Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

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.

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.

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.

I help implement solutions for customers like retailers and the automotive industry. It's used typically to help them with the cold sales process and help them go digital as much as possible into the cloud solutions. That's where we recommend Salesforce solutions based on the discovery we do with customers. We help implement the Sales Cloud platform for the customers. It's a software as a service primarily.

From the company perspective, the benefits would be the quicker return on investment, especially into the sales and service model. It's great for any company deeply into the sales and service model. In terms of investing in Salesforce, which could be Sales Cloud or Service Cloud, two of the offerings that come from Salesforce, the biggest win when I reach out to customers is showcasing to them the quickest way to ROI.

From the customers' point of view, if someone is using this product, Sales Cloud, since it is software as a service, it's pay as you go. The development cost, maintenance cost, everything will be drastically reduced - unlike traditional infrastructure where we maintain everything on our own. With Salesforce being a cloud computing solution, that's less of a headache.

I pay for a number of users who will be using the system in my company. It's license-based and there are various plans available based on the size and type of the organization that I have. That gives a lot of flexibility. You don't need to have strong developers or coders to build something moderately complex. You can do it using a few clicks.

It's really vast. The features that we have and everything else that we can do on the platform are really vast. Salesforce keeps coming up with a lot of new ideas to make sure people can learn this in various ways very easily. They're also targeting importing the admins - not only the developers. They want everybody to be able to click and configure rather than read through some code, et cetera. That's a positive side. Salesforce has been doing a very great job in bringing that to all people as much as possible.

It's a great product and most of the customers are getting a benefit out of using Salesforce.

With the solution being very vast, they need to prioritize features.

So many features being released can be a bottleneck for 90% of the customers. Salesforce has it in their roadmap for the near fix. There are some things that have been on the roadmap for a long time, and there's just so much. You wish they could get certain things out faster. 

One thing that's lacking, especially when I talk to a lot of customers, is the forecasting and revenue capabilities. That's missing from the Sales Cloud itself. You don't have a great way of forecasting or projecting revenue or growth from the information that you currently have in Sales Cloud. That requires a lot of customization and dependencies with a lot of other systems. It would be really great and attract more customers if that becomes readily available out of the box.

I wish the licensing costs and everything else would really become feasible for most of the customers. If it was more affordable, Salesforce would continue to see a lot of customers using their product.

I've been using it quite for some time. It's kind of my day-to-day interaction.

There will be hiccups around releases sometimes. Salesforce releases will be four times a year. Every quarter they do release major upgrades and a lot of new features across the clouds of sales, service, and marketing as well as several other clouds. At times, we see some bugs introduced unintentionally due to the new features or upgrades. In 99% of the cases, Salesforce is quick enough to fix them with an immediate patch or release. In very few cases, they wouldn't be able to and they will take a little bit of time. It may take a couple of months to apply the fix.

Overall, it's great. I have never seen the system being down due to a bug or an upgrade. On the other hand, there could be incidents with the DNS or the network provider - issues with the hardware side that could bring down your sales, for instance, for a few minutes or a few hours. The worst I have seen was one day - and that's in my entire decade Salesforce career.

It's easy to scale. It's 100% scalable.

I happen to work for all types of businesses, meaning startups to large enterprise organizations. Salesforce also offers an unlimited edition which is the premium one. It's a little pricey, however, you get all the features and benefits. Typically, large enterprise organizations will go with the unlimited edition. You can have a professional edition or a couple of other types. People choose enterprise versus professional based on the size of the organization and the number of users who would use the system. 

80% of clients are happy with it and are likely to keep using it. 

Technical support is very good. Tech support comes based on the type of edition that you're using. If you are a premier customer, you have thousands of users and licenses. If yours is the unlimited edition, you will have the A-plus support. If anything comes up, the resolution time is one hour. It goes down based on the type of edition, the type of support package that you have with Salesforce. Overall, it's good. If anything is down in production, they address it within eight hours.

The initial setup is straightforward. They give us some sort of trial log. You take a few weeks and just look around. If you are comfortable, you'll sign the contract and they convert it to the production log, so that trial becomes your sales production.

Typically, unless you are very sure about buying the product, what happens is we recommend, as a consultant, that you can talk to Salesforce and get a trial log. They give you a Salesforce instance. It is not a production instance, it's more of a trial log. The recommendation is you take one or two consultants and set up something really quickly, in a week or two as a prototype, and see if you really like it and your users would like it. You need to ask: are you getting really the benefit of using Salesforce, or not? That would be the quickest way to come to a conclusion, whether this is the right product or not.

Once you want to move forward with Salesforce, we have two options. Either we can get a brand new log, or Salesforce is capable of converting that trial log into your production version so that you can continue to build your stuff there.

One person can do it by themselves in terms of setting it up. You don't need a big team.

There's no maintenance necessary. Once we set it up, it'll be theirs and that's it. You just need to log in and start using it.

Clients have seen very good ROI. Especially users. The data is very good in most of the organizations where we have recommended and implemented Salesforce. That's improving the productivity and they have seen a very good return on investment in several aspects. Some of them are tangible and some of them are soft savings, however, the overall ROI is really good for most of the clients.

You need to pay for the license per user per month. For example, you need to pay $100 per user. If you have 200 users using your Salesforce, that would be multiplied by a hundred, that's $20,000 per month and a quarter million per year. That never stops.

That's a recurring cost. If someone is not ready and hasn't thought through, maybe they would be disappointed in terms of the cost and price. 20% might drop off of Salesforce for various reasons. Mostly, they come to think that Salesforce might not be the right platform for them.

If you get the unlimited edition and a huge number of licenses, the price will go down for sure due to the size of the business. However, if you are starting with really a small fit, it is pricey.

There are additional costs. That depends on, for example, if you have Salesforce Sales Cloud. That's the primary product. After a while, if you decided to enhance or extend it to Service Cloud, you might want to buy a call center product which is Service Cloud.

For that Service Cloud, all you need is additional feature licenses as you already have Salesforce and Sales Cloud on top of that. Some of your users will be part of the call center. In those cases, you will pay a little bit of additional money for those Service Cloud licenses. Again, it depends on the type of product that you're looking for. Those additional features will come with a feature license cost.

We did evaluate other options. We also try to recommend the best product for customers. For example, we go through the requirements and current processes, and everything else as part of the analysis and discovery phase. We see that the phase of the customer and their income and everything else that says the cost that they need to pay for Salesforce. More importantly, we see the day-to-day business that they do. If it is not that heavy, they really don't need Salesforce for what they're doing. In those cases, we recommend building their own solution using Java. It's a one-time investment. They won't have a recurring cost. That's an option for some.

There's also Pega, which is fulfilling Salesforce in the CRM world. There's also ViVA and a few other CRM products competitive to Salesforce, however, they have light pricing and are very affordable. Of course, they're not as super scalable as Salesforce.

We are just end-users. We don't have a business relationship with Salesforce. 

Anyone considering Salesforce should choose the right implementation partner. They should consider choosing a professional implementation partner right from the beginning. It really helps taking professionals that can evaluate and tell you right at the beginning whether Salesforce is the right fit or not. Even if it is the right fit, they will help you build in the right direction. It could go completely wrong if you don't have a very good architect in the first place when designing the system. Once you design and start accessing it, you will create a good number of records and data.

Down the line, in a couple of years, if you realize that this model won't work, then it is a huge cost to be paid if you want to redo the whole thing. I have seen this multiple times with a lot of other clients, where they were not really knowledgeable and screwed up and ended up paying more for rectifying everything. Therefore, invest money and time in the beginning rather than being sorry later.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

We use Salesforce Sales Cloud for keeping track of both clients and employees on different levels, whether they're client-facing or they're more behind the scenes, such as myself.

Salesforce Sales Cloud has helped our organization by giving it the flexibility to customize our products to fit tiers of products. There are many timing and automation features that have given us control over some of the very unique business processes.

Salesforce is such a widespread software in terms of what it can do and its scope. Theoretically, you can run a whole company off of it. There are many valuable features, such as reporting and analytics. You can customize almost the whole environment is what appeals to so many companies the most.

I would love Salesforce to keep on committing and building out what they call flows. It's their point-and-click version of coding. You don't have to be a coder to create essentially what a developer would have to normally, which is a great feature, but it could still be improved upon.

I have used Salesforce Sales Cloud within the past 12 months.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is reliable.

The scalability of Salesforce Sales Cloud is one of their biggest advantages.

We have a little over 150 employees using it Salesforce Sales Cloud. There are probably 10 of us that use the backend. We have five of us that are dedicated Salesforce developers and administrators and an additional five that you would call super users, who have a lot of permissions because they were very close with us, and we trust them. The rest of the workforce is more client-facing in different parts of the organization. We are the development team, they are part of who we support.

The leadership team is very dedicated to increasing the use of Salesforce, whether it's adding another cloud or adding more people to my team. Recently we added approximately 30 brand new users. this can happen again at any time.

Salesforce is such a large company, they have three feature releases a year. They're constantly addressing issues. However, their responsiveness could be better at times. I do not have many complaints and they have very good customer service when we developers need it.

Overall the support is very good. The responsiveness can vary, but nothing that has displeased me and they will always see the job through. They're very dedicated to filling those types of quotas. They can be very responsive when a case has been open for a while.

The delays we faced are more of a corporate issue, but if you contact them individually, you receive much better service.

I have always used Salesforce, I am a Salesforce specialist. However, the company I work for might have used something else previously but I am not sure about that.

The implementation of Salesforce Sales Cloud is straightforward because it does not matter who you trained with to receive your Salesforce certifications and work in the industry, you know the deployment process. Everyone tends to know that it can be clunky, it can be frustrating, but at the same time, it's not exactly a broken system by any means.

The time it takes for the deployment depends on the size. We work in sprint cycles, we do it every two to three weeks. It depends on the size of that particular sprint. When it comes to deploying and then testing to make sure it's already it will never be more than an hour and a half.

The deployment tool could use a lot of work. However, when compared to everything else they're doing, it feels it's more left on the side, they prioritize the newer features.

My whole team and I, do deployments together or at least after we finish our assignments. There are about five of us at the moment. We have both developers and administrators, who all come together, and we complete whatever needs to be deployed all at the same time.

We always need someone dedicated to regular maintenance. I would imagine it's no different than any kind of another software environment of the size of Salesforce. You always want to have someone dedicated purely to making sure everything is working all right.

When it comes to dollars and cents, I couldn't tell you what that return on investment is. What I can say is that as we've grown out and increased automation, and over the past six months we have seen a very noticeable improvement.

I've seen the prices for Salesforce Sales Cloud, but I haven't been the one to handle the money. As someone who's only visually looked at the price, I would imagine it's on the pricier side, but they do have a ton of leverage, and seeing that everyone I've worked for has always been dedicated to continuing Salesforce. I've never worked for anyone who has threatened to leave. Everyone has accepted the pricing for what they offer.

There are additional feature costs but licenses are definitely the most expensive, but once you add or talk to your account representative about more individual features. We're talking about Salescloud, and if we wanted to add Servicecloud, that would be much more reasonably priced than us asking for 50 new licenses. Licensing is where they make most of their money.

The three companies I've worked for who have all used Salesforce, they've never by any means brought up the idea of moving to a competitor. Everyone's been happy on a macro scale of what the product has brought to their firms.

I rate Salesforce Sales Cloud an eight out of ten.

They can always improve and, if 10 other people in my position were asked about features they could improve they would bring up different answers. They do release a lot of features three times a year, every year. They're listening to customers, but sometimes you have to be more persistent than you'd hoped for them to listen.

My use case includes account management, opportunity management, forecasting, lead management, products and pricing.

We store driver information in the account objective. We have also developed an application for technology consulting clients who sell hardware. Software products can be tangible or intangible-like services. We use the product object to store the products.

When there are multiple types of servers, like database servers or application servers we store and use attributes of the server, like the size of the server and whether it's scalable or not.

We use the asset object after the product is shipped to the customer. Price list items and price lists are used for price management that handles pricing across multiple countries. We also use is the charge types and subscription-based models. For example, if you have purchased an internet subscription for one year, your charges could be a monthly, quarterly, half year or yearly.

For our premium customers, they receive discounts. This could be tiered discounts based on the data consumption or the initial discount in the amount of 5%, 10% or 15% based on the type of customer.

Sales Cloud has accelerated the business process. It has helped generate more revenue and close deals faster.

I find the forecasting the most valuable feature. It's valuable because there are a few types of forecasting, customizable and collaborative forecasting. Higher level leadership can forecast revenues using the forecasting feature. The forecasting can be based on the opportunity amount or opportunity line items or subscription product. It enables them to determine what the revenue will be next quarter or next year. It is customizable based on the organization's fiscal year.

Sales Cloud starts with the company and ends with the revenue. For example, a car manufacturing company such as Hyundai, Honda, or Tesla, would set up a campaign. Employees of the office will visit the campaign stall and ask about the features of the car. The sales team of a Cloud manufacturing company can note the details and generate the lead from that campaign and nurture the lead. If the employee is interested, the lead can be converted into an account contact opportunity, or suspect converted into a prospect. Quotations are read to the client, and negotiations commence and the sale will be either won or lost and the prospect becomes our customer.

Salesforce development is faster than others and they have the best documentation. Anyone can learn using their documentation.

They are continuously improving their product three times a year compared to other companies that release new features every two or three years.

There are things that could be improved with respect to file sharing. There is a limited file size.

Also, there is no inbuilt capability to calculate taxes so you have to rely on third party software.

I have been working with Sales Cloud for 3 years.

Salesforce is very stable. We have multiple data centers across the globe. If a data center fails it is highly available and stable, and available 24/7.

Technical support is very supportive and responds quickly and resolves your concerns. Most of the issues are not because of Salesforce, most concerns are because on the developer side or because of limitations due to a cloud based multi-tenant environment. 

I have used multiple CRMs, as it comes under the customer relationship management. Compared to other CRMs, Salesforce is best.

The deployment of Sales Cloud is simple. There are various ways that it can be deployed, the native Salesforce chain sets or the CICD, continuous integration and continuous deployment third party tools to deploy it. Deploying the data, which is a record and deploying metadata that is a component. The record can be deployed using data loader tools, which are native Salesforce features. Metadata can be deployed using end tools, chain set or continuous integration and continuous deployment, like Kin or Microsoft.

It is very quick to deploy, millions of components can be deployed in 30 to 45 minutes if planned efficiently.

The deployment process depends on the organization. The minimum amount of people required for the deployment could be one, even for complex business and maximum would be 10 people to support a very large scale business.

Being license based, the license varies by type. There are standard user licenses, Salesforce license, Salesforce Platform license or community license. Prices range from $5 to $70 or $75 per user per month calculated yearly. It can not be purchased for two or three months, it must be purchased for the whole year. The pricing is considered average. Health Cloud is more expensive than Sales Cloud. 

Account executives from Salesforce will negotiate if you are purchasing licenses in bulk.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is the most powerful cloud of the Sales Cloud. It is scalable and bug-free.

If a company is a business model that is based on lead generation, I recommend that they use the unlimited edition org and use the Einstein product for lead management, lead nurturing and rule based scoring of the lead. Another good feature is forecasting.

I would rate the complete Sales Cloud a 9 out of 10.

We have a partnership with Salesforce. In addition to that, we have fully implemented Salesforce for one of the biggest automotive companies in Baghdad, ZSCO. There are some other companies that give support to and implement Salesforce for them in Iraq. 

We have implemented Sales Cloud to create leads, accounts, opportunities and workflows. We have API integration with our central and PBX, so it's fully integrated. 

In addition to that, we are dependent on Salesforce Enterprise Edition. We have some users who use Platform and some of the users are using Lightning, but usually we are using the Enterprise Edition for Salesforce in our implementation. It is more flexible and more capable to cover many activities. 

Salesforce is not used for financial things. It is not for inventory. It is not for financial activities or operation. It is for CRM, customer relation management.

It is an open platform with API integration with other systems. Salesforce is not a software. It is very famous and available. It is good for creating and generating leads and opportunities. It has wonderful reports as well. The dashboards are amazing. 

It has a workflow inside of it. If you need to send an email or send an SMS to a customer you can do it very easily in Salesforce. 

In addition to that, it is a brand. When we are talking to our clients about Salesforce, people are already aware of the brand. Any company, even big companies are saying that they use Salesforce, so this is wonderful. 

This system is a reliable system. It is without bugs, without problems, you can develop it. You can have outsourced support easily, including videos, all training, partner training, and webinars. It is easy as it's a worldwide software. 

So due to that, we usually go to this international solution to include our customers to help them with growth in their work. 

Salesforce is wonderful. 

The main issue is that is it is costly. Salesforce is not cheap, it's costly. Some of our customers say it is a costly solution. So, we have lost some sale opportunities regarding the high price. This is the main issue that we are facing. It is sales per user and the user price is about $150 per month, per user for the Enterprise Edition. The other edition is less than this, but it is costly. A company that has 70 or 80 users would pay more than $8,000 USD yearly because it is cloud based.

In addition to that, it does not include a professional accounting system, it is operations and it is a CRM. It is not capable of accounting things. 

It is most stable. We don't have any bad feedback on the technical side of Salesforce.

Scalability is wonderful.

Technical support is wonderful. When we open an issue, they call us and solve it well. We don't have any problems.

Previously we used IT Microsoft Dynamics CRM, it is a little bit like Salesforce, but Salesforce's capability is greater.

As for the deployment, you should have a professional guide you in order to do it. Nobody can do the implementation by themselves you can just set up some of basic things. You should have a developer, you should have a partner, you should have a person who has the knowledge. Have training courses in order to do the implementation the right way. 

Salesforce is user friendly in implementation and it is in using it, but you should have a specified person. 

I recommend Salesforce to customers that have commercial or workflow needs and CRM needs. 

I recommend Salesforce to customers that have commercial or workflow needs and CRM needs. I would rate it an 8 out of 10.

It's really the field sales mobility and alignment with the customer-service functions, so Service and Sales Cloud alignment through Salesforce.

We use the SaaS version. Predominantly, it's pipeline management and Salesforce optimization. We are a smaller company, so there are about 80 users working with Sales Cloud.

In my company, we have very manual backend disparate systems, but the good news is that through Salesforce—not only the Sales Cloud, but the Commerce Cloud—our customer-facing experience is best-in-class with this solution. We give all our customer service and sales teams a shared view of every one of our customers. Obviously, there's all the analytics and now the AI business analytics. 

It easily integrates with different ERPs, so we are now, in a progressive manner, implementing an ERP across a large food manufacturing business. There is no down time to the customers because the backend will implement this in terms of finance and operations, but the frontend and sales experience for customers is unaffected because Salesforce is basically ERP standalone, ERP agnostic.

I like that Salesforce is ERP agnostic. In the past and at different companies, I have implemented new or replacement ERPs. It's best in class. I like that it's a SaaS. I like that it can work on any device—any Windows, Android, or Apple device. It can also sync with your Office suite, i.e. your Outlook calendar. It has a lot of features: the dashboards, the reporting, the hierarchy, and just the ability to connect to many different technologies and main best-in-class ERPs and other systems, including eCommerce.

It would be nice if they had an ERP offering or a firm strategic partnership with a best-in-class ERP. So rather than say they're just ERP agnostic, you would pick whichever ERP you want, which is very generic. I think it would have a lot of merit if they partnered strategically with a best-in-class trusted ERP platform or acquired an ERP platform.

I would like to see AI leveraged for proactive business decision support. For instance, if some sales trends change, rather than relying on a business analyst to analyze reports, it would be nice to leverage AI so workforces could be notified of changes—be it business intelligence, or capability, whether it's good or bad—so you can respond to it proactively. It would be nice to see this done in a simple, automatic, cost-effective manner.

I was a long-term customer when I worked at Zodiac Marine & Pool, which is a global French company. I was the regional head of IT, which was the chief technology officer. I implemented Salesforce Sales Cloud in the region and worked very closely with the Americas and the EMEA—Europe, Middle East, Africa—counterparts to implement it across the globe. When I was at Hills Limited, which is an Australian public-listed company, I was the head of technology there as well, and I oversaw the whole Salesforce instance, which used Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Marketing Clouds. My new employer, My Muscle Chef, is also a large Salesforce customer.

In the earlier days, there were challenges with broadband and internet being cost-effectively and easily available at all times, but now, it's very good.

As long as your business rules and master data is clean, and as long as it's configured correctly, the up-time is excellent. I've never encountered any issues. It's a very trusted vendor. Their systems never have outages. I think there was one outage in 10 years, but it works really well. It's excellent.

It's very scalable. I implemented it in a region and then integrated it globally with my other counterparts for thousands of users. It's very scalable. It's agile. You can scale down or up depending on the term of your contract.

At My Muscle Chef, all the front-facing, customer-facing technologies are basically Salesforce, which basically compensates our current legacy, disparate backend applications. It's all compensated heavily by the effectiveness of how well we use Salesforce. I'm also a chairman of a National Rugby League club called the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs, and we are also a Salesforce customer.

We have our in-house team at the moment that deals with the partners, but when I was more technically involved in the implementation of the product, I dealt with customer support. As long as you are subscribed to the relevant type of support, it's excellent. It's global, and if you have 24/7 coverage, you get premium 24/7 coverage. It just depends on what type of subscription you have.

I've had a fair amount of experience with different platforms like Zendesk, SugarCRM, and ACT!. We replaced that with Salesforce. In the last four years, I have had experience with Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM.

I think Salesforce is industry agnostic. It works well across all industries: sales, service, marketing, Commerce Cloud. That is its strength. Some of the less known solutions are more industry or bespoke to the size of the company. SugarCRM is probably more for a smaller, marketing boutique type of organization. Salesforce can do this but can also work in enterprise size companies.

The big challenge I'm finding at the moment is there's a shortage of skills, and if you are implementing Salesforce Cloud, it could be costly from an implementation cost point of view, but once it's implemented, it's a best-in-class solution. So it's the cost of achieving the actual implementation that is a challenge at the moment, with the cost of the labor and a shortage of skills in the Salesforce community.

For the deployment process, we have five dedicated, highly paid resourcers that maintain our Salesforce platforms, but we also work with agencies and partners.

The time it takes to deploy Salesforce depends on the size of the business, but if you want to implement it properly and integrate it with your other ERP or data systems, I would say six to twelve months, depending on how big your business is. But to do this properly, the change management, training, and the ownership and handover to the business will take a minimum of six months. Depending on the size of the business, it can be as long as twelve months if it's done properly.

It is a premium product, so it is not the cheapest solution. I think if it's implemented well, and you're getting the soft cost benefits, the efficiencies, it's justified. But not if you're looking at just apples for apples as a subscription, without the complexity that you can achieve. It can deal with complex business requirements. Some other CRMs can't. But you certainly pay, so it's a premium-charged solution. It's one of the more expensive ones. 

The only other additional cost would be support, depending on how complex your business is and how much change is required. At the moment, there's a shortage of talent in the Salesforce community. They're in high demand and very costly to recruit or to have an arrangement with, whether it's in a formal employment or partner arrangement.

One thing Microsoft Dynamics has that Salesforce does not is the full suite of applications in ERP, so that's one of the advantages. While Microsoft CRM is rapidly gaining good rankings in terms of improving, it might not be on par with Salesforce, but the value-add is the whole Microsoft suite of products, so the Microsoft 365, which is Office, SharePoint. These can all integrate with Salesforce, but they can give you everything, including this CRM and ERP all together in a single vendor experience.

I would rate this solution 9 out of 10. It is a premium product.

My biggest advice is to know your scope. Make sure you have buy-in, the executive ,down. It has to come from the leadership down. It can't be from an employee up, otherwise you won't have the buy-in, the optimized use of it. Then form a continuous improvement committee to ensure that you're leveraging the true capabilities of a best-in-class technology. Otherwise, you risk just using it for business-as-usual administration without necessarily leveraging the benefits of a SaaS, where there's ongoing new enhancements and capabilities. Unless you're investing in leveraging those, you're probably not getting the best return on your investment.