Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

It's for managing the sales cycle.

When it comes to the lead management process, we track and evaluate the different stages and the challenges in each stage. It's so that the entire team has visibility of what's going on with each individual lead.

It has significantly impacted the sales cycle because we are able to get more precise updates, report back to our senior execs using the Salesforce stats, and make database judgments. So, it has shortened the sales cycle.

I like that I can customize the sales process to a particular team so that, based on whatever framework I use, I can significantly adapt sales. That's the security of the system.

It might be easier if there were better integration with other sales systems or clouds that are not powered by Salesforce. For example, when we work with partners, such as Amazon or any other major tech company, sometimes we collaborate to develop a sales lead. 

We use integrations between Salesforce instances so the partner can add opportunities to our account and vice versa.

The integration between systems used by different partners is very hard. So, that's something that can definitely be improved.

There are features I would like to see in future releases. It could give recommendations on what could be a possible next step and highlight important points; that's where AI would come in. If it sees patterns in sales and Sales Cloud could evaluate it and showcase to us how that sales cycle could be shortened – that would be a great feature.

I have been using it for five years now. 

The solution is fairly stable. I have not faced any issues. 

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten.

The solution adapts to our use cases. It's highly customizable, but you just need to know how to customize it.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup a six out of ten, with one being easy and ten being difficult. 

It's just a matter of enablement. Sometimes, when it comes to inputting data, it has to be in certain formats, and it doesn't work properly. When you convert it to a report, it doesn't display the report correctly, so you need to know exactly how it needs to be tailored.

Our IT team deployed it.

I would recommend having a good Salesforce administrator. Other than that, it's pretty easy to use. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. I would recommend using it. 

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

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

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

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

I have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud for nine months.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A client was running the sales and marketing operations in a spreadsheet, and they wanted to have everything in one place. So, they migrated to Salesforce, and we helped them out with:

• Creating the object structure
• Mapping their objects with native Salesforce objects
• Putting together the page layout for the team
• Adding the data from the sheet into the instance

In terms of deployment, it was on the Salesforce cloud. The users had to log into it through a browser.

It enabled them to centralize the location of all the information. For example, everyone could enter the lead information in the central location, and then the higher management had a high-level overview of all the leads that came in. They could see how long it was taking to process leads and close them from the time leads come in. It keeps track of the close date as well. 

You can set up automation for following up and sending emails to the rep when the leads first get assigned. You can also run automation where if there is no activity on a certain lead for 30 days or so, the lead owner gets the notification. 

The ability to work on it from anywhere is most valuable. All you need is a computer, a browser, and an internet connection to access your instance. It can be accessed from anywhere, which is pretty cool and user-friendly. 

Its licensing can be improved to accommodate small companies. They provide a certain number of licenses in a set or batch, and you have to buy the set. For example, if they have 20 licenses in a set, you have to get the whole set, even if you need just three licenses, which could be a barrier for small companies. There is no option to buy fewer licenses. So, small companies have to go for a smaller CRM, such as HubSpot.

It has been pretty stable. When they have any maintenance, they usually send a notification saying that the system is going to be unavailable from a certain time, which is usually over the weekends. Usually, no one uses the system at that time.

It seems to be pretty good. It provides the ability to use different types of automation. If you want to create complex solutions or automation, you can do that. You can also start with simple ones and then go into the more complicated ones.

Currently, we have around 10 to 15 users who use this solution. They are usually into business development. There is also a leadership team with around five or six people. There are two different divisions of the company. One is marketing, and one is sales, and then there is also a business development section. So, each team has a number of people associated with it.

It is being used extensively. If we onboard new people, it'll probably scale.

They're fairly responsive. They usually respond within half a day. They send the details or instructions about how to resolve an issue. If it's something that belongs to a future release, they redirect us to the post mentioning that.

Its deployment was fairly straightforward. It wasn't too complicated for this use case. The complicated part was figuring out and mapping the existing objects and data structure with the Salesforce data structure.

For deployment, we had a team of three people. This team included a project manager, a developer, and me. We didn't really need the developer. We had him in case we had any complicated deployment. It was a smaller implementation, and it took about two months.

Its maintenance depends on the scale. If it is a big deployment, you would need an admin. For our internal instance, currently, we don't have an admin, but in the next few months, we'll probably be looking for a dedicated internal admin because we want to implement a few data projects. We're trying to create a partner portal, and we are thinking of hiring a dedicated admin for that.

It is alright for now because we ended up getting a discount off the base price. So, for now, it is okay. We may have to renegotiate when we get more users, and I don't know if the price would stay the same or increase.

It has just a standard licensing fee. If you end up hiring a consultant for implementation, you will have to pay for the implementation. Other than that, there are no additional fees.

You should know what your use cases are. Try to figure out if you will be extensively using automation or not. If you're not, you can use the lower licensing versions that are pretty cheap. The basic model was about $25 a month per user, and you can probably have three users for that, but it doesn't give you extensive automation capabilities. You will have to do a cost comparison for your specific use case to see if the basic license fits the needs of your business.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

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.

• 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.

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

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

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

I have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud since 2018. 

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

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

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

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

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

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.