Sales Cloud to manage my sales pipeline.

Salesforce is very good and offers a comprehensive sales process.

Salesforce has a vast sales process. It's a very broad tool, and it is difficult to pinpoint any specific feature.

There is no room for improvement in Sales Cloud. I would not want any new features included in the next release.

I have been using Sales Cloud for almost ten years.

I have not had any issues with the stability while using it.

The scalability of the product is good, actually.

Their support team is good.

Positive

I do not know anything about the pricing.

Everyone has room for improvement.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use the solution for CRM and to monitor customers, projects, and sales. We are using Salesforce Sales Cloud as a forecast platform. The solution forecasts the current data, current project stages, and the probability of it happening or not happening.

The most valuable features of Salesforce Sales Cloud are increased productivity and business accuracy.

The solution's design could be improved.

I have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud for two years.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for stability.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a scalable solution.

With Salesforce Sales Cloud, you have visibility and competency and see all the information you need from the sales side on one page.

We chose Salesforce Sales Cloud because we need everything in one place to have one forecasting platform, one sales platform, and one customer management platform. The solution's forecasting feature gives us visibility on one page to give us better guidance and understanding of what's going on and what could happen. Since the solution is an appliance, there's nothing to deploy.

I would recommend the solution to other users. From my perspective, it's a tool that should be used for every purpose because it could be scalable from a small number of users to huge ones. Usually, it's flexible enough to implement all the features that customers could need. Salesforce Sales Cloud is a native integrated solution.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine 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.

My primary use case of Sales Cloud is for account management. It's usually used by the sales teams, to organize our accounts and actually target certain accounts, to push certain products over to them. We have it linked with our current ERP platform, SAP, to give us visibility on invoices and products, what we call pack sizes, where we can build reports that help the sales teams do their jobs more efficiently. We also use it to create call cases, which is our product complaints process. 

The number one benefit of Sales Cloud is the visibility of accounts. Before, when people were communicating by email, for example, things could get lost in translation. Whereas, now, we can centralize all communication to a specific account. We can then tie it in and create follow-up tasks—based on what we call the chatted posts—on the actual records themselves. Communication has definitely been a lot more centralized, and it gives everyone the visibility needed on their accounts, whether it's on their desktop or even their phone, on the mobile app. 

One of the most valuable features is the automation of Sales Cloud. It gives us the ability to easily—without the use of coding—create automation in order for us to do our work a lot more efficiently, whether it's notification reminders or certain automatic processes. There are a lot of things that Sales Cloud can do that, in my opinion, make everyone's jobs a whole lot easier and give them the visibility they need when they require it, when talking to customers and prospecting. It makes the account management process easier as well. 

Sales Cloud could be improved with more training. In general, the training is very good, but you have to really seek out some good options in order to upskill yourself. Another thing, which could also be a benefit, is that Sales is very customizable. If you move from one organization to another, you can see your Salesforce as before, but their Sales Cloud may look completely different from what you're used to. It's not like Microsoft Excel or Trello, where the layout and all the functions are the same. Because it's so customizable, I feel like there is a bit of a learning curve when you inherit another Sales Cloud instance. To be honest, I think that's the beauty of Salesforce because you can customize it so much to fit your needs as a company. It follows your processes and use cases in order for you to get the most out of the system itself. 

The other thing I believe Salesforce could improve on is the file storage system. Salesforce is very good for its account management processes and automation, but when it comes to file storage, it could use a bit of work to rival that of something like Microsoft OneDrive or SharePoint. With that being said, there is a lot of integration with a tool called Files Connect, which allows you to connect to SharePoint or OneDrive, so it's not an issue moving forward, but it's something that they could improve. 

An additional feature we would like to see is better integration. A lot of software is already very well-integrated with Salesforce, directly as well, but I think that because we use SAP, we would like to see more of a direct link. We have one via a third-party solution, but I think that integration should eventually be a lot easier without the use of a third-party. For now, it's still very manageable, though. 

I have been using Sales Cloud for eight years now. 

The performance is very good. Every now and again, there may be something up with the system, but Salesforce is very transparent when it comes to these issues. 

Sales Cloud requires maintenance three times a year, so you need to be ready for when the product launchers come. 

This solution is definitely very scalable. We work in a multinational company—in Australia, we have approximately 70 people using Sales Cloud, but we use Salesforce in the other countries as well. In total, I'd guess there are around 2,000 people who use it. Our sales team uses it maybe 30% of the time because a lot of our main selling processes are still external. Given that our organization has a mature customer base, this is the way things have been done for a long time. We're translating processes bit by bit—maybe three projects a year—translating big things in order for us to do it within the Salesforce Sales Cloud CRM. We would like to get engagement up to 50-60% in the coming years, and we'll definitely see that engagement with initial projects that we're rolling out for the coming years and beyond. 

Salesforce replicated very well within multiple organizations. We've got one organization for several countries across the world, even though we've only got 70 people in Australia, and I think it will be very easy for us to use as we move forward. There are times when we need a bit more training, but I think that the onus is on them. Salesforce provides their own training and upskilling lessons called Trailhead, so they're very helpful. 

I contacted Salesforce in my previous role and I had a really good experience. Whenever you create a case, they get back to you quite quickly a lot of the time. I previously communicated with the account executive of Salesforce and they were very helpful with their processes. If they can't help us directly, they're more than happy to lead us in the right direction. So far, it's been a great experience. 

I don't have previous experience with similar products—I've only really worked with Salesforce. 

Just last year, I deployed this solution with my current company. It was a bit challenging to translate our current business processes into Salesforce. We have about 80% of the functionality that we used to—for example, copying and pasting from an email into a Word document or Excel is a lot easier than copying and pasting it into Salesforce. There's not that like-for-like translation. 

There were three people involved in the deployment process and it took about 18 months.

We implemented Salesforce through an in-house team. 

They're the best in the business, so I think their business model is definitely based on that. The cost is worthwhile, to me, and I think it's fair because of the customization capabilities. However, small organizations that are just starting out might struggle to pay for something additional like this, so they might have only one or two. You pay per license with this sort of solution, as well as any additional benefits. They have what they call managed packages, some of which are free, but some you have to pay for. My understanding is that Salesforce is a little bit expensive, but in terms of the efficiencies, automation, and visibility, I think it's definitely value for money. 

The advice I would give to someone looking into implementing Salesforce is to know the business inside and out—that would be what they call a functional consultant—because a lot of processes can be translated easily enough without the use of coding. For us, it took about 18 months of scoping in order to get the best process moving forward. The implementation can be as easy or as difficult as you want it to be. If you translate all your processes together, then I think it will be more difficult, but you essentially have to give a bit in order to take.

I recommend engaging with an experienced Salesforce consultant or partner in order to get the most out of the system because if you're doing it yourself, it might get a bit overwhelming, especially if you don't have any CRM experience. Just know that almost anything is possible with Salesforce. A lot of the companies I used to work for were built on Salesforce and all opportunities—revenue-driven processes—were driven through Salesforce. It's easily done, especially within the e-commerce and tech software industries. Sales Cloud is very applicable, but make sure to engage a partner who is experienced in rolling out Salesforce. There are partners who specialize in the education sector, F&B, etc., so you have options. 

I rate Salesforce a nine out of ten. 

I am a salesman with a systems integrator we use Salesforce Sales Cloud as our CRM solution.

As a CRM, it's relatively easy to use.

This product is lightweight.

The user interface could be more intuitive. I had some challenges with how to convert from a lead to an opportunity. It may have been due to our configuration, rather than the software, but I did not find it was intuitive.

Assigning team members to a deal is something that I found challenging.

It offers some level of integration with LinkedIn, although closer integration with LinkedIn would be good. On top of that, having tighter integration with other tools, like Franklin Covey or Miller Heiman would be good.

I have been working with Salesforce Sales Cloud for approximately five years, on and off.

This solution is super stable.

I've used a couple of other CRM solutions.

At a recent company, I used Siebel for a couple of years and it was very clunky. Anytime I wanted to use it, it would consume a lot of resources on my computer and it took a long time to load up. I haven't experienced that at all with Salesforce Sales Cloud.

Any of the limitations that I've felt when using this product could be due to our configuration, and not necessarily due to the software itself.

This is a product that I would recommend. The only thing that I would suggest is that if somebody is going to implement it, then what they need to do is collect more feedback and more input from different levels of sales leaders beforehand.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our main use cases for the solution are B2B directions, some presale activities, and some of our service manager activities, which are mainly requests for supplies, certain products.

We do re-house implementation, sales calls for our B2B segment, so it's business to business. We are actually covering all of our sales interactions with our clients within Sales Cloud, just trying to keep the information in one place and all of the activities, according to the sales cycle, within the Sales Cloud, within the certain records inside Salesforce.

The main way the solution has improved the organization is by giving a good understanding of how the salespeople should be tracked, how to restructure their work. Normally salespeople can be disorganized, so we have people who do something which is very difficult to track. However, some people won't do anything until the deadline is tomorrow. So all of the directions, all of the processes should be tracked and sales will give you the understanding. If a salesperson is working to discover a relationship with a client and is trying to sell something, it can be very easy, very intuitive, with very few fields. 

Then you can see if something is moving on or still at the same place for months or even years. You can easily identify it by creating the opportunity and seeing whether you made progress or not. As long as you understand how it should be tracked, the only thing is left to go to sales and say that you expect anything you do to be reflecting this in a certain record, and either I see the progress there, or I can see there's no progress at all. You can say that you're doing something, but if I do not see it within the system, it does not exist.

One of the most valuable features is with management within Salesforce. This is one of the important parts of the process we have right now in place. 

First of all, the point of view that Salesforce gives you on certain object models normally satisfies the biggest parts of the business. In a lot of business scenarios, because the sales process is more or less at a high level the same, in different areas, it's been changing. On the high level, it's all about managing the clients, managing the opportunities around those clients, managing the tasks, calls, activities, all those things are already pretty fine on Salesforce. 

Flexibility is the second point I would like to mention. The flexibility is pretty high and we can set up different scenarios. We can use different pools, both with developer experience and with development experience, making things automated within Salesforce. So it gives you an opportunity for not just a flexible set up, the processes you would like to set, but also to automate the things and make the automation for different scenarios, like providing emails, assigning leads, assigning the right clients to the right people. And also automate that during the sales cycle, if we're talking about providing the resources and providing the information resources.

And I would say the interface isn't perfect, but it's much better than the other CRM systems can provide. So it's not 100% modern if they're talking about making it 21, but compared with the competitors, you can see that Salesforce is way better in terms of user experience. Working the system, it's much more intuitive, it's more user-oriented, user friendly than the other systems I had in my previous experience.

One area where the solution could improve is with handling feature requests. Salesforce has its own community all over the world and people submit ideas saying, okay, that's what's needed. The number of requests is pretty high, and all of these requests are stored for years, but people need these. These features that I requested really sound obvious, but they're still for five, four, six years remaining just the same. When you search for a feature and find that someone created a request years ago, and 6,000 or more are saying, "yes, of course, we need this," it's an obvious feature. It's not that difficult to implement but the waiting line can be up to 10 years long.

One of the features I'd like to see in a future release is a way to see the updates of all the records that I follow. Not an email notification, but a single page to see the information for all the records I'm following. There is a solution that can partially satisfy this need in Salesforce Classic, but it's also classic and old-fashioned, and we would not like to promote the initial sales software within our firm. We are trying to keep Salesforce Lightning as the main tool. Rather than asking the commercial director to switch to Salesforce Classic, just to see a part of the information, but if you need both, we'll be able to give it.

The other area that is definitely a waking point for me is the integration with Slack. Slack is pretty popular and we're trying to launch it as well. The basic integration that is out-of-the-box is pretty small. Having both of these products in the product portfolio in the same company, we actually really expect to have it highly integrated for different scenarios, like task assignments, following notification, so even the same balance can be done within Slack and assigned to a certain account record in Salesforce. There is a huge field for improvement; right now these two products are pretty separated, despite the service.

And the third thing I would say is a Salesforce strategy. A lot of countries, all over the world are trying to protect personal data. And the limitations are increasing here and in new territories, like China, Russia, India, Arabic countries, GDPR regulation, European Union, all of these things that you require the new response from the platforms that are actually dealing with this personal data, personal information. Salesforce itself, its data is a GDPR compliance system, out of the box. The only funny thing is it's two digital compliance until you start entering the personal data there. As long as you are entering personal data there, so they can do some GDPR compliance, in terms of Russian regulation, Chinese regulation, Arabic countries' regulation. It's definitely something that we expect to be improved.

I've been working with Salesforce Sales Cloud for three and a half years.

The stability and performance of Sales Cloud itself, which is provided by Salesforce, is pretty good. We are pretty satisfied with it. We didn't have any huge lags in months with Salesforce downtime; some certain tools that we actually implemented ourselves, were not the level of reliability of Salesforce, though. But that was something we implemented in our own home. The problem was not with Salesforce, but really the tools, the way we actually implemented it.

Ease of scalability depends on where we actually are scaling, and if we had a certain predicted behavior, such as we have a new region to sell, we have a new person in the new region or have a new account, etc. It definitely requires not just some maintenance, but some developments as well. 

We have approximately 100 users in our company. We're using the solution more and more often. Initially, it was a certain form where sales just gave everyone the opportunity. Then we came to the decision, we want this as a system to direct those people on a regular basis. Now we have a regular meeting and the information from Salesforce is checked by the commercial director. We're trying to introduce the solution to see the broader picture, the full pipeline for targeting the client, and finishing the client when you've closed the case.

Technical support has been pretty helpful, in those rare cases I actually use it. During my previous experience, which was also connected with Salesforce, we had some strange cases escalated to Salesforce, and the answer was, okay, we will fix this in one of our upcoming releases. But that was a matter of half a year, and we had a business stopping issue. But after a certain escalation, we actually managed to do this fix earlier. However, we expected it to be faster.

Previously, I've worked with this SAP, and I was working with a custom regionally developed CRM system based on the Microsoft platform. Salesforce has better flexibility and orientation to the user. SAP has perfect functionality and it's really powerful. However, I wasn't fulfilled with the SAP for five years before I actually left SAP. It was like people who developed it just forgot about the end-users. So the interface, how the end-users actually interacted with the system, was horrible. Salesforce is way better. However, SAP also had the best effort in giving data during the later five years.

The initial deployment can take time. We started the project in February, and the deployment was in June, end of June. Five months, and we are not talking about the prerequisites, because we gathered the business scenarios we need to finish the analysis. So if you're talking about the analysis and prerequisites as well, so it will three months more.

Update deployment prevents a lot of issues, as it gives you the opportunity to change the things that can be badly influencing the production system. So you invest some time to get a deployment done. It still takes hours to deploy and there is a certain benefit behind this. The more time spent on deploying, the fewer issues on production. However, there is certainly fuel for improvement there.

The initial deployment was a group of about 20, involving people from different parts, both development, quality assurance people, admins, business analysts, business representatives, salespeople, pre-sales people department. So this group was much broader than future deployments.

There is only one person who actually doing update deployment for us. However, the more we grow, the more people will be involved in the deployment. And we work with the vendor because certain parts of our implementation require the help of Salesforce authorized companies which help us to do this. And there were more people than one to do the deployment because different groups of people were involved in the development. To merge the codes of different groups of development, we required the efforts of recruiting people. Either two or three people were involved in the deployment; they were not only our internal team working with the development.

Right now I'm operating on the Russian market, and in terms of investment value and return of the investment, Salesforce right now is pretty good in the Western markets where the price of the employees is pretty high.

Here in Russia, the country has a cheaper workforce, so the investment into Salesforce Solution is questionable, in terms of the return on the investment. The price model, is oriented on the best markets and there is a certain sense of investment in Salesforce there; but here in Russia, prices for the workforce can do the same thing easily. It's the 21st century, probably manual work should be reduced each day. We think if we look at this problem in terms of the investment, it will be a big question if it's worth the money, as Salesforce is pretty expensive.

The biggest advice that I can give to anyone considering Sales Cloud is to develop a good pre-analysis before the implementation and don't overload the stages of the opportunity. Think what the main purpose of these stages is. The best way to make it work for salespeople and for the commercial department is to structure it that way, that it will now reflect the stages of the penetration to the client. Pursue methodology, when we have targets, interact, propose, close. It's not just throwing the opportunity between the different departments, but it's complete and clear and simple, which is very important. You don't have 20 stages, but you have five certain career stages, which actually reflect the steps when you're closer and closer to the deal. Not in terms of working with the documents, but in terms of structuring the sales process in terms of the penetration to the clients.

Also, very close to the implementation, the final day of the goal, dedicate as much time as possible to the data migration. Dedicate as much time as you have, consider doing data migration; it will be difficult. We will have a lot of migrant issues rolling the data from the previous system to the new one. So two or three weeks is the shortest period that should be dedicated to that purpose.

I would rate the solution a seven out of ten.

The reporting and dashboards functionalities are the most valuable features for us.

Also, the CRM's built-in information indexation with standard and custom fields provides complete control in manipulating data. This functionality remains key to driving informed decision making.

It's driven comprehensive decision making by associating marketing spend with the lead source to revenue generation from completed sales efforts over an extended sales cycle.

Also, the information indexation is fantastic and this facilitates a comprehensive understanding when you need to correlate marketing spend with sales efforts to ascertain ROI. This helped to reallocate marketing spend to more effective lead-generating activities that contributed to higher ROI. Information indexation of the tool facilitates associating ROI by lead source which won opportunities for sales.

• Reporting can become slow to pull once you reach a certain limit of contact records due to the complexity and volume of the data available.
• It's a comprehensive tool that is not intuitive to use in order to effectively leverage the benefits of its customization capability.
• The tool can appear complex and there are key understandings needed to leverage this CRM properly. Not creating an opportunity upon lead conversion for example, prevents correlating data between lead source and opportunities won at a later date - so important!

I've used it for over 5 years.

No, it's straightforward to get an account. From there, it's knowing how to customize it properly to optimize process and facilitate quality data input. It's also been straightforward to deploy for my clients.

There are only stability issues if the report pool involves data from 10,000+ records. The pull can be very slow. Other than that, the tool is both robust and stable.

Scalability issues only arise around reporting from my experience as the data pulls can become slow.

Never called customer service.

I've had insufficient engagement with technical support to comment.

We didn't switch, but different CRMs apply to different business sizes and integration requirements. 17 Hats is quite comprehensive for entrepreneurs, for example, but you might consider this more of a simplified ERP solution.

I have not come across the circumstance where I migrated to Salesforce from something else. Either it was chosen from the beginning or not chosen when the complexity of data control was not needed.

Setup is complex, but worth the time to get things the way you want it. Complexity is commensurate with what you want to get out of the tool.

You sign-up online with immediate access to the tool. I feel the setup can appear complex to those not familiar with the tool initially and creation of customizations is not intuitive at the admin level. There is a learning curve with detailed control.

We did it in-house.

N/A

Professional is what I choose unless the enterprise functionality is immediately relevant to the business operations. Standard license is usually sufficient. In my professional opinion, the pricing is small compared to the value Salesforce brings.

We evaluated InfusionSoft, Sugar, Karma 2.0, Netsuite ERP, and Zoho.

CRM deployment is part of a bigger strategy to centralize your data. By mapping out all the area data enters and exits first with requirements for each point, you can assess if Salesforce is the right fit properly.