Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

• The Sales Cloud platform
• The Service Cloud platform

It has touched every spectrum of our organization regardless of the roles the various department plays. Every department contributes to the revenue numbers through the use of this tool.

Improving reports/dashboards is needed. It is quite good, but taking it up a notch would be beneficial for the whole team.

I have used it since 2009, so six years.

There have been no issues with the deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

It has scaled well and every department in our organization uses it.

Start small, then leverage it to the whole team in phases. You will achieve greater success when doing it in small steps, which will also ensure that this product gets used most efficiently.

A six out of 10.

A six out of 10.

No other solutions were previously used.

The initial setup was quite straightforward.

We used a vendor team for implementation.

Get your requirements properly analyzed before walking it through with the deployment team.

The ability to easily change layouts, create customized fields and customized reports makes my job so much easier. Adding company hierarchy makes it easy for our sales people to identify subsidiaries of existing customers. The Salesforce forums are very responsive when you ask for help.

Adding customized drop-down fields and check boxes limits the amount of admin time that our sales people have to spend to keep their accounts up to date. Using Salesforce for Outlook enables our sales group to easily add emails sent and received to the account which puts all the information in one place. This allows top management to see exactly what is going on with each account without having to go to sales to get updates. Also having the ability to schedule pipeline reports to be emailed keeps the entire management team up to date on any pipeline changes.

I'd like to have the ability to change default values on certain fields such as the “Related To” field on the Task and Event pages.

I've been using it for over eight years.

The only issue we had with deployment was training the sales team on how to use it. After using ACT for so long, it took some of them quite some time to feel comfortable with it.

There have been no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues scaling it.

It has been excellent the few times I've had to use either customer service or technical support. For most issues I come across I use the forums which are excellent!

We previously used ACT. ACT had many limitations but the biggest limitation but the main reason we switched was that ACT had limitations when it came to integrating with our accounting software.

My part was straightforward. The only complex issue was integrating it with our accounting system which was handled by our CIO.

We implemented it ourselves. Prior to cutting over completely, you should definitely have all of your lists (Lead Source, Industry, etc.) in place. You should also have any customized fields in place and your layouts finished.

We have not tracked ROI, however, upgrading to the enterprise edition gives you more options and is definitely worth the additional cost.

You should definitely purchase enough data storage. If you start using above 80% to 85% of your allocated data storage, response times will decrease.

Multiple editions available and all cloud based.

Have recently began working with the new interface called Lightning and feel that its a great improvement to the "classic" version.

1. The entire organisation is now on the same page, with one source of truth.
2. Forced people to become compliant in reporting and updates - if its not in Salesforce it did not happen.
3. No more "versionitis", data, reports all in once central place.

The only time I have ever been upset with Salesforce was when I failed my certification exam. I thought to myself "Why do they make the exam so hard ? Why is the training so expensive ?" Now that I have passed I am grateful that it was a difficult exam. Other than that I support clients all over the world and Salesforce are quite stringent about sticking to regional offices.

Just over eight years

I thought I could manage on my own with the first deployment but needed an expert which we called in.

No

No

Excellent and that's the regular support not premium level. Support staff are always helpful polite and do not close a case until the customer smiles.

Excellent

We were using a combination of Google docs and contacts in Outlook. We switched because it was a mess.

We needed the help of an expert and it had just as much to do with scoping our needs as it had with configuring Salesforce to meet those needs.

We started in-house and moved quickly to a vendor whose expertise level was very good.

Never calculated it but cannot understand how we ever managed without Salesforce.

I have been involved with the deployment of a number of versions starting with contact manager (very reasonable) all the way up to their enterprise version. You get what you pay for and whilst the enterprise version is not cheap, its worth every penny.

Zoho CRM, Goldmine and Act.

Spend as much time as you can scoping your needs and understanding what you want to achieve today, next year and in 2 years time.

I am really happy that Salesforce gives admins and developers access to the latest release in their sandbox (test environment) weeks before the release. This gives you a chance to evaluate and become familiar with the new release features.

The new interface Lightning is an important and extensive makeover that is even slicker and leaner than the existing interface

This is very flexible product. I can tune many of its features for our company. Also, it integrates almost all needed tools for a small company, like ours. I like its powerful dashboard and third-party integration tools. In different tabs, you can track accounts, leads, and opportunities with one click. Also, I love their PRM system for communicating with indirect channels. I worked with Salesforce for one-and-a-half years and I completed many projects with it.

Salesforce is more expensive than other CRM services. It also has fewer features than many others competitors. Each of these reasons is not a big deal, but they forced us to eventually find another solution.

I used it for one and a half years.

There were no deployment issues.

There were no more than a dozen cases of instability a year.

It scaled well for us.

Customer service is nice.

They sometimes have problems with finding the root cause of an issue.

We didn't use a previous solution.

This is an expensive solution.

Chatter, Mobile Platform along with Mobile Push, Salesforce synchronization for MS Outlook, simple & smart analytic dashboard

User Adoption has improved a lot resulting in improvement of Data quality & ROI of Software.

Need to make complex CRM processes as Out of Box features, Address interface challenges between Salesforce and On-premise enterprise Software, Lot of dependency on affiliate software such as Service Max & Marketo

7 years

Digitizing complex business process around Sales (Multiple layer of approvals), building complex dash board consolidating Sales, Marketing data (Marketing ROI), building interface between Salesforce and On-premise enterprise software.

Yes. In Data synchronization & Replication.

Yes, when we moved beyond 3000 seats, we had challenges in meeting some Performance & Scalability standards.

I would rate them 7 out of 10.

I would rate them 6 out of 10.

Yes, I used Siebel & we switched to have better user adoption and better manage the cost of ownership of CRM software.

Initial setup was easy however we faced a lot of difficulty when we tried to interface it with other enterprise applications.

Our business was a mixed one i.e. combination of in-house & vendor team. Initially, we had a lot of challenges in terms of scaling up vendor team.

Unfortunately, we don't have a comprehensive way to capture ROI however we can observe both tangible & intangible benefits of using Software (Better user adoption, simplified data entry, better decision making through alerts of software, etc.)

Setup cost was way higher than expected. We spent close to $1.5 million on setup including interfaces for 3000 seats. Our d-d cost is approx 900k.

Yes, we evaluated SAP CRM, Oracle On-demand and Siebel

I strongly recommend it for a small to mid size company.

You can have non-sales and marketing personnel using Chatter without driving up licensing cost.

The bulk edit page is nice for creating multiple users at once with the most basic information.

The integration piece is missing.

Salesforce has a integration capability, but the moment we say integration, it's categorized into the following types:

- Synchronous and Asynchronous integration

- Hybrid integration: direct and middleware based

- Cloud-to-Cloud integration such as Salesforce.com to RightNow

So my point was whether Salesforce has the mentioned integration capabilities or not and answer is always the same -- it depends.

In such cases, we have to consider integration from the beginning and what kind of legacy systems we have and what the architectures of the current accounting system are, etc.

But also have to recognize that simply because we use a legacy system from a vendor who has a Salesforce too, that doesn't mean it integrates all that easily.

For Salesforce.com products to truly add business value to the enterprise, integration is thus crucial.

The increasing shift toward hybrid architectures, moreover, means that integration solutions must be able to seamlessly connect Salesforce.com with other SaaS applications and on-premises legacy systems.

And here, based on my past experience, I can say that Salesforce still have room for integration improvements.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues with scalability.

The ease of customization plus the availability of an extensive selection of apps.

We have moved away from sharing docs and now everyone is on the same page with only one source of truth.

It is still relatively expensive - would like to see it a little cheaper.

I have worked with all versions, contact manager. group, professional, enterprise, unlimited and non profit starter pack for almost seven years.

I did need some external help initially but the reason for that was my fairly complex formula fields.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It's outstanding.

It's outstanding on standard support plus they off premier support.

I worked, for a limited time, with Zoho and was looking for a bigger "ecosystem."

I had a few issues with the formula fields otherwise it was straightforward.

We used an in-house with some vendor assistance who had a very high level of expertise.

It's never been measured, but our year on year growth would have never been possible without Salesforce.

I would rather go for a version with less functionality, but allows a budget for more users.

Zoho CRM

It is not a perfect solution to all needs but is certainly an ideal solution for most.

Prepare an extensive needs analysis - ensure that Salesforce can deliver the solution you need.

The most valuable feature of Salesforce platform is the development model of Customer Facing Implementation/Applications. Salesforce provides a basic data model already prepared for users and allows developers to customize the platform according to their business needs.

Salesforce helps in increasing the productivity, sales, lead-management process (in which every lead is tracked in an efficient manner). The users within the organization are able to track their (and their sub-ordinates') opportunity pipeline. Sales managers have the tools, real-time tracking and instantaneous feedback are by far the best methods and hence they can give more energy to selling and immediately incorporate managers’ instant feedback with deals in motion.

Salesforce is itself expanding at a fast pace for all the partner, customer, and developer community. But as a Salesforce developer, it would be great of Salesforce can step towards the Open Source platform for development and implementation.

I have more than two years of experience working on the Salesforce platform. I have worked on Apex classes, VF pages, REST API, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, etc. for developing and customizing Salesforce for our clients.

While the Salesforce version upgrades are in process, there may be some performance issues (however, Salesforce does inform users about this beforehand).

In terms of scalability, the Salesforce platform is a multi-tenant platform and, hence, it focuses more on the governor limits and scalable applications. But if a company wants to expand the CRM, they can ask Salesforce for the 'unlimited' version which enables a larger limit with a per usage count.

Salesforce provides various levels of technical support for different types of customers based on the version they have purchased.

I have not worked on any other CRM application development platform.

Salesforce provides a basic data model which matches most all of organization models, but there is always a requirement to customize it according to a company's user needs in the most efficient manner. The consultants or the Salesforce developer can help the customers to achieve company-level customization.

We implemented it through a vendor team. I have worked on a Salesforce appExchange product (quick modular application specifically designed for companies to overcome implementation efforts).

The best advice for Salesforce implementation is to check if the feature is provided by Salesforce in the standard version; if not, then search for a Salesforce app on AppExchange which might fulfill the requirements, and if no such app exists, then we might have to develop it ourselves for the particular situation.

Costs and benefits in most cases are hard to determine, but don’t let perfection be the enemy of valuable information. If you are looking for a systematic functioning within your organization, Salesforce is one of your paths towards it.

There are various case studies on Google which suggests the options for choosing the best CRM. It depends on various factors such as cost, productivity, implementation cost, maintenance cost, etc.

You can try Salesforce as a free developer version (with lots of limits). You can contact me at vishal_kdn@yahoo.co.in for any kind of help and advice.