Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

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.

Our use case within the organization covers the entire cycle from lead generation, demand planning, and opportunities to realization and closure. For our clients, Salesforce is used more to plot the cycle from products to cash and lead to revenue. They mostly build offers and pricing quotations in the Salesforce environment through their field marketing agents.

Salesforce could integrate downstream systems by adding Tableau or MuleSoft into the KDDI. But is there a way to figure out industry-specific solutions? From an ERP standpoint, SAP has industry-specific solutions that are a straight fit for separate industry verticals.

I need to do a lot of customization to implement an ERP solution for an energy and utilities client versus a BFS client. Salesforce should look at the common customizations each client wants and see how much of that can be standardized into industry-specific specific solutions. That would speed up implementation, so we don't need to go through the same steps a hundred times. Salesforce could do it once and put it out for the rest of the clients to use it.

I've handled verticals like manufacturing, automobile, telecom, and BFS. The use cases vary from one to the other. There is no standard recommendation per se. I've handled some three or four clients per vertical. Maybe one or two clients in each industry have a Salesforce ecosystem. Let's say I've had two instances of a financial service client asking for a specific level of customization, so why doesn't Salesforce include that in the cost. 

Salesforce could consult with companies in these different industry verticles to determine the level of customization they need and what common tweaks could be included in the out-of-the-box product. That's something I would love. 

It would be great if Salesforce could pitch customers a base product with an estimate of how much time it would take to implement. On top of that, they could offer the client a set of packages consisting of three or four use cases essential to that customer's vertical and give them a standardized time for implementing these add-ons to the core product.

I don't think clients can afford a designated Salesforce consultant, and that's why businesses come to integrators like us. There's a demand for easy deployment maintenance of Salesforce's no-code, low-code platform with automation. It would help the clients deploy an ecosystem within their organization rather than relying on somebody else to do the implementation and jam it together.

At the same time, it might make sense for Salesforce to integrate an RPA provider like Pega did with the Open Spam acquisition. Salesforce should definitely look into out-of-the-box automation.

I've been working with Salesforce for five or six years. It's the solution we use for internal organization and what I propose to my clients based on their needs, as well.

Salesforce runs smoothly. I've never had a client come back and say, "It is the end of this product's life, I want to switch over from Salesforce because the support is ending by this quarter." I've never seen that case ever.

Salesforce is as easy to install as any other product in the cloud today. I don't think it's difficult for any engineer. The hard part is integrating Salesforce into your environment, which typically involves deploying with hundreds of other upstream and downstream systems on the data flows.

It depends on the number of use cases and customizations the client wants. This varies from client to client in terms of the standard data flow, the number of reports, level of fields, etc. The initial implementation could be done in weeks or months, but it's not for us to decide whether that is sufficient. The client chooses whether to stick with the base product or customize it.

Salesforce is affordable. I don't think there are any significant issues there. 

There are very few instances where we've engaged in a consultation to figure out the right product like we did with MDM versus MRK. For the most part, I believe the client will have the appetite and the know-how to pick the right product.

As system integrators, we typically implement the entire product on the cloud or provide customizations on top of the base product. That's our main involvement in the clients' environments. Generally speaking, we don't go to our clients and tell them why they should pick Salesforce over Siebel or vice versa. That type of conversation is for salespeople from Salesforce or Oracle who pitch to the client directly. The licensing deal goes through the vendor directly.

I rate Salesforce 10 out of 10 because I've made five or six Salesforce deals with clients. If there were any problems with the solution, I would not have secured those deals as a salesperson. I would never hesitate to give Salesforce a perfect 10 because it has helped me sell more solutions to clients. If the clients are buying, it means the solution is good.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is used because it is requested by our customers and colleagues.

For the moment, I only know one CRM, and it's Salesforce Sales Cloud. 

I don't use it directly, I am a business unit director. For me, Salesforce is used because I need information about the customers and sales.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is used to collect address information and sales revenue about our customers.

We provide this solution to our clients.

Our clients only enter the data to follow the project.

The performance is good, and it is easy to use.

All of the information that we need is stored in Salesforce Sales Cloud. 

We have no issues with this solution.

The user interface is excellent.

The monitoring has improved. The monitoring for the fixed bugs is beneficial for our developers.

Training is available for our clients before they start to use this software, which makes it easy for them to use this CRM. 

We have a team of specialists for training for this CRM.

Maybe a product can always be improved. But, for me and our office, we don't need any more information than what we already have in the system.

Perhaps the MMI or ESM side could be better than what we currently have.

The monitoring is very good, but it could be better.

I use it every week because I need information about my customers. It is a mandatory requirement for me.

As it is a cloud-based solution we are always using the most recent version.

We have a lot of managers who use Salesforce because we use it for our development teams and can use it for requirements, we can use it for customer requests, bugs, and bug fixes, and all managers require customer information.

This solution is used by more than 150 people in our company, and we have 200 customers.

The technical support is fine.

I require solutions other than Salesforce because we have procurement direction, which we use to share other solutions, other software for CRM, and other needs for our company.

I was not involved in the installation of this solution. It was already installed on our PC I just have to open the software and use it.

The installation was completed by our IT team.

We also have an IT team That ensures that there are no issues with the security system.

We pay for the Salesforce Sales Cloud license. 

When this solution is installed on the customer site for our project, there is no licensing cost to the customer.

We don't have an issue with the price. We don't pay a lot because we have several licenses and any users.

The licensing fees are reasonable.

Yes, I would recommend it for other users.

When you use Salesforce, we have another team that is in charge of developing other CRM module complements. If we require information that is not currently available in this CRM, our development teams can create it.

We have Salesforce, and if we need other information that isn't actually in the CRM tomorrow, we have our IT teams. They have some developers, who can create this module, we can add it, and you will have the information we require.

If we need some dashboards, or if we need more dashboards than we already have, we have some teams that can develop this software. We have a separate module component that can add to our CRM.

I would rate Salesforce Sales Cloud a nine out of ten.

The primary use case is if you want to update old legacy systems and go into a more mobile way of doing business. One of the main competitive advantages of this solution is that it already offers an 85% solution (out of the box), and you can modify it if you wish.

Salesforce does not offer anything on premise. It's always in the cloud.

No installation of software, or security updates. Easily working together with colleagues.

Salesforce wishes to push for a declarative way of solving IT problems.
As an end user, you can do a lot by yourself, so you do not have to write code. The idea is that they go for low-code and they use flow. It's possible to update records and do things like automation without writing real code. I think this is one of the advantages of the solution.

Also you can easily collaborate with your colleagues. Another main benefit is that you can find a lot of information on websites, and you can learn it yourself through Trailhead. It's a guided way of learning new topics, and it's completely free.

The company has a policy of three releases per year.

One of the advantages of Salesforce is that it's fun. With features like Trailhead, the gamification makes it a joyful environment.

The reporting part is a bit low. You have other possibilities, like Einstein, or Tableau.

The deployment of (meta) data from the sandbox environment to production is also a weaker point because their solution is not powerful (even non-existent).

I have been working with Salesforce Sales Cloud for more than five years. 
I work as a Salesforce functional consultant. My role is to improve the adoption ratio of the client. I help implementing (declarative) and migrating legacy systems towards Salesforce.

The stability of Sales Cloud (and Salesforce in general) is extremely reliable. Ten years ago, we were one of the first Belgium customers that got a massive implementation of Sales Cloud. Servers were in the United States, there were several complaints from customers that it was taking too long. Salesforce acted and invested heavily in data centers in Europe, and now I have never had any issues with reliability or stability.

The solution is extremely easy to scale up because you can go from the Professional Edition to the Unlimited Edition.

You will only have a problem if you wish to downgrade.

If you have a problem, you can open a case with Salesforce. They give it a status, like high, low, or medium. If it takes a bit of time, maybe it's linked to the fact that your case is not crystal clear. If they don't do anything after a while or if you haven't heard back from them, then you can escalate the case.
Of course all is linked to your service contract and SLAs.

Positive

Salesforce doesn't require any specific maintenance. Salesforce works like a hotel. You just rent a room for a particular period, and the rest is done for you.

The main issue is the price. Because it's SaaS, you will have to pay on a monthly basis. It will become very expensive because you'll be thinking, "I have Sales Cloud, and I want to do service and help my customers, so I need another cloud." This is something I have already seen with other customers. They would like to jump into the Salesforce environment, but it can become a hefty price tag, so that's an issue.

There are different licensing models. 
You could have the Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited edition. It is linked to functionality. I only work for multinational clients, so they usually use an Unlimited or Enterprise solution.

If you are a big company, then you have a lot of leverage and more power to decrease the cost of your system per month. A lot of people aren't aware of that. If you go into a full-fledged solution, you can still bargain or discuss the price.

Only one person is required for deployment, and you can automate it if you wish. If you have a good developer who creates that, and you have your deployment street, you can push information into the production environment on a nightly basis.

I would rate this solution a 9 out of 10.

Sales Cloud is suitable for everyone, even a mom and pop shop, if you have the money to invest in it ( I would not recommend it for a very small company that has only one FTE). 
If you have five or 10 SEs, you can definitely use it, all the way up to Fortune 500 companies. Most companies that use Salesforce are Fortune 500 companies.

I would definitely recommend that you try to stick to what Salesforce offers. You should not try to change the native setup of Salesforce, otherwise you will face issues with new releases. You should try to follow the spirit and idea of Salesforce, for example avoid large coding because then you will/can screw up the system.

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.

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.

I'm using it for the selection of sale pipelines, project opportunities, and sales analysis.

I'm using its latest version.

It is easy to customize, and it is also easy to view the summary of a project opportunity. 

There is a ton of information on the dashboard. Reports are also there for us. We can analyze information across the team and across a period, such as quarterly or annually.

There are multiple views to display information. You can display information as a table, and you can also split the views.

It is a bit pricey.

I have been using this solution for about a year.

It is stable.

I have not tried to scale it. We have five to seven people in my team who are using this solution.

I'm working in a global company, and in my business unit, for the local region, we have five to seven people using this. We also have a group of people abroad who view this information.

I have not interacted with their technical support.

I used another one about three years ago, but I prefer Salesforce.

It might be a bit complex the first time, but it is not very hard to understand.

It was done inside the organization. We have a team for this.

Its license is expensive. It is probably a lot more than smaller solutions. It is around £500 a month, but I don't know how many licenses we have.

So far, everything has been good. I would advise others to go for it if they can afford it. It is very good.

I would rate it a nine out of 10 because nothing is perfect.

We are using Salesforce Sales Cloud to develop sales processes. For example, from the lead creation, submitting the contract, and sending the contract via DocuSign for the user to sign it. We use principle objects, such as opportunity, lead, account, and contact, and some process automation to automate the process of sales.

The automation of Salesforce Sales Cloud makes the process very easier to focus on leads and converts them automatically to accounts, contacts, and opportunities.

Salesforce Sales Cloud could improve by allowing some customization of the processes with coding to avoid the problem of memory. When we use only flows in the process, which can become large flows, they are more complicated to debug and also for maintenance. It's better to invoke some Apex classes to make the process better.

I have using Salesforce Sales Cloud for approximately three years.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is stable.

We have approximately 100 users using this solution in my organization. 

Salesforce Sales Cloud has the ability to scale to large numbers.

We are using this solution on a daily basis.

I have been satisfied with the technical support of Salesforce Sales Cloud.

We deploy the solution using many different tools. The process is simple because you only need to create the package and component and choose the sandbox.

The time it takes to deploy the package depends, it could take a few minutes. However, when we use GitLab or another tool, it takes more time than changeset.

The amount of people involved in the implementation depends on many factors. I have worked with many managers, such as GitLab managers, and we created a branch and later deployed it.

There are some releases that need to be updated and some packages that are necessary for maintenance.

I have found Salesforce Sales Cloud to be expensive. However, it is the number one CRM solution in the world. It is worth the money.

I would recommend this product because it can give a company a chance to have new clients. There is a lot of functionality that can increase the number of clients they have.

I rate Salesforce Sales Cloud a nine out of ten.