Salesforce Platform Reviews

We use it to manage the customer base, sales funnel, and sales team. We also intend to use it for CRM.

It is very modular in approach. It is very light, and it can be used on various devices. It could be used on an Android phone or a laptop, which makes it good for the sales team on the road.

It could have a lot more customization options in terms of fonts and reports. 

There should be an even lighter version with just two or three fields. It could be a bit more light if the field guys want to use it on a mobile phone on the road. 

For deploying it for CRM, maybe we can have our customer database, project funnels, and projects to help us in managing our supply chain business.

I have been using this solution for almost ten or eleven years. In my current organization, we have been using it for the last two years. I have also used it in my previous company.

It has been quite stable. We didn't have any challenges.

In terms of scalability, it has been good so far. I have seen it working fine for a team of 10 people as well as for a team of 1,000 people. There are probably more than 1,000 users in our organization globally.

In this organization, it is primarily for managing the sales team and sales funnel, but we also intend to use it for CRM around three years down the line.

I am a sales guy, and from my point of view, I never had any problem.

It is straightforward.

I have heard that it is fairly priced. It offers ROI.

It is a good platform. To deploy it in your organization, users should identify their problems and needs. They should align it with their needs in terms of customization. 

I would rate Salesforce Platform an eight out of ten.

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 used it for sales and mobile access. We had to create mobile access for sales agents. We also used it for customer service and for onboarding in the treasury space with the nCino product. 

It has definitely improved the way our organization functions.

We used it for providing a 360 view of the customers from within Salesforce. So, a lot of data got presented there, for which we used Einstein Analytics. The Einstein Analytics dashboards were really great.

It is quite expensive. It has gotten to that point where it is a lot more pricey. It has kind of got its own proprietary language for development. It is probably never going to change, but if it had a more market language for development, it would be easier to find developers. They come at a premium cost, so it is expensive.

I have been using this solution for more than four years.

Overall, it is stable. We generally tend to wait until somebody else has upgraded.

It is highly scalable. In my previous organization, we probably had 2,000 or 3,000 users.

They have a model where there are a lot of user groups before you get into really calling them. We go through the sales channel and get assistance through that. We didn't really use the tech support itself that much. We kind of leveraged sales engineers to help us with things that we had questions about.

Based on my knowledge, we were not using any other solution. I have used it here for four years, but they have had it for eight years.

It really depends on what you're doing.

It is quite expensive. Its developers come at a premium cost, which makes it expensive.

I would advise others to go with the base functionality first and then develop specific use cases for your expansion and customization. Try to leverage, as much as possible, the core capabilities without customization. Rely on configuration because customization is really expensive. The developers are expensive.

I would rate Salesforce Platform an eight out of ten.

I primarily just log into the platform and approve some of the entries which are there. I know there is a marketing aspect as well, however, I don't use it that much.

The reporting of the solution is excellent.

The dashboards are excellent. They are very clear and easy to understand.

The entire solution is very customizable and you are able to add many functionalities.

There are very good analytics capabilities.

The solution is easy to use. All of the UI is great. You can navigate it with ease.

The workflow process is fine. We haven't had any issues surrounding that aspect.

The solution should keep adding features. They've continued to develop a lot of functionality over time with their additive approach to developing the product.

There needs to be more documentation. They need to make it easier to find what you need in order to get help and solve problems.

Technical support could be more responsive.

The solution could increase the number of plug-ins on offer. They should have ready-to-go modules that can just be added at any time to increase the capabilities in a number of directions.

I've been using the solution for one and a half years at this point. It hasn't been that long.

The product is very stable. The performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

You can add small functionalities, so it's scalable. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. You can customize it to add to it in many ways.

We have about 200 people who use it in our organization.

The technical support has been good. That said, likely the lead time to resolve issues can be a bit quicker. Definitely, they do a good job in correcting some of the problems that we face, however, the time it takes to resolve the problem can be quicker. They're okay overall.

I did not handle the implementation process. For us, the solution comes pre-installed. The IT team installs it on our computers you can probably go to a site and then log in on the cloud.  I do not have much knowledge about the setup and deployment.

We are customers and end-users of the product.

It's my understanding that we are using the latest version of the solution. I don't know the exact version number.

I'd recommend the solution. It's worked well for us overall.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

We originally started using Salesforce Platform for our sales guys who go into the market every day. They wanted a common platform that is scalable and easy to work with, especially for the clients. We took to Salesforce because it filled this need, and because it came with multiple apps from different vendors and partners that could be integrated with it.

The sales team do route planning, meeting planning, and then they take a particular vehicle to particular retailers. Then they talk to them and find out their reason for taking or not taking a particular order, so that my marketing team and other teams can take action.

In 2015, we decided we should be on cloud. That is, we should not build our own infrastructure, hardware, network, database, etc., because then you cannot focus on the business outcomes; you're focusing more on the infrastructure. With Salesforce Platform, we are able to focus on business outcomes and we need not worry about infrastructure at all.

We found that the dashboard creation is very simple, so we got all our data in one place and we told users: now it's your job to create whatever analytics you want on the backend. So instead of generically recreating and redefining everything, what we did is we allowed our users access to all the fields that let them select and define their own graphs and analytics and so on. When used like this, it is very simple for users and doesn't require any technical IT skills from their point of view.

We like that the technology is very agile and flexible in the sense that there's a large partner ecosystem within Salesforce Platform. This enables us to choose from many different partners with different advantages, and all of it can be done in a plug-and-play kind of way.

One other aspect that is very important to us is that Salesforce Platform is a global platform and widely available across all of India.

Although the platform is already set up for you, there's a lot of customization that needs to be done, especially for any new component we start using. For whatever solution we wanted, we had to think for ourselves and design it all on our own. And, unfortunately, there were some components that were not really mature in the beginning, like Tableau for example. I would like to see Salesforce better, or more quickly, integrate the applications that they acquire, like Tableau and Slack.

Technologies are changing rapidly nowadays, and customers are requesting all sorts of new integrations. For example, some are asking for WhatsApp integrations, AI and ML integrations, etc. When you're using a single platform such as Salesforce or SAP, your data quality is the one thing that is taken care of, and we would like to continue managing our data across many different integration channels.

We've been using Salesforce Platform for almost four years. 

It's a very stable solution. We haven't had many issues with stability. 

With our environment of around 1500 users, there have hardly been any performance or scalability issues.

I don't think I have ever called technical support for an explanation or anything. At least not for the solution that we use for our sales staff who visit the markets. 

The setup was really straightforward. The one hitch was that when first setting up our customers, to capture their details and enter them into the system, we found that not all of them had reliable internet access. However, I understand that this is not a product challenge, but rather a practical or technical challenge.

The licensing is per user per month, which we took out a contract on a long time back. It's really an okay price for what solutions are available and for how many features and what kind of functionality you get.

The only thing is that, regarding the pricing contract, if you agree on 2000 users, you have to pay for 2000, even if you only have 1500. An agreement for 2000 users was in our contract, so we had to pay a little bit extra because we only have about 1500 users currently.

I can recommend Salesforce Platform to others with no hesitation. For a PaaS, all the infrastructure was in place. But when you begin with a new platform, you have to start from scratch at level zero and then keep on maturing. Thus, my advice to my team and everyone else is: don't complicate from day one. You start, make it simple, keep on using it, make sure it's working correctly and so on, and from there on out things are very easy for users.

I would rate Salesforce Platform a seven out of ten.

As a project manager, I deal with many use cases, however, for privacy reasons, I can't really discuss them in detail.

The queue management of the solution is its most valuable aspect.

The solution is quite stable.

The product offers good scalability.

We need to do a lot of configurations on the solution in order for it to be set up as we need it. It would be ideal if it didn't require so much effort to tweak everything.

The initial setup is rather complex. 

We've only very recently started using the solution. It's only been about two months or so at this point. It's quite new to us.

The solution is stable. It's reliable. We haven't had issues with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The solution is highly scalable. A company can easily scale if they need to. It effectively expands to meet your needs. We'll likely expand the usage a bit more in the future. Right now, it's still pretty new to us.

We have about 100 users on the solution currently.

I haven't used technical support just yet. I wouldn't be able to speak to their level of service at all.

We did use a different solution. It was quite dated, which was why we needed to switch. We also needed something that would work for a global project.

We found the implementation to be pretty complex. It's not straightforward.

We had to transition from an old CMR in the backend systems we use which made the integration really, really difficult for us.

It's my understanding that the deployment took about two months, however, I wasn't completely involved in the process from beginning to end.

I'm not sure how much maintenance is required or how many staff would be needed for that task.

We ended up using a consultant for the integration, however, we handled the deployment by ourselves. We had a good experience with the consultant. They were very good.

I'm unsure as to what the actual licensing costs are. It's not an aspect of the solution I handle.

I wasn't the project manager at the time the solution was chosen, and therefore I don't know if there were other options that were considered before ultimately choosing this product.

I'm not sure of which version of the solution we're using. We're using both Google and Amazon clouds, however, I'm not sure where this version actually sits and if it's on one of those.

I'm just a user. I'm not an integrator or reseller.

I'd advise those considering the solution to ensure that the integrations are strong. We probably would have had an easier time if our older solution integrated better into this one.

Overall, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. I'd rate it higher, however, we did have some challenges at the outset with the setup.

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.  

We use Salesforce for all of our customer resource management, forecasting and tracking our contacts and opportunities. We also use it to make internal requests.

It is an easy product to use and does great things for our company. It keeps track of all of our sales activity.

A company needs to carefully consider how they set up Salesforce in order to ensure it benefits them. 

I have been using Salesforce for 16 years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution due to the fact that it is cloud based. We have 3000 users on Salesforce. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.