Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

We use Salesforce Sales Cloud for customer engagement, CB2, marketing, and forecasting tools.

The most valuable feature of Salesforce Sales Cloud is for teams the ability to do marketing on our page and to manage their marketing leads. You are able to close a deal and do the renewal. For the life cycle management for customer management, we use Salesforce Sales Cloud. The performance of the solution is good.

The user interface could be better in Salesforce Sales Cloud because it feels a little heavy.

I have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud for approximately 10 years.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is stable.

The solution is scalable.

We have approximately 50,000 users using this solution.

The support is good from Salesforce Sales Cloud.

The installation took approximately three months to complete.

We have approximately 300 people that do the maintenance and support the solution.

I would recommend this solution.

I rate Salesforce Sales Cloud a seven out of ten.

I'm using it for the selection of sale pipelines, project opportunities, and sales analysis.

I'm using its latest version.

It is easy to customize, and it is also easy to view the summary of a project opportunity. 

There is a ton of information on the dashboard. Reports are also there for us. We can analyze information across the team and across a period, such as quarterly or annually.

There are multiple views to display information. You can display information as a table, and you can also split the views.

It is a bit pricey.

I have been using this solution for about a year.

It is stable.

I have not tried to scale it. We have five to seven people in my team who are using this solution.

I'm working in a global company, and in my business unit, for the local region, we have five to seven people using this. We also have a group of people abroad who view this information.

I have not interacted with their technical support.

I used another one about three years ago, but I prefer Salesforce.

It might be a bit complex the first time, but it is not very hard to understand.

It was done inside the organization. We have a team for this.

Its license is expensive. It is probably a lot more than smaller solutions. It is around £500 a month, but I don't know how many licenses we have.

So far, everything has been good. I would advise others to go for it if they can afford it. It is very good.

I would rate it a nine out of 10 because nothing is perfect.

We are using Salesforce Sales Cloud to develop sales processes. For example, from the lead creation, submitting the contract, and sending the contract via DocuSign for the user to sign it. We use principle objects, such as opportunity, lead, account, and contact, and some process automation to automate the process of sales.

The automation of Salesforce Sales Cloud makes the process very easier to focus on leads and converts them automatically to accounts, contacts, and opportunities.

Salesforce Sales Cloud could improve by allowing some customization of the processes with coding to avoid the problem of memory. When we use only flows in the process, which can become large flows, they are more complicated to debug and also for maintenance. It's better to invoke some Apex classes to make the process better.

I have using Salesforce Sales Cloud for approximately three years.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is stable.

We have approximately 100 users using this solution in my organization. 

Salesforce Sales Cloud has the ability to scale to large numbers.

We are using this solution on a daily basis.

I have been satisfied with the technical support of Salesforce Sales Cloud.

We deploy the solution using many different tools. The process is simple because you only need to create the package and component and choose the sandbox.

The time it takes to deploy the package depends, it could take a few minutes. However, when we use GitLab or another tool, it takes more time than changeset.

The amount of people involved in the implementation depends on many factors. I have worked with many managers, such as GitLab managers, and we created a branch and later deployed it.

There are some releases that need to be updated and some packages that are necessary for maintenance.

I have found Salesforce Sales Cloud to be expensive. However, it is the number one CRM solution in the world. It is worth the money.

I would recommend this product because it can give a company a chance to have new clients. There is a lot of functionality that can increase the number of clients they have.

I rate Salesforce Sales Cloud a nine out of ten.

I have only ever used the Sales Cloud as customized by the Nonprofit Starter Pack (NPSP) as provided by Salesforce.org and virtually all aspects of that application are incredibly helpful from a nonprofit perspective. It really takes the ‘Sales’ Cloud and turns it into the ‘Nonprofit’ Cloud. We use it for fundraising, grant management, volunteer management and everything in between.

We use Salesforce for every aspect of our business and it improves efficiency and gives us one source of truth when it comes to organizational information. Everything from fundraising to volunteer management goes through Salesforce!

There are data limitations on the platform – in terms of how much data you can store on the platform without having to purchase more. Generally, anything over one GB of data is going to cost your organization extra – this happens fast too so watch out. There is a lot you can do with zero programming knowledge and you can automate most repetitive tasks with no code!

I've used it for roughly five years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

I would call out the one GB data limits as a scalability concern – as it is often an unexpected cost as Salesforce generally hides this nugget of information in the documentation/limitations of the product. From a deployment perspective – not really. It’s a complicated tool so the amount of time, expertise and/or money you have is generally going to impact deployment.

Salesforce relies heavily on their Community to do the work of support/customer service and it has paid big for them. I am usually headed to the Power of Us Hub or the Salesforce Community before I pick up a phone to call support. Overall, that experience is far more positive than trying to contact support. In the rare instances where I have had to call support, they are responsive – but beware of the additional costs for the ‘Premium’ support packages.

In my current role, no. In previous roles, we evaluated other donor solutions and determined that Salesforce was best suited for fundraising and program management. The flexibility and 360 degree view of your constituents is really the draw.

It’s a fairly straightforward purchase process – but the set up can be complex depending on your organizational requirements. The NPSP makes it easy to get off the ground quickly, but additional customization can often require consultant assistance.

I’ve done both – generally working with a vendor for any heavy development/coding work that needs to happen. Everything else I was able to learn. Salesforce does a great job empowering customers and ensuring that they have what they need (including access to peers) to learn the platform. I would say this is a core organizational strength of Salesforce.

In terms of non-profit licensing, you get your 10 free Enterprise Edition licenses as a 501(c)(3) and take advantage of those to learn the platform! As your organization grows, see Salesforce as an investment, not as a free tool that you must ensure continues to cost your organization $0. This will do more harm than good – learn the platform and allow it to grow with you.

You generally have two routes to go when implementing; you can hire a vendor to do the work for you, or you can invest in/hire a staff member/team to learn the platform, gain expertise and implement internally. In the non profit space, I heavily favour the second option as I think investing in some staff time to learn this is great and there is an amazing community to support the process.

The reporting and dashboards functionalities are the most valuable features for us.

Also, the CRM's built-in information indexation with standard and custom fields provides complete control in manipulating data. This functionality remains key to driving informed decision making.

It's driven comprehensive decision making by associating marketing spend with the lead source to revenue generation from completed sales efforts over an extended sales cycle.

Also, the information indexation is fantastic and this facilitates a comprehensive understanding when you need to correlate marketing spend with sales efforts to ascertain ROI. This helped to reallocate marketing spend to more effective lead-generating activities that contributed to higher ROI. Information indexation of the tool facilitates associating ROI by lead source which won opportunities for sales.

• Reporting can become slow to pull once you reach a certain limit of contact records due to the complexity and volume of the data available.
• It's a comprehensive tool that is not intuitive to use in order to effectively leverage the benefits of its customization capability.
• The tool can appear complex and there are key understandings needed to leverage this CRM properly. Not creating an opportunity upon lead conversion for example, prevents correlating data between lead source and opportunities won at a later date - so important!

I've used it for over 5 years.

No, it's straightforward to get an account. From there, it's knowing how to customize it properly to optimize process and facilitate quality data input. It's also been straightforward to deploy for my clients.

There are only stability issues if the report pool involves data from 10,000+ records. The pull can be very slow. Other than that, the tool is both robust and stable.

Scalability issues only arise around reporting from my experience as the data pulls can become slow.

Never called customer service.

I've had insufficient engagement with technical support to comment.

We didn't switch, but different CRMs apply to different business sizes and integration requirements. 17 Hats is quite comprehensive for entrepreneurs, for example, but you might consider this more of a simplified ERP solution.

I have not come across the circumstance where I migrated to Salesforce from something else. Either it was chosen from the beginning or not chosen when the complexity of data control was not needed.

Setup is complex, but worth the time to get things the way you want it. Complexity is commensurate with what you want to get out of the tool.

You sign-up online with immediate access to the tool. I feel the setup can appear complex to those not familiar with the tool initially and creation of customizations is not intuitive at the admin level. There is a learning curve with detailed control.

We did it in-house.

N/A

Professional is what I choose unless the enterprise functionality is immediately relevant to the business operations. Standard license is usually sufficient. In my professional opinion, the pricing is small compared to the value Salesforce brings.

We evaluated InfusionSoft, Sugar, Karma 2.0, Netsuite ERP, and Zoho.

CRM deployment is part of a bigger strategy to centralize your data. By mapping out all the area data enters and exits first with requirements for each point, you can assess if Salesforce is the right fit properly.

• Open API
• Big ecosystem of applications, knowledge, and training
• Flexibility

I’ve worked with about 30 nonprofit organizations implementing Salesforce. I’ve seen it answer questions that are key to an organization’s strategy, e.g. Does our program work? Which people does it work best for? Where is the revenue coming from? How many people are we serving today/this week/this month/this year?

In addition, it saves hours a day for staff members who track donations, volunteers, etc.

Reporting is still not as strong as it should be.

I've used the Enterprise Edition for three years/

Salesforce is complicated, and there are plenty of things that can go wrong. With small to medium non-profits, the biggest issue is typically that staff don’t have time to spend using the new system, or that leaders aren’t asking questions of the system. When the system doesn’t get used, it definitely doesn’t work.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It really depends. The free customer service isn’t so useful, but that is mitigated by the huge number of consultants, YouTube videos, and KB articles. These resources are just a different level of magnitude than for any other similar product. If you pay for tech support and additional customer service, I believe that the experience is better, but I don’t have direct experience with that.

The free tech support is really only useful for pretty basic stuff. They get the job done, but it isn’t any fun. It would be nice if they would consent to fix things via email instead of phone calls.

I’ve switched organizations from various home-grown solutions, eTapestry, Donor Perfect, Gift Works, and piles of spreadsheets. All those options have their advantages, but none are as flexible as Salesforce.

I did set it up for an organization where I worked, and it was complex but now I’m very comfortable doing it, however, your average non profit staffer is not.

I've been the vendor, except when I set it up for the organization where I worked.

The price point for non profits is very low, as the first 10 users are free and subsequent users are about $30 per user per month. There’s also the investment either in significant staff training or in a consultant, but for something as simple as a donor database, you’re probably looking at a one time cost of about $3000-$5000. Ongoing costs depend on the time and tech skills you have on staff. Organizations with one person who is interested and able to spend some time on it can need as little as 10 hours from a consultant per year, but those who need more assistance might need more like 48+ hours per year. Prices for consultants vary widely, as does quality. In terms of the return on that investment, a non profit that uses the system well should be able to raise more money with the data and time savings provided. Some organizations do this by better identifying and following up with donors, and some are able to demonstrate their effectiveness and better compete for grants.

It depends entirely on how complex the use of the system is. A system that does day-to-day program management, volunteer management, donor management, and outcomes tracking can cost upwards of $40K. A basic donor database can be as little as $3000-$5000.

For different organizations, I’ve evaluated Sugar CRM, eTapestry, Gift Works, Donor Perfect, Wild Apricot and Neon. These products all have their advantages, but only Sugar CRM has the open API and flexibility of Salesforce. Unfortunately, Sugar’s ecosystem is tiny compared to Salesforce’s. It is much harder to find qualified consultant, online resources are paltry in comparison, and I’ve been told by web developers that Sugar is horrible to interface with.

Hire someone to help, even if you just hire them to spend a few hours pointing you in the right direction. Make sure you’re ready to use the product, Salesforce provides pretty good resources for evaluating this. However, the big thing you need are leaders who are asking the important questions and who will give staff time to devote to setting up and using the product. Without those two things, it doesn't matter who you hire or how much money you spend, you won’t be successful.

The ability to customize many things, from the UI to the business logic, and the fact that the solution uses a cloud platform were valuable features for our organization.

It has sped up development and delivery within the organization.

The areas for improvement are adding more options to customize the UI, and the business logic.

I have been using the solution for 3 years.

No issues with deployment.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

The customer service was good.

The technical support was good.

Initial setup was straightforward. It is just a matter of receiving the initial user credentials, change its password and create the other users after logging in. This is the initial setup prior to developing any customizations.

We implemented through an in-house team.

Setup cost: $280 per month per user, $600 per month per developer + 20% of the total yearly cost (users x individual cost) per sandbox - pre-paid annually.

Before choosing we looked at Microsoft Dynamics.

If seeking help, make sure that the people who will work on your project are certified (don't merely ask if they are certified, ask for a list of their certification numbers prior to agreeing with their statement of work). There are companies that assign junior people to your projects and bill them as senior consultants.
Expect to pay $200+/hour for HIGH quality consultants - if less than that, you may not getting high quality and may end up paying more in the end for the rework or the costs associated with a inadequate implementation.
Start with smaller, short term projects and add functionality and users gradually.
If you're in a large company (has divisions/regions), before attempting companywide adoption, choose a smaller group of users and make sure they are so pleased that they become champions of the product.

I use the tool for a company with which our company used to work in the past. I used the backup and archiving capabilities of the solution.

My company generally uses the tool for all kinds of use cases. For a particular case of our company's customer who needed us to deal with the areas of archiving and backup, we used Salesforce Sales Cloud.

In general, the data model and everything is really helpful for the development phase. The tool is quite flexible, and you can modify its features easily. The whole development process is quite advanced in that you have all the support you need to take care of the development phase as easily as possible. The development phase is as easy as possible for all areas, including the UI, data model, custom logic, and processes, along with areas like reports, dashboards, and everything.

The areas revolving around archiving and backup in Salesforce Sales Cloud are not as advanced as some of the other solutions in the market. The aforementioned areas can be considered for improvement in the product. Maybe the tool covers bare backup requirements, but it is usually insufficient.

For the additional features needed in the product, I can say there is a very nice comparison on LinkedIn that I saw about the tool explaining compliance, granular restoration, and other related areas.

The price of the product needs to be lowered.

I have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud for two or three years. At the moment, my company is not even a customer of Salesforce since, presently, we do custom development, meaning we do development in Salesforce for other companies who need to use the tool's services.

It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

My company is a medium-sized company with around 400 people.

I have experience with CRM solutions that were either used in-house or made available from other vendors. I think Salesforce is currently the solution that is accepted by all the markets. I see another tool similar to Salesforce in advertisements called monday.com, which I have never used. I think monday.com has quite an aggressive marketing campaign.

I think it is not that difficult to install the product. I don't have that much experience with the product's installation phase. I am not a developer or administrator, but from my experience with the tool, I can say it is quite easy to use and do everything a user wants. I wouldn't say that the product's installation phase is complex. At an organizational level, things are usually more complex, especially when you agree on things inside your organization over what you need and how you are going to try out new processes. Once the aforementioned are cleared out at an organizational level, then I would say that things are not that complex.

I don't have any data to prove the return on investment I have seen from the use of the solution in my company. There is definitely some benefit from the use of the solution in the company, but I cannot speak about it specifically.

Price-wise, the product does not fall under the category of cheaply priced products.

The ease or difficulty with the maintenance part of the product users' experience depends on what they need from the product. The archiving and backup features of the product are not that flexible and convenient for certain use cases. You can use just a basic backup with the tool, which is not enough in most cases. If a user wants more backup features, then the user May need some additional tools while dealing with Salesforce Sales Cloud's installation phase.

I think Salesforce Sales Cloud is the right solution to use, as it is a good solution that is widely adopted and has proven itself in practice. I think it is a good decision to use Salesforce Sales Cloud. There are many aspects an organization needs to consider before adopting Salesforce, which are matters that can be greater than just the technical part.

I rate the overall tool an eight to nine out of ten.