Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

I am a Salesforce consultant for multiple clients, and we have different scenarios wherein the Salesforce Sales Cloud has been used. Use cases include different scenarios and different industries, so from banking to automobile industries, to NGOs, nonprofits too.

One use case is for a client in the automobile industry. There is a sales process, sales funnel, that has been built for the particular company, according to the region. When there is a lead that comes into Salesforce, according to the region, they will be assigned to a particular salesperson. If the lead is converted, then an opportunity has been created and the opportunity is nurtured through Salesforce. There are different tasks that will then be allotted to the particular salesperson in each opportunity stage.

Sales Cloud in particular is a very, very powerful tool, and we can build on top of the existing platform for the requirements each company has. So if there is a particular workflow that we need to build, particular validation, or there is a particular scenario that we need to capture which is not there in Salesforce, or not in the inbuilt system -- then Salesforce is a very powerful tool that helps us to build that through tools like Process Builder or Flows, or even write code to achieve these scenarios. It's a very dynamic system.

One valuable feature with Sales Cloud is the opportunity for nurturing leads, and there are different sales processes that we can establish in Salesforce to do this. Having different sales processes helps us to diversify the whole system for different regions or different products. The same processes will help a lot in managing or helping out the salespersons to nurture those opportunities.

I've been totally into Salesforce, and almost everything can be achieved through either the configuration part or doing customization. One area that needed improvement though was with the record views. The record views were not aligned, and they have no split views. So to see each record, we had to go back and then select another one from the list, but that has been fixed. One current issue is the system requirement for running Salesforce Lightning. For current computers, it works fine, but for people who are using old systems, there is a lag in loading the Lightning pages. Lightning is the new interface that Salesforce has for the records and seeing the whole data. So if there is an old system used, or if the infrastructure is not correct, then customers are having an issue and it's taking a lot of time to load.

An additional feature that could be added is the email templates. At the moment, it is actually still not a feature to set up email templates. There are two views in Salesforce, the Classic and the Lightning. To set email templates and have those processes, we have to go back to Classic and then do the whole process. It would be beneficial if everything was happening in Lightning itself so that people don't have to switch back and forth. But I think that's down the roadmap of Salesforce to have everything in Lightning.

I've been working with Salesforce for the past five to six years.

With the cloud infrastructure, the stability of the solution is pretty good. There has not been much downtime, or I've never seen any downtime happening in my experience with Salesforce at all. They are evolving in performance, too. The transition from Classic to Lightning was a major shift they had, and that has increased a lot of performance. The solution has been more powerful since it was transitioned to Lightning. If you don't have the right infrastructure, then we see performance issues.

Salesforce is super easy to scale. If you want to add users, you just need the licenses. If you want to add additional features, scalability is not an issue with Salesforce.

The solution is suitable for every sized company. It makes things easier, even for small companies. The amount of manual work can be reduced if they have a proper automated system in place.

We've been in contact with technical support multiple times. They're very responsive and it seems we get an immediate response back from the technical team. In the case where the issues has not been resolved from the lower level, they escalate it to the technical team. I would say they say the technical support process is quite good. But for that too, there is a package I think needs to be bought for high-end technical support. For regular users, there is a certain level of technical support that Salesforce offers, and then if you need more, we need to have an engagement for that.

We have some experience with Zoho CRM, but I wouldn't say it is as comparable as Salesforce. It has a different set of Salesforce setups in Zoho.

With adding multiple sales processes or more fields to the layouts, Salesforce is more flexible and bigger than Zoho.

The initial setup of Salesforce is pretty straightforward. The deployment process is quite easy. With that being said, I would say there are a lot of instances where this pretty straightforwardness has been misused. There need to be some guidelines or DevOps processes in place so that people don't just push things to production.

The solution does not require any onsite maintenance; since it's cloud, the maintenance is done automatically. Since the platform is evolving, there are cases where they add in a few security points or depreciate a few old processes. Then we might need some enhancements done to the work that we did.

Just one developer can have test classes built in and then push it over to production. There have been cases where we see that even one admin team in companies just does the whole end-to-end, adding the component, then pushing to production. It is not an extensive, manpower-required process.

Pricing wise, I'm not sure how affordable the solution is, because for each market it's different. For small companies, I don't know how the pricing point works, but feature wise, I would say it is a very useful tool for all sized companies.

My advice to any company implementing any product is to have their processes lined up, at least on paper first, rather than going to a system. I've seen this happen with a few clients. Their structure is not set, but they come into the CRM and then they build on the go, which creates a lot of best practice issues when they do that.

Before implementing any CRM, I would suggest that any company should have a proper sales process or their processes lined up, and have a clear idea of what they want to happen in the system so that that can be translated easily onto the system.

I would rate Sales Cloud a nine out of ten because I'm totally into Salesforce and I appreciate the product a lot.

I'm using it to track opportunities and keep track of customer relations.

It's fast. It's accurate. I can access it anywhere. I can log calls live, keeping the information fresh in my mind. It has really helped expand our customer base.

I can see activity per customer. I can find out quickly and easily who was the last person I talked to, when it was, and what we were talking about.

I like its reporting.

Sometimes, it is difficult to integrate it with my emails. I've had trouble integrating it with my emails. There were a couple of things I did try as well, but I wasn't able to do so. 

I've had difficulty in other areas too with integration. It was related to syncing my calendars. I want the tasks that I put in to automatically sync to my calendars and update my calendars, but I couldn't figure out how to do it.

I have been using this solution for three years now.

I haven't had any issues so far.

I'm only using a small portion of it. You can do a lot more than I'm using it for, but I haven't gone into that yet.

There are 10 people in our organization who are using this solution. It is currently not being used extensively in the organization. It could be used more. Right now, we're just scratching the surface.

They were good, and they helped me through my issues.

I used Sage CRM for a while, and it's not very much fun to use. I switched because every time I had to do something, I had to contact our company IT support. It was too cumbersome. They had to get involved every time I wanted to do something, and I needed to be able to do things quickly and without having to go through someone else.

I had to set it up myself. There were some parts of it that took a little bit of learning, but I found the videos and other resources helpful.

My advice to others would be that they should talk to a consultant and tell them everything they want to do beforehand. They should make sure that they have a plan in place to get it set up the way they want to right away.

I would rate it at least a nine because it is really easy to use, and it has helped me a lot.

I am a consultant and deliver the build for Salesforce to our customers. The company has a partnership with Salesforce and I'm the director. 

There are many benefits to Salesforce. It allows companies to know who their customers are, how much they spend, then relate that to earlier purchases so that a company can focus their efforts where necessary. You can also determine how sales staff are working against their targets and whether they need assistance.

I think Salesforce as a whole is all about understanding your customers and the pipeline with customers. Through an account, you can capture all the contacts that relate to that account or business, including personal details. It's highly configurable so you can completely adjust it to whatever business requirements you have. Once you've understood who your customers are, you can decide what you might want to sell them. It can all be captured and put into reporting. As a result, you can forecast against the reporting and figure out where you want to go on quotas for your sales team. You can also see how long it might take for a sale to go through and whether any sales opportunities get stuck.

You can track any issues with Sales Cloud functionality once a customer purchases by capturing your phone calls and storing them in Salesforce, along with any emails. Everything can be stored and tracked. The company brings out new features three times a year. I haven't used all the features because there are so many of them and the solution is now very large. They've changed their custom UI and it's now more configurable so that you can change it to suit your needs. I might only want to see certain fields at certain times throughout my journey and it can do that. There's a ton of functionality that I haven't even started to really explore.

Salesforce has a built-in functionality called changesets to move functionality from the sandbox and into production. That's a little dated now, and it's not very good for version control or backups. There are third party apps that can provide a slicker service to manage version control and deployments between environments.

I've been using Salesforce since 2007. 

The solution is highly stable and they have serious backups. If there are any glitches you can go to their site, trust.salesforce.com, and check on any problems. In terms of maintenance, once you've implemented it, it's important to get a team onboard internally to maintain things; users come and go so you're constantly canceling or adding users. Some will need help with reporting and once they understand the benefits and power, they'll want more teams to use it which will require more functionality. Our customers are always wanting to increase use. Salesforce is in major demand and most clients have continuous new project ideas and as a result, an expanded functionality. 

The solution is easy to scale and our customers range from small to enterprise size organizations. 

We sometimes need to contact support and for most customers, it's beneficial for them to have premise support because you do get a quicker response for resolution. You do have to ring them sometimes in order to get features enabled but once you're part of a consulting firm, you rarely need to contact them because you can generally resolve the problems with internal expertise.

There's no simple answer regarding complexity of deployment. It actually depends on the size of your implementation. If you're on a huge project, deployment can take months, if not years. These days, Salesforce has better version control using external tools which speeds up the setup because you keep a version in control and you move it through the different processes in order to push it through. You can deploy something within an hour of building and testing, and capture all the requirements. It's highly configurable.

The minimum time for deployment is generally a couple of months but it is absolutely dependent on how much you want to tweak it and make it your own. It can be a very quick turnaround.

Every finance director I've spoken to will say that Salesforce is expensive and that's mainly because it is a per-user license. The more you use it, the more it will cost. There are licensing costs and implementation costs in configuring the system to your needs. It's expensive but also one of the largest business systems you'll have in your company because it'll integrate absolutely anything you need it to. It should be viewed as an investment.

The solution needs to be considered as a long-term investment, and I suggest engaging a partner to implement it. Salesforce will tell you it's possible to implement in-house, particularly for smaller organizations, but I would recommend a certified expert with experience and knowledge.

I rate this solution 10 out of 10. 

We use the solution to manage our sales processes.

The reporting is easy and helpful.

The product is not stable when enhancements are done to the cloud.

I have been using the solution for three to four years.

I rate the tool’s stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a ten out of ten. We have 100 users in our organization. We use the product twice or thrice a week.

Salesforce is a huge competitor of Microsoft and other solution providers. We chose Salesforce Sales Cloud because it is quick to launch. We could start working with it immediately.

I did not face any major issues. I recommend the solution to others. It is easy to use. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

I personally find the Opportunities to be the most valuable aspect of the tool. It helps me keep a close eye on the business' pipeline. We've also developed a native project management solution on the Salesforce platform called Mission Control. We use this to track the scheduling and performance of all implementation projects. This is of great importance to our business in understanding our bandwidth and efficiencies. We also find the Case object to be of great value, including the email to case functionality that helps simplify the process for our clients when submitting support requests.

We run our entire business in the cloud and Salesforce.com sits at the heart of our solution stack. We have a subscription based model for our products, such as Mission Control, Mercury SMS and InteliMail. We've integrated Salesforce.com with eWay, an online payment gateway to automate our monthly billing process.

The main area that I feel could be improved is the performance of the Salesforce1 mobile application. I find it to be too slow to be of any real value whilst out on the road.

I have been using the Salesforce.com CRM system for over 12 years. I first used it as a Marketing Manager for the company I was working for at the time. In the last six years, I've been running Aprika, a Salesforce.com Consulting Partner helping to implement the solution for clients in Australia.

We've implemented Salesforce.com for over 200 clients and we've never come across a requirement that could not be delivered on the platform.

We've implemented Salesforce.com for over 200 clients and we've never come across a requirement that could not be delivered on the platform.

We've implemented Salesforce.com for over 200 clients and we've never come across a requirement that could not be delivered on the platform.

The standard Salesforce.com support process is very good. They also have a premier support option which provides a very quick response time. In addition to this, the community of users are extremely helpful and supportive to one another and using the success.salesforce.com website, you're always guaranteed someone will be able to help you out.

We are a Salesforce.com Consulting Partner, so we're the team helping the client implement their required solution. Salesforce.com conducts regular, independent research which states a client that works with a consulting partner to implement the solution is 65% more likely to be successful.

We have implemented Salesforce.com for over 200 clients, as you can imaging, there's been varying scales of complexity in the requirements ranging from a simple out of the box configuration through to solutions requiring a lot of customisation using Apex and Visualforce as well as integration with third party systems.

I do hear that Salesforce.com licensing is expensive, but once clients start using the system and the light goes on in relation to understanding the power of the platform, they realise it's well worth the investment.

From a personal perspective, one of the key things Salesforce.com provides us is insight into our business that would be difficult to achieve otherwise. We're able to easily track conversion rates, budget performance, staff efficiency rates and many other key metrics that are important to our business.

12 years ago, I initially compared it to a number of other solutions through a tender process. We conducted our due diligence and Salesforce.com came out top by a long way. As a Consulting Partner, we typically see prospects comparing Salesforce.com and MS Dynamics. Generally, we see them evaluate the two products and in most cases, they'll establish Salesforce.com is the more powerful, flexible and scalable solution.

Don't hesitate - if you're looking at using Salesforce.com, you're on the right track. After a few months, you'll wonder how you managed without it. In terms of implementation, I would strongly recommend engaging a consulting partner, it doesn't have to be Aprika. They can bring real value add to the project and ensure the system is set up to support user adoption. Engaging staff from various parts of the business in the initial implementation is also a key ingredient to successful adoption.

I use Salesforce Sales Cloud to customise order management and tracking. We also use it for revenue recognition, billing and analytics. Salesforce is our primary CRM.

This solution offers a good user experience. It is easy to learn and use, even for those who are using it for the first time.

I have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud since 2008.

This is a stable solution. When any issues are anticipated from Salesforce, we are notified. We have experienced a 99.9% stability rate. 

This is definitely a scalable solution. They have different types of licensing based on your needs. You can increase and decrease the number of users and access it from anywhere. The users are in business functions including the case management team, revenue team, analytics team, development, and QE. 

The support for this solution is good. If you have an enterprise account, you get access to really good support.

Positive

The company I work for used to use Microsoft Dynamics CRM and they switched to Salesforce because Salesforce was skyrocketing during that period of time.

We generally deploy through packages constructed within Salesforce and we use our own local deployments. We have ANT scripts and we were trying to come up with some CI/CD implementations. Currently, our deployment on Salesforce is out of the box. 

Our engineering team completed deployment. Every release cycle took one to three months. We take at least one day to deploy, because we have other integrations and components closely linked to Salesforce. Salesforce have their own release cycle. If they have any changes or new features they want to implement, they have push notifications to the customers on the features utilize.

The return on investment from this solution is from case management and the way billing information is captured. We have Tableau dashboards to pull up how many orders are created for a particular month. This information is supplied to the business to understand how we can streamline, improvise and improve marketing activities. 

Compared to other CRM solutions, Salesforce is expensive. It is more affordable for enterprise users than for small businesses. 

I would advise those considering Salesforce to first understand their business model and how a CRM would fit in. They should understand their use cases and how their business functions can be changed from a technological perspective. 

The Salesforce Lightning feature is a new concept and we need to understand how it could help our business. We need to understand the usability and user experience for customization and to provide solutions for specific industries.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We can store our leads and track the sales. We can store objects like contacts, opportunities, and accounts in our Salesforce database. It will help to close deals faster. Suppose a contact is interested in purchasing something. That information is stored in the Salesforce database, and you can track the current level of contact.

For example, before they sign the deal, the contact wants some discount. You can see this data, know the sales process, and close the deal easily. One advantage of the solution is that it helps to improve our sales.

The most valuable features of the solution are reporting and dashboards. You can easily compare how many products were sold last year and this year.

The solution's scalability has some limitations.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a stable solution.

The solution's scalability has some limitations. If you want to add more users, you need to purchase or subscribe to the advanced version. Some big organizations purchase an unlimited edition, which allows more than 1,000 users. Only a few people can use the basic version.

The technical support team is available 24/7, and I am satisfied with the technical support for the solution.

I would recommend the solution to other users.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We use Salesforce for lead management, opportunity tracking and sale tracking. It provides insight into what has been sold and a forecast for future opportunities.

Salesforce highlights what are we selling in different regions and which regions or areas offer opportunities. We are able to view sales by month, quarter or year.

I like how you can create marketing campaigns. In five minutes, you can create a marketing campaign and send the campaign to users in less than 10 minutes. 

Salesforce is a powerful tool and you need specialists to create or to develop new functionalities. It is a difficult platform to learn to manage and you need years to know the whole product. 

I have used Salesforce for four years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. I previously used Asana but Salesforce offers better scalability compared to Asana. 

The customer service team respond really quickly. I would rate their support a five out of five. 

Even though we have more than 50 employees in our organization, only 10 users use Salesforce. This is because licenses are expensive and more employees use Asana which we have free licenses for.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.