Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

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.

The ability to customize many things, from the UI to the business logic, and the fact that the solution uses a cloud platform were valuable features for our organization.

It has sped up development and delivery within the organization.

The areas for improvement are adding more options to customize the UI, and the business logic.

I have been using the solution for 3 years.

No issues with deployment.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

The customer service was good.

The technical support was good.

Initial setup was straightforward. It is just a matter of receiving the initial user credentials, change its password and create the other users after logging in. This is the initial setup prior to developing any customizations.

We implemented through an in-house team.

Setup cost: $280 per month per user, $600 per month per developer + 20% of the total yearly cost (users x individual cost) per sandbox - pre-paid annually.

Before choosing we looked at Microsoft Dynamics.

If seeking help, make sure that the people who will work on your project are certified (don't merely ask if they are certified, ask for a list of their certification numbers prior to agreeing with their statement of work). There are companies that assign junior people to your projects and bill them as senior consultants.
Expect to pay $200+/hour for HIGH quality consultants - if less than that, you may not getting high quality and may end up paying more in the end for the rework or the costs associated with a inadequate implementation.
Start with smaller, short term projects and add functionality and users gradually.
If you're in a large company (has divisions/regions), before attempting companywide adoption, choose a smaller group of users and make sure they are so pleased that they become champions of the product.

I use the tool for a company with which our company used to work in the past. I used the backup and archiving capabilities of the solution.

My company generally uses the tool for all kinds of use cases. For a particular case of our company's customer who needed us to deal with the areas of archiving and backup, we used Salesforce Sales Cloud.

In general, the data model and everything is really helpful for the development phase. The tool is quite flexible, and you can modify its features easily. The whole development process is quite advanced in that you have all the support you need to take care of the development phase as easily as possible. The development phase is as easy as possible for all areas, including the UI, data model, custom logic, and processes, along with areas like reports, dashboards, and everything.

The areas revolving around archiving and backup in Salesforce Sales Cloud are not as advanced as some of the other solutions in the market. The aforementioned areas can be considered for improvement in the product. Maybe the tool covers bare backup requirements, but it is usually insufficient.

For the additional features needed in the product, I can say there is a very nice comparison on LinkedIn that I saw about the tool explaining compliance, granular restoration, and other related areas.

The price of the product needs to be lowered.

I have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud for two or three years. At the moment, my company is not even a customer of Salesforce since, presently, we do custom development, meaning we do development in Salesforce for other companies who need to use the tool's services.

It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

My company is a medium-sized company with around 400 people.

I have experience with CRM solutions that were either used in-house or made available from other vendors. I think Salesforce is currently the solution that is accepted by all the markets. I see another tool similar to Salesforce in advertisements called monday.com, which I have never used. I think monday.com has quite an aggressive marketing campaign.

I think it is not that difficult to install the product. I don't have that much experience with the product's installation phase. I am not a developer or administrator, but from my experience with the tool, I can say it is quite easy to use and do everything a user wants. I wouldn't say that the product's installation phase is complex. At an organizational level, things are usually more complex, especially when you agree on things inside your organization over what you need and how you are going to try out new processes. Once the aforementioned are cleared out at an organizational level, then I would say that things are not that complex.

I don't have any data to prove the return on investment I have seen from the use of the solution in my company. There is definitely some benefit from the use of the solution in the company, but I cannot speak about it specifically.

Price-wise, the product does not fall under the category of cheaply priced products.

The ease or difficulty with the maintenance part of the product users' experience depends on what they need from the product. The archiving and backup features of the product are not that flexible and convenient for certain use cases. You can use just a basic backup with the tool, which is not enough in most cases. If a user wants more backup features, then the user May need some additional tools while dealing with Salesforce Sales Cloud's installation phase.

I think Salesforce Sales Cloud is the right solution to use, as it is a good solution that is widely adopted and has proven itself in practice. I think it is a good decision to use Salesforce Sales Cloud. There are many aspects an organization needs to consider before adopting Salesforce, which are matters that can be greater than just the technical part.

I rate the overall tool an eight to nine out of ten.

It's a centralized dashboard for all our in-house information.

We used to have all of the data in Excel sheets, but with the CRM, we can have all of the information in one place. You have access to all your deals, and all the information is visible to everyone in the company. You don't have to ask each employee to share individual sheets with you. Instead, what Salesforce does is that it gives everybody access to all the information on the dashboard.

Opportunity is a feature that I use very frequently. You create an opportunity when you schedule a call with a client. Within the opportunity, I can log all of the relevant data.

The type of customization that comes with Salesforce CRM gives me a lot of liberty and ease of access to add any information that I wish to add. For example, the name, email ID, designation, the name of the decision maker, when the client joined the company, and the amount of influence he will have on the product.

I also like the type of reports that I can create. Salesforce gives you the option of creating customized reports, which helps me to have a clear view of my opportunities. You don't have to necessarily go and check each and every opportunity, and there are in-built reporting capabilities as well.

I'm a massive fan of the custom integration Salesforce offers.

Salesforce Sales Cloud does not integrate with Slack or WhatsApp, for example. As a result, there is no easy way to directly log a conversation with a client that occurred on one of these platforms. There are a few things that still need to be done manually in these instances.

As for additional features, I would like to be able to link my personal phone to Salesforce so that I can log the records from my personal phone as well. With the current setup, they have to set up your ISP. To ensure that your data is logged into the CRM, you have to have the physical phone integrated with Salesforce Sales Cloud. If used with caution, I think this feature is going to help out. In India, the business model is such that nobody replies to an email. So, you have to use your personal phone or WhatsApp.

I've been using Salesforce Sales Cloud for more than three years.

As a user, I'm happy with the stability.

We have 20 people who use this solution, and we hope to expand. However, at my previous company, the Salesforce integration took six months. Therefore, in terms of scalability if you have to add different departments or new employees, the integration may take a while.

The only challenge that I see is in terms of having to run the cycle, create the account, and contact different teams for different purposes. What could be done better is to have a single point of contact for all your queries, but that is a massive request because there are sales teams, support teams, tech teams, dev teams, etc. However, if you can have a sales engineer who can help with all our questions, then it would be great.

The FAQs are helpful, and the technical support team is very efficient and capable of handling all your questions instantaneously. 

Also, the help that I got during the initial stage is where Salesforce stands out completely. They are not about email, chat, or phone. They are present throughout your entire journey.

I'm a massive fan of the Salesforce technical support team and would give them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We went with Salesforce because most of the employees who joined our company had used Salesforce before and because Salesforce comes with a lot of options.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

The deployment took six months from start to finish.

Salesforce saves time, and I have seen a fair amount of growth in terms of efficiency and accountability.

We have a yearly license, and there are no hidden costs. Considering the Indian market, the pricing is reasonable. I don't consider it to be on the high side.

Have a training module in place because Salesforce is a little bit technical and you need to understand all of the features.

The Salesforce Sales Cloud platform stands out from other products, and I would give them an eight on a scale from one to ten.

My current use for the solution is in implementing it for a company that sells services. The aim is to use the Sales Cloud to track all the existing accounts of my customer.

I'm a consultant, so I don't implement Salesforce for myself, but for my customers. I need Salesforce to be valuable for my customers. Because if not, the project will not be a success. In every project, it's very important to define the KPIs. But if you define well the KPIs with your customers, Sales Cloud will improve the organization. 

For one customer, Sales Cloud helped him to save two FTE. I don't know the English word for that, but it's like two times of 2% a year. So you save two-incomes per year using Salesforce because your employees are going faster.

The most valuable feature of Salesforce is that it's a system where you can use declarative development. Just using point and click, you can configure it in very nice ways. For small customers, you can use it for 80% of their business. Then we will have to use the custom development using a code, JavaScript, HTML only for really complex business processes of your customer. It's a nice feature because developers and development are expensive, and long to payment. So it's good that you can do a lot with point and click.

One area that needs improvement is that it can be difficult to understand for customers of Salesforce. If you are subscribing to Sales Cloud, we will have an out-of-the-box solution that is good and easy to use. But if you are not keen on system language and things that, you will need a consultant. You will need me to implement it to answer your needs. Because it can be difficult to understand, customers have to pay for the system, and then they have to pay a consultant to implement it. So that is expensive. But in the end, you will win money if the project is well defined, and the design has been done in a good way. Then the system is designed for the customer.

An advantage of Salesforce is that they upgrade their system every time they have a new release. We have a community where we can ask for additional features, and then Salesforce implements the new features in the new release.

I'm currently working on a Sales Cloud project. I'm working on a CPQ project, but while you work with CPQ, you have to work with Sales Cloud at the same time because both products are linked.

The solution is reliable. Salesforce use is like renting an office in a building. You share the water and things with all the users of the building. So you have to be aware that you can use too much, or you can use the water of your neighbors. It's the same way for Salesforce. So as long as you spend time to find the solution the best way, the only concern you will have is the data you're using and the storage of files. But you can have best practices for your people in the company, and buy extra data from Salesforce if you are using too much. So it can be a concern, but you will always have a solution.

The solution can require some maintenance as there can be bugs, and the customer doesn't always understand why. Sometimes, the customer is allocating one of their employees to be the admin of the solution, so they do not require a consultant.

The solution is really easy to scale. One of my projects was to deploy Salesforce for a multinational company, we started with one country, and then deploy it to all the countries of the company. 

The risk there is about the right & access and to cover all countries requirements.
But Salesforce gives a lot of tools to answer to customer needs.

The customer service for the solution is good. You can log cases, but the one thing you have with Salesforce, you will not have the same maintenance quality. If you pay a lot, you will have the best support. If you pay less, your support will be maybe not that efficient as another customer. But overall, it's nice.

Salesforce will give you an answer. The time for the answer will depend on how much you paid to Salesforce.

To build and deploy the initial setup takes about one month for big needs, half a month for medium needs. 

First is the design parts where you have all your customer needs, we build it in what we call a sandbox. In this sandbox, you have all the custom fields and the custom features that you build for your customer. You deploy this in a user acceptance testing environment. Then your customer, the company, will subscribe to Salesforce, will test those features. Once it is tested you will have to deploy it to the production environment, where the customer has all his data. It takes some time, and you have to wipe down everything you've built, to not miss anything. Because if you do, the deployment can be long and difficult. But there are tools that can help you to easily deploy the Sales Cloud solution.

It's very rare that your customer is only subscribing to Sales Cloud. Sometimes he has Sales Cloud and Service Cloud and things like that. And all your clouds are linked. But it's easy. You don't have to independently deploy the Service Cloud and the Sales Cloud. You can deploy it together.

The implementation team depends if you have declarative development or custom development using Apex and things like that. As Salesforce is using the cloud, you are using shared resource. Salesforce asks you to test your development, to not use too much data. If you have custom development, you will need to test it, and you will need a developer to deploy this. If it is only custom fields and declarative, depending on the size of the project, you only need one person. But then you need someone to follow the test, that the customer tested the solution, is it accepted by the customer. That is the longest part.

The solution is expensive, but you don't have to install it. You can access it from any computer, and it's the only solution on the market allowing that many features. So it's expensive, but you know why that is. It's not surprising.

Salesforce is good for all sizes of customers because you can adapt Salesforce for all customer needs. My suggestion to anyone considering Salesforce would be to spend a lot of time in the designing phase. For me, that's the most important.

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

This is a cloud solution. Within my company, we have around 150 users.

The user interface is pretty simple.

This is definitely a solution for the younger generation because it's working with the web frontend. There's a lot of new stuff where you can scroll down, use via handheld, and so on. As a cloud solution with web browser, it's different than my classical way of thinking. It's modern, but for older people, maybe it's not that understandable. It could be more user-friendly, maybe with an option to switch between interfaces.

I have been using this solution for the past two years.

Within other companies, I have previously used C/4HANA, which is the SAP product for CRM. From my user experience, I prefer SAP.

I think it's complex and simple. Because it's a cloud solution, you can maybe put in a logo or something like that, but the functionality is provided by the manufacturer, by Salesforce itself.

On a scale of 1 to 5, I would rate the difficulty of setup a 3.

I would rate this solution 6 out of 10.

Salesforce started as pure CRM software. For the CRM environment, this might be pretty good, but imagine when you have to interface this. Regarding interfaces, there could be some improvement.