Salesforce Platform Reviews

It is our customer base, and we use it for just about everything.

I am using the unlimited latest version. It is on the Salesforce cloud.

We use the whole gamut of it. We use it for customer information. We also use it for prospecting. It has information about our delivery team such as who has got a particular account. It also has any type of service information that is needed, such as billing address, demographics, system information, account teams, and account planning. If we want to delve into a customer, we can account plan and find out what they've got and what their networking environment looks like, and this information is held in our records. If something happens to me, and somebody called about that particular record, they can find this information and pick from where I left off.

It is easy to close pending deals. When a customer signs the paperwork, it has got the e-sign incorporated in it. So, when a customer says, "Yeah, let's move forward with that.", we send an amendment or a contract to the customer via e-sign. They sign it, and it comes right back to us. After that, the person who does the sign off on contracts signs it, and when they're finished with it, it comes right back to me stating that it has been signed and countersigned, and now I can go ahead and process that order and get to the customer a copy of the record so that they have a copy in their records. It is overall an easy place to keep things organized.

It is a good solution. It has a learning curve, but once you learn it, it is a very good piece of software to have to keep up with everything, such as cancellations, new accounts, new contacts, and new opportunities. We also sell co-location, so it gives us a lot of data center information, such as what rack this customer is in and how much power they've got on that particular rack. It gives a lot of information. You just need to know where to find it. Once you learn it, it is just easy to navigate. 

I can go anywhere with it because it is web-based. All I need to do is get to it, and I can get to my customer. It is pretty straightforward. It's like any piece of software nowadays. It has an application that can be taken with you anywhere. It is on my phone, and it is also on my iPad, desktop, and laptop, so I can take it with me anywhere. It is very easy to use and easy to access.

I like it because of the fact that it lets me know what I'm working on and what I've recently worked on. It also helps me and allows me to do tracking. If I want to go out and find out how many times I've touched customers, I can find that information out. It tracks such information, and we use it. If we send any type of promotions out, it tracks who gets those promotions and how they've responded to those promotions. It is just a well-organized space that kind of has everything that you need to take care of your customer.

There is always room for improvement. It can be hard to learn, but when you have somebody who is experienced in this, it is like anything else. It is like Excel, you'll never know everything about Excel, but there's somebody who would possibly know. I'm sure I don't know all of the ins and outs of Salesforce.

In terms of additional features, it has got pretty much everything in there. It has a lot of information, and it is perfect for me. I'm an old-school guy, so I think it's perfect, but I'm sure there's going to be some room for improvement somewhere along the line.

I have been using this solution for the last five years, but my company has probably been using it for quite some time.

The only glitches that you'll have will be the operator, but once you know the navigation of it all, you won't have a problem with it. It's like anything else you learn.

It is easy to scale. I use the unlimited version, so I've not been stumped on anything here. In terms of usage, all the personnel in our company use it.

I've signed up for difficult classes, and they've been Johnny-on-the-spot to help out and to see if there's anything else that they can do. Their customer service is top-notch.

It is pretty straightforward. It is pretty easy to set up accounts.

I don't know anything about its cost, but I'm sure it has got a nice little price tag that goes along with it. 

I would recommend this solution to others if they can afford it. It doesn't mean it is expensive. I don't know what it costs, but if you can afford it, it is a good way to get in. 

It is a good product, and it has served us well. It keeps us organized, and it keeps us with our customer numbers. It has a learning curve, but you got to start somewhere. Like anything, you have to learn it. If you've got a good attitude and an open mind, you can learn anything.

I would rate Salesforce Platform a 10 out of 10.

Our team is using it for tracking sales and following sales conversations.

I'm pretty indifferent towards the solution. I don't use it for anything personally, although the company itself makes use of it for sales. My background is Microsoft and even then I don't really use Dynamics for anything.

It's a core component of any CRM, and just having the ability to journal the conversations happening is great from a sales perspective.

I like that I can subscribe to the chatter surrounding an opportunity, as my sales team doesn't actually call anybody or follow up with anybody. Yet, if they paste bogus numbers on the pipeline, I can follow it to see that they didn't do the job. It's nice to have that transparency.

Salesforce is a phenomenal application. It's very diverse. 

It does need very specific resources to help deploy it and buy in from the users. It's one of those items it's pretty disruptive and if it's not deployed properly and if it doesn't get utilized efficiently, it won't be effective.

Salesforce doesn't seem to be a really great document repository like SharePoint and SharePoint is backed in behind Dynamic CRM. Therefore, in most cases, generally speaking, it seems like it makes more sense to go the Dynamics route, assuming that the customer understands that if they're already using Exchange, Teams, and Azure Active Directory, they're using role-based access and controls for security and compliance. They have SharePoint as the underlying solution for document collaboration.

Salesforce at that point doesn't make a whole lot of sense for many Microsoft users. For example, with a customer I work with, they have this kind of disparate entity, and they select Salesforce as they say it's the one that pops up on Google when you search and that's likely why they went with it. You can't go wrong with picking Salesforce, however, you also need to have an on-site sales resource such as a Salesforce admin to manage it as nobody can figure it out. It's pretty complex. On top of that, the connection to Teams and SharePoint is so far away.

We would like it if it were possible to record a meeting on an MP4 and be able to upload that into Salesforce as something the sales team can track. There might be third-party plugins that allow for that type of usability, however, I'm not too familiar with them. 

While my company has likely had the solution for years, prior to my involvement, they have recently made a mandate to sign into the product daily. That has been as of March.

The solution is pretty rock solid. There doesn't seem to be issues with bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

While I can't say exactly how many people at my company use it, I know it's a large amount and we have 500 staff members. 

We also use Teams for our video conferencing and meetings, and I've been using Team's folders to save assets, notes from OneNote, video recordings, and stream recordings from the Teams sessions. I saved them all into the Teams file, however, the larger population of the Salesforce team doesn't even know how to use Teams and doesn't know how to log into Teams even if it's for meetings.

I didn't handle any aspect of the deployment process. We have a guy on site that kind of manages it and he seems kind of stressed about it. He supports it for the entire organization.

I am not sure which version of the solution I am on at this time. 

There's a Google disruption going on here in terms of how to share content and paste it back into Salesforce. I've just tried to put the link in there. Now I'm kind of on the journal conversations. If I've added an activity or event, or I just paste the notes or link to whatever else inside the journal conversation, there seems to be payback if other users pay attention to it.

I'm kind of a Microsoft guy. However, if someone's having a look at it, I would advise that they really look at what they're trying to accomplish and what the rest of the tech stack looks like. Maybe it is the best for what they're trying to do, however, from a Microsoft perspective, most folks have exchanged Teams and everything else, and it goes hand in hand, with your Active directory and the rest of those identity services.

When you start with a disparate CRM, it's kind of against the grain and it's not quite as cohesive. On top of that, when you have meetings and everything else, you have content and collateral that's created so you need to know where are you going to store those assets.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It's a good solution, however, it's not something I would personally pick. 

We deployed Salesforce for global shared services, for global business services, where we consolidated and standardized on case management software. It's a marketing cloud. We used Einstein as well. We had a pretty large Salesforce deployment. If it was for all internal customers around our global shared services and business services, which was connected with the contact centers. We built contact centers in Manila, Prague, Bogota, and Tampa, among others. Salesforce was the platform that we consolidated all our processes on. We brought it together with Genesis and Interactive Intelligence around the call centers so that we brought everything together.

When we first did the assessment, it was global and it was for putting in a standardized software platform for all the corporate functions of HR, finance, procurement, payroll, and compliance. We standardized all their processes on Salesforce, and then we did that around case management and knowledge management as well. We did that across all those call centers, and that was our Salesforce deployment. We had to EBOM that with ServiceNow and Workday and all the financial systems, SAP, et cetera. We use Salesforce as one of our enterprise platforms.

The flexibility around the deployment is the most valuable aspect of the solution.

The user-friendliness and the interactiveness of Salesforce are great. The tools that came built with it are useful. Between Genesis and Salesforce, there were some schemas that were prebuilt. In terms of the implementation around the popups on the Genesis system and the Interactive Intelligence, they had some pre-built Salesforce schemas which made it very simple. 

With AI for Einstein, the bot capabilities, self-service capabilities, were great. We built a global portal that was Einstein, and the bots were key for the self-service capabilities that we were trying to deploy as part of this transformation to digital, and we basically put all of our documents and we digitized just about all the processes. There was a lot of our documentation as well and we put everything online. Einstein helped in the evaluation of these products. It helped navigate for the users, the end-users, which were all internal. We had some external too, as we ended up providing that service for third parties around invoicing and procurement. That said, Einstein helped in the user effectiveness and efficiencies around the interactions.

The biggest challenge we had was the cost and the licensing, and we ended up getting an ELA, so enterprise licensing agreement. That took a lot of negotiations and a lot of pressure, however, we were able to get good pricing, the community licensing, and they bundled in Einstein. They bundled a lot of capabilities for us with the ELA.

I've used the solution for the last two years, although it was deployed in 2017 or 2019.

The stability is very strong. We haven't had any issues. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The product is scalable. 

We ended up getting premium support. Due to the fact that it was a critical environment, the call centers, we ended up getting the premium support that was built into the package that we provided. We did get the higher level, higher SLAs, to make sure that there was business-critical support.

We had a large Salesforce deployment in our pharma and medical device organizations. Therefore, we ended up getting enterprise licensing. We ended up having a good set of knowledge. We ultimately used Deloitte to do our development, and Deloitte had some very, very strong capabilities in Salesforce, specifically around case management. That got us going pretty quick. We had a very successful deployment in Salesforce.

From a capability standpoint, Salesforce has really met our needs. It was pretty easy to deploy. We kind of stuck to the basic versions and tried not to customize. We did configurations, however, we tried to stay native for most of Salesforce.

You really have to work hard with the licensing. they are open to negotiating, however, it takes a while to get there. 

We evaluated Salesforce, Appian, Pega, ServiceNow, Remedy, and we ended up selecting ServiceNow and Salesforce.

We selected Salesforce over Pega as we were able to consolidate everything on it. Then we selected ServiceNow for the IT side of it.

I'd advise to definitely not customize. As they rolled out the new versions, which were every six months, there had to be some significant testing and verification that happened. New companies need to have a good, strong third-party provider that is very experienced to assist. We used Deloitte. We did investigations. We evaluated Accenture, KPMG, and some others - even IBM - however, basically, we decided on Deloitte and that was a good decision for us.

You need to have a really good partner who has a center of excellence, or experts, that could give you a lot of insights into what they've learned that could jumpstart your deployment. I'd advise new users to just stay standard and really focus on the licensing. Otherwise, it could get really costly. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We are quite satisfied with Salesforce. 

CRM tool 

I find that the SalesForce solution can be used to capture everything you're doing during the course of the workday. I'm not a senior executive. I'm the guy in the trenches. I find management is trying to develop a portal to log all the information possible, so that, if I ever left, that they would be able to recreate my funnel and have all the contact information and the customer information and try to better understand the dynamics of the decision making within any of the corporations that I've identified as potential customers.

What I really like about Salesforce is that it's very intuitive. It's an easy platform for salespeople to quickly and efficiently be able to track an opportunity and develop custom reports for management. 

At times, companies that have embraced the Salesforce engineering model, have been able to gather resources necessary to facilitate quotes. It'll be able to store all my information, as far as notes from calls, meetings, and tracking the progress of a particular project.

There's always room for improvement. Simplification is something it needs for sales. Every time you get the engineers involved, they make things a little too complicated. It might be more beneficial to simplify everything for quick and easy reference.  

The solution should offer a Salesforce version for individuals. You have a number of people that have independent agencies and other independent workers that are out there that want to be able to track what they're doing and be able to put that into some sort of a schedule that coordinates with their calendar and everything else. When I look at Salesforce and I open Salesforce, it's unique to me as an individual. I've used Salesforce with many different companies. Sometimes you can see the visibility of other accounts, and things of that nature. These platforms can be problematic as you have people that are always looking at your stuff and then trying to work their way around you. 

With Salesforce, I do feel that I'm doing a lot of repetitive tasks. We're constantly, re-putting in the same thing over and over and over. And that's something that Salesforce should figure out. They need to remove redundancies, as salespeople want to move on to the next deal. Salespeople want to talk and track the initial and primary points of contact. They want to put in a quick note and move on to the next opportunity. 

For a salesperson, sometimes, you should be able to categorize your opportunities in the vertical markets that can be beneficial as well. I know it makes it a little more complex, however, that way you could see everything at a glance. You could look up which vertical, for example, you are more successful in. You should be able to split those out and dissect everything a bit better.

That way, when you're running your campaigns, you could actually have some consistency. For example, as a salesperson, you could say "today I'm going to call logistics companies" or "today I'm going to call finance companies". 

I've been in technical sales for about 30 years now and have used Salesforce for almost 20 years now.

The company I work for right now has 400 people.

I actually worked with GoldMine CRM, one of the first CRM tools that were out there. They worked on my internet services and voice services for many years before selling GoldMine to Vendata.

What I liked about their tool, which is something that Salesforce doesn't do, is they actually had a version for individuals as opposed to companies. That way, I would be able to track everything I was doing, too, and coordinate, and be able to save that information without setting up all the alarms that come with downloading something.

I haven't had to buy Salesforce, however, I have heard it's $1500 a user. 

I've used Goldmine Software, SEIBEL, Oracle, and Symantec Compass. 

The company I work for has a partnership with Salesforce. 

The product version is the latest and up-to-date. It's all handled through the company I work for.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. Nothing is perfect, however, Salesforce is a good CRM tool. 

We primarily use the solution for Account Management and Lead Management.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the unit coordination between sales and marketing when it comes to lead management.. We needed one CRM where we can have all the relevant lead lists, customize lead information fields over there, upload important information, update information and pass the information from sales to amrketing and vice versa and ensure a seamless coordination - that was the best part of it because it improved the productivity and no longer we rely on email threads or manual excel sheets -we had a robust mechanism.

Another interesting feature is integration with other marketing automation platforms like ZoomInfo, Outreach etc. This significantly reduces our workload or maintaining or integration of data across tools and seamlessly helps us execute our activities. 

The initial setup was straightforward.. It didnot take any time to learn and set it up. 

The product has proven to be stable. We have not faced any productivity or workability issues. 

The pricing is good.

We've found the technical support to be very helpful and responsive. 

Basically, Salesforce has two different views. One is the plastic view and one is the lightening view. If I log in the view is not returned for me specifically. For example, if I'm working with view number one, and I toggle to view number two and then log out when I log out, I come back and I'm still back in view number one. I'd like to stay in whichever view I need.

Sometimes what will happen is we work on it and then we move to a different tab and work on something else. After five minutes, when we come back, it automatically signs out. The thing is, every time we need to re-login. I would like to propose a session extension pop-up. This means that there will be some kind of reminder that your session is going to expire in the next two minutes and to please sign in if you want to continue. 

We haven't been using the solution for a short amount of time. We've used it for about two to four months.

The solution is quite stable. There are no bugs or glitches. We haven't found that it crashes or freeze. Its performance is reliable.

We have yet to attempt to scale the solution generally. 

We did not add any users, however, we have added more and more workflows. We've been able to customize to our needs. In that sense, it can scale.

We have five users on the solution currently.

I'm not sure if we have plans to expand the product at this time.

I've been in touch with technical support and would give them a rating of nine out of ten. They are quite responsive. We've been very satisfied with their level of assistance.

The initial setup is not complex or overly difficult. It's very straightforward, very easy. A company shouldn't have any issues with the process.

I cannot recall the exact amount of time that the deployment took.

I don't have too much insight on the licensing, however, the pricing is quite reasonable. It's not overly expensive. 

We did evaluate one solution, however, Salesforce is the best when it comes to marketing.

We are just a customer and an end-user.

It is my understanding that we are using the latest version of the solution at this time. 

Salesforce is great. Without any doubt, I would say one should definitely go for Salesforce. It does a lot of sales and marketing in the CRM that would help you if you work on productivity. If someone wants to have a single place where they need to be productive and that will deliver to the sales and marketing list, then yes Salesforce is the place.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've been very happy with its capabilities overall. 

There are many use cases as we have done more than 300 projects globally. One of the projects was where we implemented a customer care solution for dealers, sub-dealers, contractors, et cetera. We have worked in aviation, where we designed solutions there as well. One client was a manufacturer of parts for the aircraft. The quality check of each product, each spray part, what they were manufacturing, was pretty hard. It's supposed to go through ten different testing checkpoints. We designed a solution for them on Salesforce, to follow the protocol and the process.

Apart from that, I've worked on many real estate projects where a company used it for managing properties, including rental properties and construction. We have worked with integrating Salesforce with a government website where they used to update the new buyers of the property across Philadelphia. We pushed data from that government website into a client's Salesforce. That way, they were always aware of sold properties, when, and by whom. They used the information to make a pitch for renovation assistance services. 

The solution has grown its services over time. Now, for example, it includes a Sales cloud, Marketing cloud, Service cloud, et cetera.

I liked the classic version of Salesforce. There are a lot of really great basic features.

It's very flexible and offers tremendous features for customers.

The solution is stable. 

The product works well at an enterprise level.

Pricing is the biggest factor. The cost right now is too high and I've had a lot of clients leave. 

Sometimes customers can get annoyed as there are just too many features to understand and work with. They should consider reducing their offering, or work to streamline it so that it is not so overwhelming. There are now many great competitors that offer more streamlined, easy-to-understand services. 

Customers need accounting, and, right now, they need to go elsewhere, to something like Xero, for example, or QuickBooks. It would be nice to have some kind of accounting available right in Salesforce. 

The stability could be better. 

We don't get any leads from Salesforce here in India. It would be helpful if we could use the product to get us leads. 

We've been on the Salesforce platform for about 11 years at this point. It's been over a decade and we've used it for quite a while. 

In Salesforce, I haven't seen many issues. However, in some cases, we have clients that for some reason don't see specific add-on features and we bring in Salesforce to understand why certain things do not appear. 

However, for the most part, the stability is good and doesn't cause any issues. 

We have not set a benchmark in terms of the size of companies we work with. We don't work with thousands of users. We are helping single users from companies and we have worked with 4,000 plus users at an enterprise level.

That said, this solution works well for enterprise-level organizations. 

A customer who is coming to Salesforce for the first time, and doesn't understand CRMS, may need to take time to understand business practices. However, if a person is in IT or software, they usually get it a bit faster. They can handle the complexity.

During implementation, it's best to take baby steps before getting into complex cases. There's a learning curve, however, the level of the learning curve varies from customer to customer. 

The amount of time deployment takes depends on the kind of project.

The pricing is pretty expensive. 

We're using the enterprise version of the solution. 

I've done only four or five projects since I started my own shop back in 2010. Most of the projects which we have done are all for overseas companies. 80% are from the US and 20% are from the rest of the globe, including Australia, Canada, Europe, and the UK.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We primarily use Salesforce to manage pipeline opportunities. We are customers of Salesforce and I'm a senior enterprise multicloud strategist.

Salesforce enables us to track the percentage of opportunities that progress, the percentage that don't, and the reasons why.

This solution gives us a great platform to import and save customer data from various sources, and then manage them using outreach and various plugins to keep activity up. The dashboards are great, I can see lost or suspended accounts, year to day, total opportunities either as owner or team member, team pipelines, etc. It's very modular, so I don't have to continue to run reports and then track them myself. They have third-party plugins which are basically the same as features that enable you to get whatever functionality you need. It's fast and it works well, it's easy to aggregate information from multiple sources and all in all, I feel like it makes us a lot more productive as opposed to having to go to multiple websites. Here you can pull up an account, see all the tabs for that account without the need to have seven different tabs open on your browser.

The reporting functionality is very granular and you can do a lot with it, but unfortunately, it's not very intuitive. It's hard to get the report to show exactly what you want. It works if you turn it into a tile in the dashboard but working through it and creating the report is a little cumbersome, it's terrible. It's not super user-friendly, it takes time and some fiddling around. Simplified reporting would be great, but perhaps I don't have enough experience. I could spend some time figuring it out but for now, I create a report that I never have to create again. It's in a dashboard, so I don't get the opportunity to create much. With some training, I'd likely be better at creating reports. 

I've been using this solution for six months. 

The solution is stable. 

I've been able to scale very easily. We've doubled the size of our team in the last year and it's really easy to add new users and with a couple of minutes of training they've pretty much got it down. For that kind of internal growth and for everyone to be using it relatively well in such a short period of time, is great.

We have an internal technical resource that's able to assist on the Salesforce side. One of the things we've added recently is a button where you can essentially open a ticket for questions related to the use of Salesforce. In the past, I would reach out to our internal support team to help me build a report. Now, we simply have a request button that gets us to Salesforce.com support. I open the ticket and get a very quick response which is really great. 

From my perspective, they need to incorporate plugins. Salesforce is a great platform. It's like being able to use the apps on an iPhone. It looks good, you can make calls and it's easy to use but it's the ability to add apps which makes it great. In Salesforce terms, the value lies in the modular solutions through the plugins.

In terms of rating, the solution loses points because of the non-intuitive reporting. On the other hand, it provides many benefits. I would therefore rate the solution eight out of 10. 

We primarily use the solution for the CRM, the customer relationship management, but now we are expanding its usage to allow our customers use access an online customer portal based on salesforce community and using B2B commerce  

It was a great add-on to our digital landscape. It is an easy-to-use, easy to customize platform.

Salesforce is not a product, it is a platform, there is a huge difference between the two use cases. 

The platform allows us to receive and collect information easily.

There's a great ecosystem within Salesforce:

1) A huge network of implementation-certified  partners  who have great knowledge about the platform

2) A Market place where you  can download 3rd party apps on the platform

3) There is very good online documentation available and Salesforce offers good communication with its clients. It's very user-friendly and has a system that is easy to learn.

We've found the stability to be quite good.

The initial setup is easy.

The product can scale well.

The solution doesn't really have any weak areas. Overall, it's a very good product, but technical support could be a bit faster. For the standard support, their SLA is about 48 hours which is not that fast if you have a serious issue 

Based on the platform capabilities. I see that the Platform is very, very capable of handling a full ERP, and not only a CRM.

Maybe in the near future, SF will launch their own ERP system.

We've been using this solution for ten years at this point. It's been a decade. It's been a long time.

The stability of the product has been good overall. We don't experience any downtime. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. You do need access to a good internet connection, however. Without a strong internet connection, you may experience some problems. However, that's not the fault of the Salesforce backend in any way. 

The scalability is very good. If you need to expand it, you can do so relatively easily.

Technical support is okay. It's average. Their response times could be faster in terms of getting assistance to us. I'd rate it overall at a four out of five. Mostly we are happy with the level of support.

We did previously use another solution before Salesforce.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not overly complex or difficult. 

The time it takes to deploy depends on what your plans are for the solution. Without any specific customizations, it's a very quick process. Once you log on, you have access.

The solution is relatively expensive. It also comes with extra costs. For example, extra technical support is a bit more. It can add up.

We did evaluate a few other options before ultimately choosing Salesforce. Among these was Microsoft.

We're just Salesforce customers. We don't have a business relationship with them.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We're mostly quite satisfied with the product and its capabilities.

I'd recommend the solution to other users and companies. However, you need a strong team to manage it. You need to have suitable admins on hand to properly implement the rules.