Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

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.

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.

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 have only ever used the Sales Cloud as customized by the Nonprofit Starter Pack (NPSP) as provided by Salesforce.org and virtually all aspects of that application are incredibly helpful from a nonprofit perspective. It really takes the ‘Sales’ Cloud and turns it into the ‘Nonprofit’ Cloud. We use it for fundraising, grant management, volunteer management and everything in between.

We use Salesforce for every aspect of our business and it improves efficiency and gives us one source of truth when it comes to organizational information. Everything from fundraising to volunteer management goes through Salesforce!

There are data limitations on the platform – in terms of how much data you can store on the platform without having to purchase more. Generally, anything over one GB of data is going to cost your organization extra – this happens fast too so watch out. There is a lot you can do with zero programming knowledge and you can automate most repetitive tasks with no code!

I've used it for roughly five years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

I would call out the one GB data limits as a scalability concern – as it is often an unexpected cost as Salesforce generally hides this nugget of information in the documentation/limitations of the product. From a deployment perspective – not really. It’s a complicated tool so the amount of time, expertise and/or money you have is generally going to impact deployment.

Salesforce relies heavily on their Community to do the work of support/customer service and it has paid big for them. I am usually headed to the Power of Us Hub or the Salesforce Community before I pick up a phone to call support. Overall, that experience is far more positive than trying to contact support. In the rare instances where I have had to call support, they are responsive – but beware of the additional costs for the ‘Premium’ support packages.

In my current role, no. In previous roles, we evaluated other donor solutions and determined that Salesforce was best suited for fundraising and program management. The flexibility and 360 degree view of your constituents is really the draw.

It’s a fairly straightforward purchase process – but the set up can be complex depending on your organizational requirements. The NPSP makes it easy to get off the ground quickly, but additional customization can often require consultant assistance.

I’ve done both – generally working with a vendor for any heavy development/coding work that needs to happen. Everything else I was able to learn. Salesforce does a great job empowering customers and ensuring that they have what they need (including access to peers) to learn the platform. I would say this is a core organizational strength of Salesforce.

In terms of non-profit licensing, you get your 10 free Enterprise Edition licenses as a 501(c)(3) and take advantage of those to learn the platform! As your organization grows, see Salesforce as an investment, not as a free tool that you must ensure continues to cost your organization $0. This will do more harm than good – learn the platform and allow it to grow with you.

You generally have two routes to go when implementing; you can hire a vendor to do the work for you, or you can invest in/hire a staff member/team to learn the platform, gain expertise and implement internally. In the non profit space, I heavily favour the second option as I think investing in some staff time to learn this is great and there is an amazing community to support the process.

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.

• Open API
• Big ecosystem of applications, knowledge, and training
• Flexibility

I’ve worked with about 30 nonprofit organizations implementing Salesforce. I’ve seen it answer questions that are key to an organization’s strategy, e.g. Does our program work? Which people does it work best for? Where is the revenue coming from? How many people are we serving today/this week/this month/this year?

In addition, it saves hours a day for staff members who track donations, volunteers, etc.

Reporting is still not as strong as it should be.

I've used the Enterprise Edition for three years/

Salesforce is complicated, and there are plenty of things that can go wrong. With small to medium non-profits, the biggest issue is typically that staff don’t have time to spend using the new system, or that leaders aren’t asking questions of the system. When the system doesn’t get used, it definitely doesn’t work.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It really depends. The free customer service isn’t so useful, but that is mitigated by the huge number of consultants, YouTube videos, and KB articles. These resources are just a different level of magnitude than for any other similar product. If you pay for tech support and additional customer service, I believe that the experience is better, but I don’t have direct experience with that.

The free tech support is really only useful for pretty basic stuff. They get the job done, but it isn’t any fun. It would be nice if they would consent to fix things via email instead of phone calls.

I’ve switched organizations from various home-grown solutions, eTapestry, Donor Perfect, Gift Works, and piles of spreadsheets. All those options have their advantages, but none are as flexible as Salesforce.

I did set it up for an organization where I worked, and it was complex but now I’m very comfortable doing it, however, your average non profit staffer is not.

I've been the vendor, except when I set it up for the organization where I worked.

The price point for non profits is very low, as the first 10 users are free and subsequent users are about $30 per user per month. There’s also the investment either in significant staff training or in a consultant, but for something as simple as a donor database, you’re probably looking at a one time cost of about $3000-$5000. Ongoing costs depend on the time and tech skills you have on staff. Organizations with one person who is interested and able to spend some time on it can need as little as 10 hours from a consultant per year, but those who need more assistance might need more like 48+ hours per year. Prices for consultants vary widely, as does quality. In terms of the return on that investment, a non profit that uses the system well should be able to raise more money with the data and time savings provided. Some organizations do this by better identifying and following up with donors, and some are able to demonstrate their effectiveness and better compete for grants.

It depends entirely on how complex the use of the system is. A system that does day-to-day program management, volunteer management, donor management, and outcomes tracking can cost upwards of $40K. A basic donor database can be as little as $3000-$5000.

For different organizations, I’ve evaluated Sugar CRM, eTapestry, Gift Works, Donor Perfect, Wild Apricot and Neon. These products all have their advantages, but only Sugar CRM has the open API and flexibility of Salesforce. Unfortunately, Sugar’s ecosystem is tiny compared to Salesforce’s. It is much harder to find qualified consultant, online resources are paltry in comparison, and I’ve been told by web developers that Sugar is horrible to interface with.

Hire someone to help, even if you just hire them to spend a few hours pointing you in the right direction. Make sure you’re ready to use the product, Salesforce provides pretty good resources for evaluating this. However, the big thing you need are leaders who are asking the important questions and who will give staff time to devote to setting up and using the product. Without those two things, it doesn't matter who you hire or how much money you spend, you won’t be successful.