What needs improvement with Salesforce Sales Cloud?

There is no room for improvement in Sales Cloud. I would not want any new features included in the next release.

I cannot comment on improvements as we haven't used their customer service.

We do have a backlog, and we're currently working on addressing it. However, we're trying to overcome some limitations with the standard Salesforce features. We're exploring options to find a technical resource who can assist us with this backlog. Certain fields are not editable using standard Salesforce features, and I'm not fully aware of the specifics regarding this. Additionally, we're experiencing issues with copying and pasting data, which is impacting the efficiency of our customer service. These are the main challenges we're currently facing.

One concern with Salesforce's CPQ solution is that the integration and user interface are not as seamless as possible. Although CPQ was successfully integrated into Salesforce following its acquisition, there are still noticeable gaps in the UI and the features. These issues reflect the challenges of merging acquired solutions with the existing Salesforce platform, which, despite successful integration, still shows areas for improvement.

They should also include ATP and CTP functionality. Whenever there is a sale or opportunity, sales representatives should be able to determine what is available in the inventory and how much can be delivered to the customer. For example, if I take an order today, it might take ten days to produce and deliver the product. This is the ATP. If a customer orders 100 cell phones, the CTP functionality helps determine if we can deliver that quantity. This insight is provided when ERP systems are integrated, as ERP systems handle inventory. However, even without an ERP system, this information is crucial. The ATP and CTP stock should be monitored or mentioned somewhere in Salesforce to make decisions easier for sales representatives. If my inventory has 10,000 cell phones from 8 AM to 6 PM at the start of the day, any confirmed orders should reduce this inventory count. We can monitor my inventory in real-time and decide whether to accept new opportunities based on current stock levels.

There is nothing that comes to my mind when I think about what needs improvement in the product since it does everything perfectly. The product lacks to offer some AI capabilities. With a lot of AI capabilities that are available nowadays, I would want some of them to be added to the product since it can make the lives of its users easy by allowing them to use the features they want.

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

Sales Cloud could improve in areas such as AI integration, particularly for templates.

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.

Salesforce's price worldwide is very high. Salesforce's price in the Indian market is also high. The high price of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required. In India, the tool's customers are not very huge or big businesses with big sales revenues, so Salesforce Sales Cloud should work on the price part and make it a low-cost tool for users.

The solution's design could be improved.

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.

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.

The product’s user interface could be better. There could be an option to change the price list without creating a new quote.

The scalability could improve.

The performance is sometimes slow. There is too much information and this makes it difficult to find the answers we are looking for.

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 would like if Sales Cloud had the flexibility to create or edit the forms used to submit requests. Right now, they're fixed, and users can't edit them. Only administrators have editing privileges, so it takes too long to make changes.

When integrating Salesforce Sales Cloud with other applications it can be difficult to maintain security. The next release of Salesforce Sales Cloud should add better integration with communication systems, such as Webex.

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.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is not as simple to use as Zoho. It requires some level of expertise before you can use it. However, you can easily learn how to use the solution as you go along.

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.

It is a bit pricey.

Sometimes they refresh the production environment, which can be a bit of a challenge.

The solution could improve the partner management and communities. For the enterprise licenses, we have the help, but it should also be extended with the features to the partner community.

There are always issues that must be addressed. And, in the end, I believe we have the support of these organizations, and we are working toward solutions. I would like to see licensing fees reduced in the next release.

An area for improvement would be the ease of configuration.

The solution is secure. However, they could always improve on security.

It is very clunky. Its interface can be more user-friendly. There is always way too much information going on in Salesforce. It puts too much on your screen. It gives you every piece of information in the world, whereas I need less. It would be nice for it to be cleaned up a bit.

The reporting formats could be better. We'd like to be able to graphically, optically, change what the selections are that we can choose to put a report or format in, just in how they appear, the aesthetics. There could be more presentation formats that are incorporated that would make them easier to transfer over to a PowerPoint or something. We should be able to export documentation capabilities that are more presentation-friendly outside of the system. II want to be specific about what it looks like, what the actual report actually looks like. For example, the optics of the report, the colors that are used, the format that it's in. That's the main comment. The data is fine. It's how the report actually looks that's an issue.

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 didn't use Salesforce too much, so I can't say much about it because I don't think it would be very accurate.

There are different applications that can definitely help leverage Salesforce when it comes to data management. Importing and exporting different applications can be used to help that process. In addition, applications that can help with migrating data over from the sandbox to production would make it easier because sometimes changesets can be bulky and they're not always as effective. This can be frustrating when you make a lot of changes and try to put those changes into production. Sometimes uploading and making changes to processes can be a little slow. The implementation of automated processes could be a little bit better understood.

We have a very broad set of products at our company. The process to get that information accurately into the Sales Cloud system could use improvement. It shouldn't take weeks of time. The process of identifying products that are being sold for forecasting purposes and sales tracking purposes is too hard. We're starting to prepackage new product builds that address replacing the install base. If we can get that to be really smooth, it would be great. If a storage array is going to end of service/life, I am looking at something that not only tells me that but also says, "You should replace it with this, and here's the build for it." This way, you don't have to go through the process of throwing up what the new array would look like to get it over to the customer.

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 think the user experience could be improved. I would like the user interface to be a bit more user-friendly and modern.

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.

One area where the solution could improve is with handling feature requests. Salesforce has its own community all over the world and people submit ideas saying, okay, that's what's needed. The number of requests is pretty high, and all of these requests are stored for years, but people need these. These features that I requested really sound obvious, but they're still for five, four, six years remaining just the same. When you search for a feature and find that someone created a request years ago, and 6,000 or more are saying, "yes, of course, we need this," it's an obvious feature. It's not that difficult to implement but the waiting line can be up to 10 years long. One of the features I'd like to see in a future release is a way to see the updates of all the records that I follow. Not an email notification, but a single page to see the information for all the records I'm following. There is a solution that can partially satisfy this need in Salesforce Classic, but it's also classic and old-fashioned, and we would not like to promote the initial sales software within our firm. We are trying to keep Salesforce Lightning as the main tool. Rather than asking the commercial director to switch to Salesforce Classic, just to see a part of the information, but if you need both, we'll be able to give it. The other area that is definitely a waking point for me is the integration with Slack. Slack is pretty popular and we're trying to launch it as well. The basic integration that is out-of-the-box is pretty small. Having both of these products in the product portfolio in the same company, we actually really expect to have it highly integrated for different scenarios, like task assignments, following notification, so even the same balance can be done within Slack and assigned to a certain account record in Salesforce. There is a huge field for improvement; right now these two products are pretty separated, despite the service. And the third thing I would say is a Salesforce strategy. A lot of countries, all over the world are trying to protect personal data. And the limitations are increasing here and in new territories, like China, Russia, India, Arabic countries, GDPR regulation, European Union, all of these things that you require the new response from the platforms that are actually dealing with this personal data, personal information. Salesforce itself, its data is a GDPR compliance system, out of the box. The only funny thing is it's two digital compliance until you start entering the personal data there. As long as you are entering personal data there, so they can do some GDPR compliance, in terms of Russian regulation, Chinese regulation, Arabic countries' regulation. It's definitely something that we expect to be improved.

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.

Salesforce Sales Cloud could improve by allowing some customization of the processes with coding to avoid the problem of memory. When we use only flows in the process, which can become large flows, they are more complicated to debug and also for maintenance. It's better to invoke some Apex classes to make the process better.

While they've done a really good job of being a CRM tool and being, in my case, a sales forecasting tool, if they could integrate with other enterprises' IT aspects - like SAP and ERP - it would be great. A little bit of integration across the corporation would be helpful. If they could have convenient APIs into the other parts of the corporation that I wish to share data with, that would be helpful.

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.

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.

Its reporting capabilities can be improved. Its reporting interface should be improved to personalize reports. Shortcut keys for us diehard shortcut key people would probably be helpful. We should be able to perform actions with shortcut keys.

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.

The user interface could be better in Salesforce Sales Cloud because it feels a little heavy.

Salesforce Sales Cloud overall is too complex. There is too much functionality, it's hard for the user, at the beginning. It takes a lot of time to update the information.

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.

The cost could be lower. I would like to see a more affordable licensing model.

What I'm expecting from Salesforce Sales Cloud is a more user-friendly interface. It's what could be improved in the solution.

It could have a more user-friendly interface.

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.

Featurewise, the product almost has all CRM features that one can think of. Beyond CRM, if the integration with MS Office can be made tighter and smoother, that could be great value for customers. Especially integrating MS Word and MS Excel would be really useful. If a lighter version of CPQ is made available, it would help many midsize customers. As of now, Salesforce is the most expensive CRMs out there - making it a bit more affordable will help them in a big way. There are also certain restrictions on the reports in terms of the number of records. Ideally, that should be removed.

In the next release, I would like to see more integration.

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.

Sales Cloud could be improved with more training. In general, the training is very good, but you have to really seek out some good options in order to upskill yourself. Another thing, which could also be a benefit, is that Sales is very customizable. If you move from one organization to another, you can see your Salesforce as before, but their Sales Cloud may look completely different from what you're used to. It's not like Microsoft Excel or Trello, where the layout and all the functions are the same. Because it's so customizable, I feel like there is a bit of a learning curve when you inherit another Sales Cloud instance. To be honest, I think that's the beauty of Salesforce because you can customize it so much to fit your needs as a company. It follows your processes and use cases in order for you to get the most out of the system itself. The other thing I believe Salesforce could improve on is the file storage system. Salesforce is very good for its account management processes and automation, but when it comes to file storage, it could use a bit of work to rival that of something like Microsoft OneDrive or SharePoint. With that being said, there is a lot of integration with a tool called Files Connect, which allows you to connect to SharePoint or OneDrive, so it's not an issue moving forward, but it's something that they could improve. An additional feature we would like to see is better integration. A lot of software is already very well-integrated with Salesforce, directly as well, but I think that because we use SAP, we would like to see more of a direct link. We have one via a third-party solution, but I think that integration should eventually be a lot easier without the use of a third-party. For now, it's still very manageable, though.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An area for improvement would be to open the door for other partners to develop interfaces for software integration. In addition, the amount of storage provided is limited, so the product is less cost-effective when working with larger amounts of data.

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).

The licensing price could be cheaper. I have addressed this with my IT department and, apparently, we spend a lot of money.

The problem is the solution has gotten so big, it's very complex now. It's a bit difficult to figure out how to do certain actions. The solution probably has between 300-500 features already. I can't think of one they are lacking. The solution is quite expensive.

The cost of this solution could be improved. It is pricey, although worth it now that they have bumped up default storage amounts.

If you don't have sysadmin rights, you can be hamstrung doing many things manually and one at a time.