Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

I use Sales Cloud to manage my sales pipeline.

Salesforce is very good and offers a comprehensive sales process.

Salesforce has a vast sales process. It's a very broad tool, and it is difficult to pinpoint any specific feature.

There is no room for improvement in Sales Cloud. I would not want any new features included in the next release.

I have been using Sales Cloud for almost ten years.

I have not had any issues with the stability while using it.

The scalability of the product is good, actually.

Their support team is good.

Positive

I do not know anything about the pricing.

Everyone has room for improvement.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

It's for managing the sales cycle.

When it comes to the lead management process, we track and evaluate the different stages and the challenges in each stage. It's so that the entire team has visibility of what's going on with each individual lead.

It has significantly impacted the sales cycle because we are able to get more precise updates, report back to our senior execs using the Salesforce stats, and make database judgments. So, it has shortened the sales cycle.

I like that I can customize the sales process to a particular team so that, based on whatever framework I use, I can significantly adapt sales. That's the security of the system.

It might be easier if there were better integration with other sales systems or clouds that are not powered by Salesforce. For example, when we work with partners, such as Amazon or any other major tech company, sometimes we collaborate to develop a sales lead. 

We use integrations between Salesforce instances so the partner can add opportunities to our account and vice versa.

The integration between systems used by different partners is very hard. So, that's something that can definitely be improved.

There are features I would like to see in future releases. It could give recommendations on what could be a possible next step and highlight important points; that's where AI would come in. If it sees patterns in sales and Sales Cloud could evaluate it and showcase to us how that sales cycle could be shortened – that would be a great feature.

I have been using it for five years now. 

The solution is fairly stable. I have not faced any issues. 

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten.

The solution adapts to our use cases. It's highly customizable, but you just need to know how to customize it.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup a six out of ten, with one being easy and ten being difficult. 

It's just a matter of enablement. Sometimes, when it comes to inputting data, it has to be in certain formats, and it doesn't work properly. When you convert it to a report, it doesn't display the report correctly, so you need to know exactly how it needs to be tailored.

Our IT team deployed it.

I would recommend having a good Salesforce administrator. Other than that, it's pretty easy to use. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. I would recommend using it. 

We use the solution for CRM and to monitor customers, projects, and sales. We are using Salesforce Sales Cloud as a forecast platform. The solution forecasts the current data, current project stages, and the probability of it happening or not happening.

The most valuable features of Salesforce Sales Cloud are increased productivity and business accuracy.

The solution's design could be improved.

I have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud for two years.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for stability.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a scalable solution.

With Salesforce Sales Cloud, you have visibility and competency and see all the information you need from the sales side on one page.

We chose Salesforce Sales Cloud because we need everything in one place to have one forecasting platform, one sales platform, and one customer management platform. The solution's forecasting feature gives us visibility on one page to give us better guidance and understanding of what's going on and what could happen. Since the solution is an appliance, there's nothing to deploy.

I would recommend the solution to other users. From my perspective, it's a tool that should be used for every purpose because it could be scalable from a small number of users to huge ones. Usually, it's flexible enough to implement all the features that customers could need. Salesforce Sales Cloud is a native integrated solution.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We leveraged Salesforce Sales Cloud to perform a range of activities, starting from initial prospect calls, follow-ups, and demo scheduling, to generating quotes, managing accounts, and tracking all the way through to final sales. This comprehensive solution also facilitated any necessary follow-up tasks associated with the sales process.

Utilizing tasks is truly the most effective approach. Thus far, my priority has been diligently following up on tasks, ensuring timely callbacks after conversations with individuals, and meticulously documenting detailed notes about the progress of each account. These notes serve as a comprehensive file that captures all relevant information regarding ongoing interactions and developments.

The tracking and monitoring of daily activities within each account is the most valuable aspect of Salesforce Sales Cloud. It allows for staying informed about ongoing activities, ensuring comprehensive visibility into the progress made within each account on a regular basis. Additionally, the plugins that are available, such as ZoolInfo are useful.

The scalability could improve.

I have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud for approximately one and a half months.

I rate the stability of Salesforce Sales Cloud a ten out of ten.

I plan to use the solution more in the future.

I rate the scalability of Salesforce Sales Cloud a nine out of ten.

The initial setup of Salesforce Sales Cloud was straightforward.

We have seen a return on investment.

The scalability could improve by a small amount.

I rate Salesforce Sales Cloud a nine out of ten.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is used to track and manage businesses sales. The solution can manage the sales team and evaluate how effective their tools have been. It can determine if they are delivering value. 

The sales team populates all their activities on the Salesforce Sales Cloud. We have been given the number of calls to make to new customers that have come in, to track the prospective customers, and many other aspects will be captured. You are able to make direct calls to the customer from inside Salesforce Sales Cloud. We are able to link Salesforce Sales Cloud with a voice-over IP that can make direct calls to customers. The solution is highly versatile and it's integrated with our ERP solution of the company. When the potential customer becomes a customer, it does populate instead of having to start putting new things in the ERP system. It has good compatibility between the CRM, the Salesforce Sale Cloud, and our ERP system.

We try as much as possible to look at how loyal has the customer been. We have some of those KPIs that are coming out from the use of Salesforce Sales Cloud. It's a very great tool that the organization is using to track their business, sales team, sales, and effective management of the customers.

The most valuable features of Salesforce Sales Cloud are ease of use. It is very simple for the sales team to use. You can integrate it with a lot of other systems.

I have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud for approximately eight years.

The stability of Salesforce Sales Cloud is good.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is scalable. However, it depends on the licenses and what modules you require. For example, if you want voice integration, they have it. The ability for you to make your call to the customer directly from the system instead of picking up a phone.

In Nigeria, we have approximately 60. In some other countries, it depends on the number of staff that they have because all the systems have a user license. All the finance team is part of it. We have the marketing team and there are some others, such as the customer loyalty score users. Some of the service users that are rendering technical services, such as customer service staff are also part of using this solution.

The number of users can be quite large. It depends on your operations and the area that you want it to cover. Overall the solution is scalable.

Whether we expand or not depends on the business and how it grows. For example, if the sales teams increase, as a result of the business opportunities that are available in the country, we will increase usage of this solution. However, I am not sure because of the COVID-19 situation. It has impacted a lot of business. The possibility of an increase this year and next year is very slim because most organizations are only getting their sales goals.

Our teams in the head office that manages the entire system may need to escalate an issue based on the request of a country. In this case, they will contact Salesforce Sales Cloud who will advise on what to do.

I have used other solutions in this category, such as SAP. Salesforce Sales Cloud and SAP, are very similar solutions.

The setup of Salesforce Sales Cloud is complex. You need specialists in that area to be able to have a good setup. Once it's set up properly, running it is seamless. That's the most beautiful thing about Salesforce Sales Cloud.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a big system, it stretches across to approximately eight countries for the entire group. The full implementation took approximately six months. It was not done country by country. In my country of Nigeria, it took them close to two months to do the implementation. After it is complete there is a process of improvement. It was approximately two months before everything was finalized and in operation.

We are consultants directly from Salesforce and we have some other consultants from different regions of the country. We have consultants that manage each of the countries' rollout. We did the implementation.

The deployment stretches across different countries and the maintenance is centralized. They have a centralized team at the head office. There are approximately 10 people covering the entire country. We call them the Effectiveness Managers. Each country has what we call the Effectiveness Manager that whose major role is to maintain and look at what is going on in the processes and address any gaps. When they identify something, they report to the central team in the head office.

Then you are talking close to approximately 20 people in the maintenance department. It's a big system for us as far as the capabilities are concerned. It's a big business the team cannot be compared to smaller or medium-size organizations.

The price of the Salesforce Sales Cloud is expensive. We pay monthly for the solution but we are billed quarterly.

The price of the solution could be less expensive.

My advice to others wanting to implement Salesforce Sales Cloud is you have to make sure that you are ready to absorb the price of the solution, it is very expensive. I normally recommend a lower version, such as an open-source CRM.

They have to judge the capability of the financial department of their organization before. The organization has to know their business information well, such as sales, turnovers, the visions, the strategy of the management, and what are they trying to achieve overall.

The business is what will enable me to know whether Salesforce Sales Cloud will be a good fit for them because if they don't have financial strength, the licenses are expensive and they might not be able to afford it. 

I rate Salesforce Sales Cloud an eight out of ten.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've been working with Salesforce Sales Cloud for three and a half years.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A client was running the sales and marketing operations in a spreadsheet, and they wanted to have everything in one place. So, they migrated to Salesforce, and we helped them out with:

• Creating the object structure
• Mapping their objects with native Salesforce objects
• Putting together the page layout for the team
• Adding the data from the sheet into the instance

In terms of deployment, it was on the Salesforce cloud. The users had to log into it through a browser.

It enabled them to centralize the location of all the information. For example, everyone could enter the lead information in the central location, and then the higher management had a high-level overview of all the leads that came in. They could see how long it was taking to process leads and close them from the time leads come in. It keeps track of the close date as well. 

You can set up automation for following up and sending emails to the rep when the leads first get assigned. You can also run automation where if there is no activity on a certain lead for 30 days or so, the lead owner gets the notification. 

The ability to work on it from anywhere is most valuable. All you need is a computer, a browser, and an internet connection to access your instance. It can be accessed from anywhere, which is pretty cool and user-friendly. 

Its licensing can be improved to accommodate small companies. They provide a certain number of licenses in a set or batch, and you have to buy the set. For example, if they have 20 licenses in a set, you have to get the whole set, even if you need just three licenses, which could be a barrier for small companies. There is no option to buy fewer licenses. So, small companies have to go for a smaller CRM, such as HubSpot.

It has been pretty stable. When they have any maintenance, they usually send a notification saying that the system is going to be unavailable from a certain time, which is usually over the weekends. Usually, no one uses the system at that time.

It seems to be pretty good. It provides the ability to use different types of automation. If you want to create complex solutions or automation, you can do that. You can also start with simple ones and then go into the more complicated ones.

Currently, we have around 10 to 15 users who use this solution. They are usually into business development. There is also a leadership team with around five or six people. There are two different divisions of the company. One is marketing, and one is sales, and then there is also a business development section. So, each team has a number of people associated with it.

It is being used extensively. If we onboard new people, it'll probably scale.

They're fairly responsive. They usually respond within half a day. They send the details or instructions about how to resolve an issue. If it's something that belongs to a future release, they redirect us to the post mentioning that.

Its deployment was fairly straightforward. It wasn't too complicated for this use case. The complicated part was figuring out and mapping the existing objects and data structure with the Salesforce data structure.

For deployment, we had a team of three people. This team included a project manager, a developer, and me. We didn't really need the developer. We had him in case we had any complicated deployment. It was a smaller implementation, and it took about two months.

Its maintenance depends on the scale. If it is a big deployment, you would need an admin. For our internal instance, currently, we don't have an admin, but in the next few months, we'll probably be looking for a dedicated internal admin because we want to implement a few data projects. We're trying to create a partner portal, and we are thinking of hiring a dedicated admin for that.

It is alright for now because we ended up getting a discount off the base price. So, for now, it is okay. We may have to renegotiate when we get more users, and I don't know if the price would stay the same or increase.

It has just a standard licensing fee. If you end up hiring a consultant for implementation, you will have to pay for the implementation. Other than that, there are no additional fees.

You should know what your use cases are. Try to figure out if you will be extensively using automation or not. If you're not, you can use the lower licensing versions that are pretty cheap. The basic model was about $25 a month per user, and you can probably have three users for that, but it doesn't give you extensive automation capabilities. You will have to do a cost comparison for your specific use case to see if the basic license fits the needs of your business.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

My use case includes account management, opportunity management, forecasting, lead management, products and pricing.

We store driver information in the account objective. We have also developed an application for technology consulting clients who sell hardware. Software products can be tangible or intangible-like services. We use the product object to store the products.

When there are multiple types of servers, like database servers or application servers we store and use attributes of the server, like the size of the server and whether it's scalable or not.

We use the asset object after the product is shipped to the customer. Price list items and price lists are used for price management that handles pricing across multiple countries. We also use is the charge types and subscription-based models. For example, if you have purchased an internet subscription for one year, your charges could be a monthly, quarterly, half year or yearly.

For our premium customers, they receive discounts. This could be tiered discounts based on the data consumption or the initial discount in the amount of 5%, 10% or 15% based on the type of customer.

Sales Cloud has accelerated the business process. It has helped generate more revenue and close deals faster.

I find the forecasting the most valuable feature. It's valuable because there are a few types of forecasting, customizable and collaborative forecasting. Higher level leadership can forecast revenues using the forecasting feature. The forecasting can be based on the opportunity amount or opportunity line items or subscription product. It enables them to determine what the revenue will be next quarter or next year. It is customizable based on the organization's fiscal year.

Sales Cloud starts with the company and ends with the revenue. For example, a car manufacturing company such as Hyundai, Honda, or Tesla, would set up a campaign. Employees of the office will visit the campaign stall and ask about the features of the car. The sales team of a Cloud manufacturing company can note the details and generate the lead from that campaign and nurture the lead. If the employee is interested, the lead can be converted into an account contact opportunity, or suspect converted into a prospect. Quotations are read to the client, and negotiations commence and the sale will be either won or lost and the prospect becomes our customer.

Salesforce development is faster than others and they have the best documentation. Anyone can learn using their documentation.

They are continuously improving their product three times a year compared to other companies that release new features every two or three years.

There are things that could be improved with respect to file sharing. There is a limited file size.

Also, there is no inbuilt capability to calculate taxes so you have to rely on third party software.

I have been working with Sales Cloud for 3 years.

Salesforce is very stable. We have multiple data centers across the globe. If a data center fails it is highly available and stable, and available 24/7.

Technical support is very supportive and responds quickly and resolves your concerns. Most of the issues are not because of Salesforce, most concerns are because on the developer side or because of limitations due to a cloud based multi-tenant environment. 

I have used multiple CRMs, as it comes under the customer relationship management. Compared to other CRMs, Salesforce is best.

The deployment of Sales Cloud is simple. There are various ways that it can be deployed, the native Salesforce chain sets or the CICD, continuous integration and continuous deployment third party tools to deploy it. Deploying the data, which is a record and deploying metadata that is a component. The record can be deployed using data loader tools, which are native Salesforce features. Metadata can be deployed using end tools, chain set or continuous integration and continuous deployment, like Kin or Microsoft.

It is very quick to deploy, millions of components can be deployed in 30 to 45 minutes if planned efficiently.

The deployment process depends on the organization. The minimum amount of people required for the deployment could be one, even for complex business and maximum would be 10 people to support a very large scale business.

Being license based, the license varies by type. There are standard user licenses, Salesforce license, Salesforce Platform license or community license. Prices range from $5 to $70 or $75 per user per month calculated yearly. It can not be purchased for two or three months, it must be purchased for the whole year. The pricing is considered average. Health Cloud is more expensive than Sales Cloud. 

Account executives from Salesforce will negotiate if you are purchasing licenses in bulk.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is the most powerful cloud of the Sales Cloud. It is scalable and bug-free.

If a company is a business model that is based on lead generation, I recommend that they use the unlimited edition org and use the Einstein product for lead management, lead nurturing and rule based scoring of the lead. Another good feature is forecasting.

I would rate the complete Sales Cloud a 9 out of 10.