What is our primary use case?
Our main use cases for the solution are B2B directions, some presale activities, and some of our service manager activities, which are mainly requests for supplies, certain products.
We do re-house implementation, sales calls for our B2B segment, so it's business to business. We are actually covering all of our sales interactions with our clients within Sales Cloud, just trying to keep the information in one place and all of the activities, according to the sales cycle, within the Sales Cloud, within the certain records inside Salesforce.
How has it helped my organization?
The main way the solution has improved the organization is by giving a good understanding of how the salespeople should be tracked, how to restructure their work. Normally salespeople can be disorganized, so we have people who do something which is very difficult to track. However, some people won't do anything until the deadline is tomorrow. So all of the directions, all of the processes should be tracked and sales will give you the understanding. If a salesperson is working to discover a relationship with a client and is trying to sell something, it can be very easy, very intuitive, with very few fields.
Then you can see if something is moving on or still at the same place for months or even years. You can easily identify it by creating the opportunity and seeing whether you made progress or not. As long as you understand how it should be tracked, the only thing is left to go to sales and say that you expect anything you do to be reflecting this in a certain record, and either I see the progress there, or I can see there's no progress at all. You can say that you're doing something, but if I do not see it within the system, it does not exist.
What is most valuable?
One of the most valuable features is with management within Salesforce. This is one of the important parts of the process we have right now in place.
First of all, the point of view that Salesforce gives you on certain object models normally satisfies the biggest parts of the business. In a lot of business scenarios, because the sales process is more or less at a high level the same, in different areas, it's been changing. On the high level, it's all about managing the clients, managing the opportunities around those clients, managing the tasks, calls, activities, all those things are already pretty fine on Salesforce.
Flexibility is the second point I would like to mention. The flexibility is pretty high and we can set up different scenarios. We can use different pools, both with developer experience and with development experience, making things automated within Salesforce. So it gives you an opportunity for not just a flexible set up, the processes you would like to set, but also to automate the things and make the automation for different scenarios, like providing emails, assigning leads, assigning the right clients to the right people. And also automate that during the sales cycle, if we're talking about providing the resources and providing the information resources.
And I would say the interface isn't perfect, but it's much better than the other CRM systems can provide. So it's not 100% modern if they're talking about making it 21, but compared with the competitors, you can see that Salesforce is way better in terms of user experience. Working the system, it's much more intuitive, it's more user-oriented, user friendly than the other systems I had in my previous experience.
What needs improvement?
One area where the solution could improve is with handling feature requests. Salesforce has its own community all over the world and people submit ideas saying, okay, that's what's needed. The number of requests is pretty high, and all of these requests are stored for years, but people need these. These features that I requested really sound obvious, but they're still for five, four, six years remaining just the same. When you search for a feature and find that someone created a request years ago, and 6,000 or more are saying, "yes, of course, we need this," it's an obvious feature. It's not that difficult to implement but the waiting line can be up to 10 years long.
One of the features I'd like to see in a future release is a way to see the updates of all the records that I follow. Not an email notification, but a single page to see the information for all the records I'm following. There is a solution that can partially satisfy this need in Salesforce Classic, but it's also classic and old-fashioned, and we would not like to promote the initial sales software within our firm. We are trying to keep Salesforce Lightning as the main tool. Rather than asking the commercial director to switch to Salesforce Classic, just to see a part of the information, but if you need both, we'll be able to give it.
The other area that is definitely a waking point for me is the integration with Slack. Slack is pretty popular and we're trying to launch it as well. The basic integration that is out-of-the-box is pretty small. Having both of these products in the product portfolio in the same company, we actually really expect to have it highly integrated for different scenarios, like task assignments, following notification, so even the same balance can be done within Slack and assigned to a certain account record in Salesforce. There is a huge field for improvement; right now these two products are pretty separated, despite the service.
And the third thing I would say is a Salesforce strategy. A lot of countries, all over the world are trying to protect personal data. And the limitations are increasing here and in new territories, like China, Russia, India, Arabic countries, GDPR regulation, European Union, all of these things that you require the new response from the platforms that are actually dealing with this personal data, personal information. Salesforce itself, its data is a GDPR compliance system, out of the box. The only funny thing is it's two digital compliance until you start entering the personal data there. As long as you are entering personal data there, so they can do some GDPR compliance, in terms of Russian regulation, Chinese regulation, Arabic countries' regulation. It's definitely something that we expect to be improved.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been working with Salesforce Sales Cloud for three and a half years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability and performance of Sales Cloud itself, which is provided by Salesforce, is pretty good. We are pretty satisfied with it. We didn't have any huge lags in months with Salesforce downtime; some certain tools that we actually implemented ourselves, were not the level of reliability of Salesforce, though. But that was something we implemented in our own home. The problem was not with Salesforce, but really the tools, the way we actually implemented it.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Ease of scalability depends on where we actually are scaling, and if we had a certain predicted behavior, such as we have a new region to sell, we have a new person in the new region or have a new account, etc. It definitely requires not just some maintenance, but some developments as well.
We have approximately 100 users in our company. We're using the solution more and more often. Initially, it was a certain form where sales just gave everyone the opportunity. Then we came to the decision, we want this as a system to direct those people on a regular basis. Now we have a regular meeting and the information from Salesforce is checked by the commercial director. We're trying to introduce the solution to see the broader picture, the full pipeline for targeting the client, and finishing the client when you've closed the case.
How are customer service and support?
Technical support has been pretty helpful, in those rare cases I actually use it. During my previous experience, which was also connected with Salesforce, we had some strange cases escalated to Salesforce, and the answer was, okay, we will fix this in one of our upcoming releases. But that was a matter of half a year, and we had a business stopping issue. But after a certain escalation, we actually managed to do this fix earlier. However, we expected it to be faster.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previously, I've worked with this SAP, and I was working with a custom regionally developed CRM system based on the Microsoft platform. Salesforce has better flexibility and orientation to the user. SAP has perfect functionality and it's really powerful. However, I wasn't fulfilled with the SAP for five years before I actually left SAP. It was like people who developed it just forgot about the end-users. So the interface, how the end-users actually interacted with the system, was horrible. Salesforce is way better. However, SAP also had the best effort in giving data during the later five years.
How was the initial setup?
The initial deployment can take time. We started the project in February, and the deployment was in June, end of June. Five months, and we are not talking about the prerequisites, because we gathered the business scenarios we need to finish the analysis. So if you're talking about the analysis and prerequisites as well, so it will three months more.
Update deployment prevents a lot of issues, as it gives you the opportunity to change the things that can be badly influencing the production system. So you invest some time to get a deployment done. It still takes hours to deploy and there is a certain benefit behind this. The more time spent on deploying, the fewer issues on production. However, there is certainly fuel for improvement there.
What about the implementation team?
The initial deployment was a group of about 20, involving people from different parts, both development, quality assurance people, admins, business analysts, business representatives, salespeople, pre-sales people department. So this group was much broader than future deployments.
There is only one person who actually doing update deployment for us. However, the more we grow, the more people will be involved in the deployment. And we work with the vendor because certain parts of our implementation require the help of Salesforce authorized companies which help us to do this. And there were more people than one to do the deployment because different groups of people were involved in the development. To merge the codes of different groups of development, we required the efforts of recruiting people. Either two or three people were involved in the deployment; they were not only our internal team working with the development.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Right now I'm operating on the Russian market, and in terms of investment value and return of the investment, Salesforce right now is pretty good in the Western markets where the price of the employees is pretty high.
Here in Russia, the country has a cheaper workforce, so the investment into Salesforce Solution is questionable, in terms of the return on the investment. The price model, is oriented on the best markets and there is a certain sense of investment in Salesforce there; but here in Russia, prices for the workforce can do the same thing easily. It's the 21st century, probably manual work should be reduced each day. We think if we look at this problem in terms of the investment, it will be a big question if it's worth the money, as Salesforce is pretty expensive.
What other advice do I have?
The biggest advice that I can give to anyone considering Sales Cloud is to develop a good pre-analysis before the implementation and don't overload the stages of the opportunity. Think what the main purpose of these stages is. The best way to make it work for salespeople and for the commercial department is to structure it that way, that it will now reflect the stages of the penetration to the client. Pursue methodology, when we have targets, interact, propose, close. It's not just throwing the opportunity between the different departments, but it's complete and clear and simple, which is very important. You don't have 20 stages, but you have five certain career stages, which actually reflect the steps when you're closer and closer to the deal. Not in terms of working with the documents, but in terms of structuring the sales process in terms of the penetration to the clients.
Also, very close to the implementation, the final day of the goal, dedicate as much time as possible to the data migration. Dedicate as much time as you have, consider doing data migration; it will be difficult. We will have a lot of migrant issues rolling the data from the previous system to the new one. So two or three weeks is the shortest period that should be dedicated to that purpose.
I would rate the solution a seven out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.