Salesforce Platform Reviews

We use the product for management processes such as grading sales orders, including all the KPI for the sales team to close negotiations. I'm head of IT and corporate process and we are customers of Salesforce.

Now that mail and other communications have been automated by Salesforce, we have seen a 60% increase in efficiency levels. In addition, we improved 30% of the analysis of the KPIs in the sales team.

The value of this product to us is the seamless experience and having a fully integrated solution with all the market solutions. Salesforce also have a lot of partners with product teams for major project support. There are continuous improvements to the platform. Each day we find new functionalities or reports and it's very good for the team.

The solution is very expensive compared to CRM solutions. It requires a lot of configuration that could make it difficult for some people. We are lucky to have a partner helping us. In addition, the license together with the cost of implementation, makes it very expensive. In some cases it's good to be modular, but in this case each time you want to integrate something, there's an additional cost. If you want to integrate with Office 365 you have to pay; if you want a seamless process with the marketing team or the accounting team, you have to pay. Right now our process is good and we can do anything we need but we may need something more in the future. 

I've been using this solution for six months. 

We haven't had any issues with stability. 

Scalability is great, we can do anything we want. Again, you have to pay for it but scalability is good. If you want to add processes, functions, area, additional information, it's very good.
For now, we have the sales manager and the principal sales team using the solution. Marketing and other users don't have access yet. 

Customer service responds very quickly, within a few minutes. They will respond with a solution within about three hours. 

The initial setup was okay because we paid for the configuration using an external partner and we didn't have the internal resources for that. We defined the process and all the designs with the partner in the first week. It then took another month to define the environments and some functionalities. The process took a total of five weeks. We currently have one IT leader who spends about 20% of their time on it and then an admin who spends about 10% of the day making changes and administering. We are going to increase usage in the coming year in the sales team and maybe increase some functionality.

My advice is to consider in detail what you are acquiring because you might not get everything you need in the initial quote provided by Salesforce. It's tricky and the price will be high. 

We don't plan to replace Salesforce but we're looking at other ERP solutions to integrate with Salesforce. 

It's important to understand what you need for the short, middle and long term. Salesforce is a huge platform and might provide a level of functionality that you don't need. I would highly recommend implementation with a partner. It simplifies the process and if a company doesn't have the resources or people to administer the platform, it can effect the outcome. It's good to have a Salesforce administrator to assist when you need help. 

I rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

We mainly use the solution for Salesforce and for the sales team. They would use it to advise their clients as to other portfolio balances. Also, at any given point in time, we would also use it for referencing any outstanding documents that would ensure that we are KYC compliant.

We like that it can become a single source of truth that can be shared by providers who would need to interact with their clients on a daily basis. Therefore, rather than having to consult multiple systems to determine a client's portfolio balance, we can just look at one place.

We like that we have the ability to configure the solution to meet our needs.

It provides a 360-degree view of the client in one place. 

The solution can scale.

It is stable. 

The back end really isn't user-friendly at all. In terms of data import, migrating data from, for example, a core banking system into Salesforce, we find it very difficult to do the mapping.

They need a proprietary tool that would allow for ease of integration into the environment. That's not just for migration. It's mostly for one-time loads when we need to get the deltas in. We need some sort of tool to make this easier.

The initial setup is complex. 

technical support is not very responsive. 

I've been using the solution for seven to eight years. 

The solution is stable and reliable. I'd rate the stability and reliability nine out of ten. There are no bugs or glitches. 

The scalability is okay. I'd rate the ease of expansion a six out of ten. 

Technical support is not very responsive. 

Negative

In the past, I performed the migration to Salesforce in another organization.

The initial setup is very complex. 

We have witnessed an ROI while using this solution. 

Even though the solution is expensive, it does give companies a good value for the money they pay.

I'm not sure which version of the solution I'm using. 

I'd advise new users to first do a lot of training beforehand. You need a good base of knowledge before diving into any kind of project that will require development. 

I'd rate the solution six out of ten.

We use the Salesforce Platform for all the CRM activities in the organization.

Salesforce Platform could improve by having better integration with Microsoft Azure. For development, we use Microsoft Azure and there was proper integration between the two solutions. We had issues with the customer and they were logged into the Salesforce Platform. We did not have any good way of integrating those issues into the R&D. The R&D mainly uses Microsoft Azure.

I have been using the Salesforce Platform for approximately four years.

Salesforce Platform is stable.

The scalability of the Salesforce Platform is good.

We have 2,000 to 5,000 users using this solution. The product management uses it extensively.

We have used the support and I have not heard anyone complaining about the level of support.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Salesforce Platform a nine out of ten.

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. 

I am an end-user, I was never a power user or an architect, and I never developed any reports.

I use Salesforce for logging meetings, sales information, and metrics. I also use it for updating opportunities and looking at my own sales performance reports.

The company's sales team was at least 5,000 people.

I was hoping that with the integration of Tableau that they would have better end-user analytics to play around with. Coming from a MicroStrategy background, I was kind of disappointed. 

MicroStrategy is actually easier to use than Tableau. It was a function of the license that I was given.

Salesforce is incredibly slow. It was difficult to run live sales calls and leverage Salesforce at the same time. You can't ask a customer to hold for 45 seconds while you are looking for information about the account.

Salesforce also did not integrate well with some of the other systems that we had.

More end-user functionality would be useful. They should have some pre-canned reports that other analysts or salespeople would find valuable. 

I tried Salesforce Einstein, but that never really worked for me. The PowerSeller tool was just as helpful.

We would gather news reports about specific customers and identify if there were any buzzwords attached to it. I was able to create customized daily intelligence reports that would go out directly to my customers. TechnoMile integrated these reports directly into Salesforce allowing every salesperson that had the Archintel module to subscribe to specific reports giving them a compelling reason to reach out to the customer. Salesforce has a news feed function, but it is pretty ugly and very clunky to use. If they leveraged some sort of tool like this one, it would be amazing.

I use Salesforce every day.

I personally did not use the tech support at Salesforce. We had our own IT team.

The slowness of Salesforce could have been due to the fact that it is on the cloud. I had used Salesforce at other companies and it was not as slow.

Salesforce is the best one out there. I know that SugarCRM claims to be better but I haven't had a chance to use it to compare.

I would rate Salesforce a 6 out of 10. It wasn't great and wasn't terrible.

Our primary use case is as a CRM. The goal is to create an easy and organized way of collecting and reporting on data. There are many pros and cons but overall, this is the best CRM that I have used.

I have utilized at least five different CRMs over the last five years and although HubSpot was the easiest to use, it was not as robust as Salesforce. Salesforce inches above the rest as my favorite. I feel like some things are complicated just to be complicated and that takes away from the overall productivity it is creating for my team.      

Salesforce has created an easy way to track customer interactions and has simple reporting functions. I feel like some things are overly complicated for no reason, as there are much simpler ways to achieve the same goal.

The ability to customize things is great, as we can create an environment that is more conducive to how we do business. This allows us to be more efficient as a team and allows me to monitor their productivity without micro-managing them.

I can also set tasks for them when things get missed, as a friendly reminder. 

The most valuable feature is being able to track the activity of my team and report results.

It is easy to add accounts, contacts, and opportunities.

The integration with different applications makes quick work of tracking activity.

The ability to customize things is great, as we can create an environment that is more conducive to how we do business. This allows us to be more efficient as a team and provide quick and easy reporting for our management team and customers.

I also like the automated alerts, to catch things people miss so that things stay updated correctly. 

Easier bulk updating would be appreciated. 

We need more flexibility with building processes and workflow automation.

Better flexibility in editing emails created from templates would be great, and being able to add hyperlinks in emails for scheduling meetings would allow us to automate more.

I would also like more flexibility in being able to designate both default and override values, as I feel like every time we have a new process, we have to add more fields to accommodate exceptions to the norm.         

We have been using the Salesforce Platform for five years.

Salesforce is easily scalable.

I have only used the online resources and found them to outdated sometimes. Our Salesforce admin takes care of all this now. 

I have used several different CRMs and my least favorite was Microsoft Dynamics. It was bulky, not user-friendly, and reporting was not ideal.   

In terms of whether the initial setup was complex, I would say Yes and No. You definitely want to pay for assistance and support for set-up if you don't have an internal Salesforce admin. There is a learning curve that can be time-consuming. 

We had a vendor to start with, and now we have an in-house team.

Using this solution makes our company more agile and efficient, and prevents information silos.

My advice is that if you are going to use a CRM then use it correctly, get licenses for everyone, and demand compliance. Having only one department use it and not others will devalue the tool and its ability to provide effective solutions. 

Not at this company but in previous companies yes.   One declined Salesforce because it was not easy to get out of should they need to change their mind, and they were penny pinchers to a fault, so it was best they did that as I had issues with data loss in past when leaving Salesforce and going to a new CRM.  

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. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

The solution scales extremely well.

The stability has been great.

There's a learning curve. It was a bit hard to understand the logical way of working with it, just at the beginning.

In Salesforce, you cannot adjust the level of information to what you want to exploit or to use yourself and not share. In a big environment, it's hard to hide information you need, so you have to get local writing for avoiding sharing information you don't want to share with other sales guys or management. It's useful for your business, for your objective, however, it's not useful if you share it on too large a scale, as name dropping is something our consultants and our other sales guys try to avoid in order to be discreet.

I've been using the solution for one year at this point. 

The stability has been great. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or free. We find it to be completely reliable.

The scalability has been excellent. We haven't had any issues and don't see any limitations at all. if a company needs to expand, it's not a problem to do so. 

I've never had to contact technical support. Therefore, I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are. We have our own internal team that we would turn to if we ran into any problems. 

I've used Microsoft Dynamics. I come from Microsoft Dynamics and it was more integrated with our email solution. It was for the agenda, the calendar, and all the tools you use to just work on a daily basis.

The initial setup is really easy.  It's not overly complex or difficult. However, that said, figuring out how to us is a bit difficult to start with.

We have a pretty limitless license. However, I don't know the exact costs involved. I'm just a user and do not handle any of the payments or contracts between Salesforce and our company.

We are a partner from Salesforce. There is a special agreement with them. 

We are Salesforce partners. 

I'm in sales. I'm working on Salesforce. My consultants work with different tools, and they are certified on it. 98% of our consultants are certified on solutions.

Overall, it's been a good solution and we've been happy with it. 

For those considering using the solution, I would advise that the company or team follow the different enrollment videos to be ready to jump into the Salesforce mechanisms.

I'd recommend using the solution. 

I'd rate the product at a nine out of ten. However, I find Microsoft Dynamics better.