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Salesforce Sales Cloud serves as our primary tool for our sales team and reviews team to document and keep all our information in one place as a source of truth. We use it to manage our business processes and the effectiveness of how our team works, going through specific things such as the sales process or any business process that we need to monitor and make sure that the process is working and that we're following the right motions in order to work effectively and intelligently and making sure that we're getting to what we need to do in a timely fashion and manner.

A quick specific example of how my team uses Salesforce Sales Cloud in our daily workflow is that today we're managing reviews. When new users are created or when we're uploading specific people who we need to solicit reviews from, we put it into Salesforce. It's either an automatic or manual process at the moment. Then we have a team that actually solicits and calls them for reviews.

Our main use case for Salesforce Sales Cloud is that our team uses it as a tool to guide their workflow and ensure that they're doing what they need to do on a day-to-day basis. It's unique because as a manager, I am able to see what's done and what's not done. We're able to take a business process and break it down into bite-sized pieces and then manage that process through Salesforce Sales Cloud to ensure that we're constantly optimizing it and making sure that the business gets what it needs and that we're fulfilling our KPIs and that nothing falls through the cracks.

Salesforce Sales Cloud offers excellent features, particularly the ability to make changes on the fly as an admin. Being a platform allows us to make changes easily, enabling us to be nimble, which is a great win. The depth of the reporting that we can access helps us see where we are in any of our processes at any given time.

The flexibility and reporting features have helped my team significantly, as I am working at a company that's very data-driven, and I happen to be a data-driven individual as well. I do not like to make decisions on a whim or just from intuition. Being able to pull reports in Salesforce Sales Cloud based on any of the fields that we have there and then building logic on those fields saves me time and also gives me visibility into what's going on with my teams across multiple departments, which is very helpful for us.

I appreciate that Salesforce Sales Cloud is constantly evolving and adding new features, allowing us to turn features on and off. This is very beneficial.

Salesforce Sales Cloud has positively impacted my organization as the old excuse where a lot of people used to prefer working in Excel has been eliminated. Nowadays, we have a system that's built around our business needs, which helps us optimize processes, make processes much shorter, and give us insights into sales cycles and how to improve them. We keep our discussions and our calls in Salesforce Sales Cloud. It also helps us manage certain departments, making sure that our time to delivery is effective, that we're not lagging behind, and that all customers' needs are taken care of.

We have definitely seen reduced time to delivery and increased sales as we've experienced improved efficiency and cost savings. Cost savings go into the tens of thousands of dollars.

In terms of positive impact, I have noticed that it gives all different departments visibility into our processes and where we are within specific projects and how we're doing with sales. Anyone at any given time, especially the executive teams, can monitor how many sales we've done, how many programs are running, what the status of each program is, whether we're above or ahead of the curve or behind the curve, and then we're able to spend time and fix these things.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is beneficial for the business because it manages business processes and saves a lot of time and effort. Each employee having to manage multiple Excel spreadsheets or using Google Sheets could be a catastrophe. Salesforce Sales Cloud basically streamlines that process, so there are probably hundreds of hours saved. It also allows us to manage things and automate things. I don't say we need to get rid of employees, but when you're going into such a project, you can already assume that you won't be needing so many employees to throw more employees at a problem. It's extremely important to plan before you implement such a tool.

Salesforce Sales Cloud can be improved in several areas. First, the UI is an area for enhancement. Even though they've launched Lightning, it's clunky at times with page load speeds. It also needs to be made extremely more user-friendly. For new people using Salesforce Sales Cloud, there is a steep learning curve. Additionally, giving non-admins the ability to make changes on the fly is something that I feel is necessary. Currently with Salesforce Sales Cloud, you need to have a consultant. It's hard to build the flows or workflows. Making it easier for that end-user who's not so technically minded to help themselves is essential.

I choose seven out of ten because I think you need a consultant or a consulting company to help you build it out. Certain changes should be made much easier and more user-friendly where an admin can do it. The automation processes need to be much simpler. If you're looking at other tools out there, for example SalesLoft or HubSpot, it's much easier to build those workflows and do automation.

I have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud since 2007.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is very stable.

Salesforce Sales Cloud's scalability is impressive as it grows easily with my organization's needs. Scalability is possible when you have ruthless planning. You need to have the end goal in sight before you adopt such a platform, as with any CRM. If you don't have the end in mind or a goal with proper milestones and project management, it will be a disaster. The key is planning.

The customer support for Salesforce Sales Cloud has improved over time. When you're talking about mega enterprise platforms, in the beginning, it's really terrible. But I think as the years move on, they've gotten a lot better. However, we have an in-house admin and an offshore team that manages our instance. Having this in-house team is very nimble and much easier. I wouldn't say you go to Salesforce Sales Cloud for their customer support unless you purchase one of their premier plans, which is additional money. I feel sometimes they nickel and dime instead of providing a full package. We bought the platform, we bought into the platform, and we find workarounds in order to get what we need.

Neutral

At my current organization, we've always had Salesforce Sales Cloud, so I don't know what they had before I joined. In previous companies, we used home-baked systems. And then it was always that question: do you build or buy? We ended up buying because when you're buying a product or solution, there's a team that's thinking day and night about that solution and how to make it better. That allows a company where you're at to focus on their core competencies, which is their product. We switched from a home-built system into Salesforce Sales Cloud, which was difficult in the beginning, and it's hard to change habits, but eventually, after some time with rigorous planning, we managed to release a good, stable Salesforce Sales Cloud version for the company to use.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been that it takes a lot of negotiation. Salesforce Sales Cloud is extremely expensive. They have their year-over-year increase of, if it's 3% or 8%, they keep on increasing prices every year. It's completely licensed, so you have to really know which licenses or the amount of licenses you want to purchase before you go into negotiation with them. They're generally reluctant to lower licenses and lower cost. It's an effect where they want to start using strategy with different levers, signing multi-year contracts, and so on. I think it's important to get the best deal when you start because then pricing, besides their yearly increase which you can negotiate with, will not go up. Getting very firm with the costs is vital.

My advice for others looking into using Salesforce Sales Cloud is to look at the size of the company, how many people are going to be using it, whether or not you have somebody that can build it out, and have somebody with experience in CRM systems to map out what you're looking for. Have a look at Salesforce Sales Cloud, have a look at HubSpot, have a look at any other tools out there that provide you with a sales platform. It's then about the users; make sure that your users feel comfortable using the tool because it doesn't matter what tool you bring into your organization, the users have to feel comfortable using it. It has to be frictionless and easy to adopt. If you don't have those things in mind, your project most likely will fail. I rate this solution a seven out of ten.

From my perspective, I use Apollo.io to get and run simultaneous campaigns including LinkedIn outreach, email outreach, and cold calling.

When it comes to cold calling, we find contact numbers. For email outreach, we find verified email IDs, and for LinkedIn outreach, we find LinkedIn URLs.

We sometimes run campaigns using Apollo.io email automation, where we can set up sequences and multiple follow-ups. The first follow-up will be an email, the second follow-up will be a call outreach task, and the third will be another task sending a connect message through LinkedIn.

I was using workflows to automate tasks rather than doing manual day-to-day tasks. We can easily create automated workflows in Apollo.io to save time on manual tasks.

In one of my recent campaigns, I was targeting EdTech startups. The ICP focused on companies with 10 to 20 employees in the USA within the EdTech industry. We initially targeted them through Apollo.io using cold calls, emails, and LinkedIn outreach.

What stands out is the Apollo.io extension. When we use the extension, we can directly view LinkedIn profiles, and it automatically provides LinkedIn IDs and contact numbers. If contact numbers are available on LinkedIn, it displays them and gives an option to add to existing lists.

The extension works effectively with Sales Navigator as. Since Sales Navigator doesn't have an export tool, Apollo.io's extension allows us to easily export data into CSV files.

When it comes to USA contacts, it can be challenging. Some Apollo.io numbers are incorrect, especially when cold calling. The numbers often go unanswered, and when someone does answer, it's frequently not the correct person.

We encountered these issues mainly in the USA and UK regions, particularly when targeting EdTech companies. However, when running a campaign in Australia, most of our cold calls were answered successfully.

I believe they need to update their data in the USA and UK regions. Some of the data is outdated, and updating it would significantly improve the service. We can't afford to target the wrong person with incorrect information.

The interface is very easy to use, and they normally update it twice a month, which is good. However, they should focus on updating their data instantly rather than maintaining outdated information.

I have been using Apollo.io for maximum two years.

The cost of Apollo.io is acceptable and helps in saving costs compared to using multiple tools. Instead of having separate tools for email campaigns and cold calling campaigns, Apollo.io provides all three functionalities on one platform.

Creating workflows saves us considerable time rather than hiring interns for manual tasks. When it comes to cost savings, this is significant. Many companies hire people for manual tasks, but with Apollo.io, we can easily create workflows to save time and reduce hiring costs.

Due to some outdated data, we considered looking at competitors related to Apollo.io because we cannot target prospects with incorrect information. We initially looked at competitors such as Lusha.