Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

We use Salesforce for lead management, opportunity tracking and sale tracking. It provides insight into what has been sold and a forecast for future opportunities.

Salesforce highlights what are we selling in different regions and which regions or areas offer opportunities. We are able to view sales by month, quarter or year.

I like how you can create marketing campaigns. In five minutes, you can create a marketing campaign and send the campaign to users in less than 10 minutes. 

Salesforce is a powerful tool and you need specialists to create or to develop new functionalities. It is a difficult platform to learn to manage and you need years to know the whole product. 

I have used Salesforce for four years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. I previously used Asana but Salesforce offers better scalability compared to Asana. 

The customer service team respond really quickly. I would rate their support a five out of five. 

Even though we have more than 50 employees in our organization, only 10 users use Salesforce. This is because licenses are expensive and more employees use Asana which we have free licenses for.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We primarily use Sales Cloud to process internal requests from field sales and operations.

The reporting features are useful. 

I would like if Sales Cloud had the flexibility to create or edit the forms used to submit requests. Right now, they're fixed, and users can't edit them. Only administrators have editing privileges, so it takes too long to make changes.

I've been using Sales Cloud for about four years.

I haven't had any stability issues. Sales Cloud seems to be highly stable.

We have thousands of people using Sales Cloud at this company. 

I rate Salesforce Sales Cloud a solid eight out of 10. 

It's a centralized dashboard for all our in-house information.

We used to have all of the data in Excel sheets, but with the CRM, we can have all of the information in one place. You have access to all your deals, and all the information is visible to everyone in the company. You don't have to ask each employee to share individual sheets with you. Instead, what Salesforce does is that it gives everybody access to all the information on the dashboard.

Opportunity is a feature that I use very frequently. You create an opportunity when you schedule a call with a client. Within the opportunity, I can log all of the relevant data.

The type of customization that comes with Salesforce CRM gives me a lot of liberty and ease of access to add any information that I wish to add. For example, the name, email ID, designation, the name of the decision maker, when the client joined the company, and the amount of influence he will have on the product.

I also like the type of reports that I can create. Salesforce gives you the option of creating customized reports, which helps me to have a clear view of my opportunities. You don't have to necessarily go and check each and every opportunity, and there are in-built reporting capabilities as well.

I'm a massive fan of the custom integration Salesforce offers.

Salesforce Sales Cloud does not integrate with Slack or WhatsApp, for example. As a result, there is no easy way to directly log a conversation with a client that occurred on one of these platforms. There are a few things that still need to be done manually in these instances.

As for additional features, I would like to be able to link my personal phone to Salesforce so that I can log the records from my personal phone as well. With the current setup, they have to set up your ISP. To ensure that your data is logged into the CRM, you have to have the physical phone integrated with Salesforce Sales Cloud. If used with caution, I think this feature is going to help out. In India, the business model is such that nobody replies to an email. So, you have to use your personal phone or WhatsApp.

I've been using Salesforce Sales Cloud for more than three years.

As a user, I'm happy with the stability.

We have 20 people who use this solution, and we hope to expand. However, at my previous company, the Salesforce integration took six months. Therefore, in terms of scalability if you have to add different departments or new employees, the integration may take a while.

The only challenge that I see is in terms of having to run the cycle, create the account, and contact different teams for different purposes. What could be done better is to have a single point of contact for all your queries, but that is a massive request because there are sales teams, support teams, tech teams, dev teams, etc. However, if you can have a sales engineer who can help with all our questions, then it would be great.

The FAQs are helpful, and the technical support team is very efficient and capable of handling all your questions instantaneously. 

Also, the help that I got during the initial stage is where Salesforce stands out completely. They are not about email, chat, or phone. They are present throughout your entire journey.

I'm a massive fan of the Salesforce technical support team and would give them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We went with Salesforce because most of the employees who joined our company had used Salesforce before and because Salesforce comes with a lot of options.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

The deployment took six months from start to finish.

Salesforce saves time, and I have seen a fair amount of growth in terms of efficiency and accountability.

We have a yearly license, and there are no hidden costs. Considering the Indian market, the pricing is reasonable. I don't consider it to be on the high side.

Have a training module in place because Salesforce is a little bit technical and you need to understand all of the features.

The Salesforce Sales Cloud platform stands out from other products, and I would give them an eight on a scale from one to ten.

My current use for the solution is in implementing it for a company that sells services. The aim is to use the Sales Cloud to track all the existing accounts of my customer.

I'm a consultant, so I don't implement Salesforce for myself, but for my customers. I need Salesforce to be valuable for my customers. Because if not, the project will not be a success. In every project, it's very important to define the KPIs. But if you define well the KPIs with your customers, Sales Cloud will improve the organization. 

For one customer, Sales Cloud helped him to save two FTE. I don't know the English word for that, but it's like two times of 2% a year. So you save two-incomes per year using Salesforce because your employees are going faster.

The most valuable feature of Salesforce is that it's a system where you can use declarative development. Just using point and click, you can configure it in very nice ways. For small customers, you can use it for 80% of their business. Then we will have to use the custom development using a code, JavaScript, HTML only for really complex business processes of your customer. It's a nice feature because developers and development are expensive, and long to payment. So it's good that you can do a lot with point and click.

One area that needs improvement is that it can be difficult to understand for customers of Salesforce. If you are subscribing to Sales Cloud, we will have an out-of-the-box solution that is good and easy to use. But if you are not keen on system language and things that, you will need a consultant. You will need me to implement it to answer your needs. Because it can be difficult to understand, customers have to pay for the system, and then they have to pay a consultant to implement it. So that is expensive. But in the end, you will win money if the project is well defined, and the design has been done in a good way. Then the system is designed for the customer.

An advantage of Salesforce is that they upgrade their system every time they have a new release. We have a community where we can ask for additional features, and then Salesforce implements the new features in the new release.

I'm currently working on a Sales Cloud project. I'm working on a CPQ project, but while you work with CPQ, you have to work with Sales Cloud at the same time because both products are linked.

The solution is reliable. Salesforce use is like renting an office in a building. You share the water and things with all the users of the building. So you have to be aware that you can use too much, or you can use the water of your neighbors. It's the same way for Salesforce. So as long as you spend time to find the solution the best way, the only concern you will have is the data you're using and the storage of files. But you can have best practices for your people in the company, and buy extra data from Salesforce if you are using too much. So it can be a concern, but you will always have a solution.

The solution can require some maintenance as there can be bugs, and the customer doesn't always understand why. Sometimes, the customer is allocating one of their employees to be the admin of the solution, so they do not require a consultant.

The solution is really easy to scale. One of my projects was to deploy Salesforce for a multinational company, we started with one country, and then deploy it to all the countries of the company. 

The risk there is about the right & access and to cover all countries requirements.
But Salesforce gives a lot of tools to answer to customer needs.

The customer service for the solution is good. You can log cases, but the one thing you have with Salesforce, you will not have the same maintenance quality. If you pay a lot, you will have the best support. If you pay less, your support will be maybe not that efficient as another customer. But overall, it's nice.

Salesforce will give you an answer. The time for the answer will depend on how much you paid to Salesforce.

To build and deploy the initial setup takes about one month for big needs, half a month for medium needs. 

First is the design parts where you have all your customer needs, we build it in what we call a sandbox. In this sandbox, you have all the custom fields and the custom features that you build for your customer. You deploy this in a user acceptance testing environment. Then your customer, the company, will subscribe to Salesforce, will test those features. Once it is tested you will have to deploy it to the production environment, where the customer has all his data. It takes some time, and you have to wipe down everything you've built, to not miss anything. Because if you do, the deployment can be long and difficult. But there are tools that can help you to easily deploy the Sales Cloud solution.

It's very rare that your customer is only subscribing to Sales Cloud. Sometimes he has Sales Cloud and Service Cloud and things like that. And all your clouds are linked. But it's easy. You don't have to independently deploy the Service Cloud and the Sales Cloud. You can deploy it together.

The implementation team depends if you have declarative development or custom development using Apex and things like that. As Salesforce is using the cloud, you are using shared resource. Salesforce asks you to test your development, to not use too much data. If you have custom development, you will need to test it, and you will need a developer to deploy this. If it is only custom fields and declarative, depending on the size of the project, you only need one person. But then you need someone to follow the test, that the customer tested the solution, is it accepted by the customer. That is the longest part.

The solution is expensive, but you don't have to install it. You can access it from any computer, and it's the only solution on the market allowing that many features. So it's expensive, but you know why that is. It's not surprising.

Salesforce is good for all sizes of customers because you can adapt Salesforce for all customer needs. My suggestion to anyone considering Salesforce would be to spend a lot of time in the designing phase. For me, that's the most important.

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

This is a cloud solution. Within my company, we have around 150 users.

The user interface is pretty simple.

This is definitely a solution for the younger generation because it's working with the web frontend. There's a lot of new stuff where you can scroll down, use via handheld, and so on. As a cloud solution with web browser, it's different than my classical way of thinking. It's modern, but for older people, maybe it's not that understandable. It could be more user-friendly, maybe with an option to switch between interfaces.

I have been using this solution for the past two years.

Within other companies, I have previously used C/4HANA, which is the SAP product for CRM. From my user experience, I prefer SAP.

I think it's complex and simple. Because it's a cloud solution, you can maybe put in a logo or something like that, but the functionality is provided by the manufacturer, by Salesforce itself.

On a scale of 1 to 5, I would rate the difficulty of setup a 3.

I would rate this solution 6 out of 10.

Salesforce started as pure CRM software. For the CRM environment, this might be pretty good, but imagine when you have to interface this. Regarding interfaces, there could be some improvement.

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.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a CRM-based platform, it is used for customer relationship management.

In Salesforce we store the customers' data and we are managing those customers' data. You can connect with your customer easily and you can securely store your customer data in the best environment. Salesforce Sales Cloud is one of the best companies that is providing CRM applications.

We can also customize Salesforce Sales Cloud to our customer's company requirements. As for your demand, you can customize it. There are so many configurations we can do with the application. There is a lot of functionality that you can implement. It's an easy-to-use, user-friendly, and secure platform.

The solution updates frequently, approximately every three months. It stays updated.

The solution is secure. However, they could always improve on security.

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

The solution is scalable.

We have approximately 150 users using this solution in my organization.

I have used the support from Salesforce and I am satisfied.

I am a Salesforce certified administrator and Salesforce Certified Developer.

There are two implementations. You can either install it on your mobile on iOS, or Android platforms and on the desktop in the web-based platform. In the web platform, you can easily log into your organization and you can see your customers' data. Additionally, this can be done on mobile platforms. You can receive all those notifications.

It takes time to set up the organization as per your requirement. However, using the application does not take a lot of time. It is easy to use.

I do the implementation of the solution.

We have 50 users who work on the deployment process of this solution.

There is a license required to use this solution and the price is expensive. It could be reduced.

I would highly recommend this solution to others.

I rate Salesforce Sales Cloud a nine out of ten.

My primary use case of Sales Cloud is for account management. It's usually used by the sales teams, to organize our accounts and actually target certain accounts, to push certain products over to them. We have it linked with our current ERP platform, SAP, to give us visibility on invoices and products, what we call pack sizes, where we can build reports that help the sales teams do their jobs more efficiently. We also use it to create call cases, which is our product complaints process. 

The number one benefit of Sales Cloud is the visibility of accounts. Before, when people were communicating by email, for example, things could get lost in translation. Whereas, now, we can centralize all communication to a specific account. We can then tie it in and create follow-up tasks—based on what we call the chatted posts—on the actual records themselves. Communication has definitely been a lot more centralized, and it gives everyone the visibility needed on their accounts, whether it's on their desktop or even their phone, on the mobile app. 

One of the most valuable features is the automation of Sales Cloud. It gives us the ability to easily—without the use of coding—create automation in order for us to do our work a lot more efficiently, whether it's notification reminders or certain automatic processes. There are a lot of things that Sales Cloud can do that, in my opinion, make everyone's jobs a whole lot easier and give them the visibility they need when they require it, when talking to customers and prospecting. It makes the account management process easier as well. 

Sales Cloud could be improved with more training. In general, the training is very good, but you have to really seek out some good options in order to upskill yourself. Another thing, which could also be a benefit, is that Sales is very customizable. If you move from one organization to another, you can see your Salesforce as before, but their Sales Cloud may look completely different from what you're used to. It's not like Microsoft Excel or Trello, where the layout and all the functions are the same. Because it's so customizable, I feel like there is a bit of a learning curve when you inherit another Sales Cloud instance. To be honest, I think that's the beauty of Salesforce because you can customize it so much to fit your needs as a company. It follows your processes and use cases in order for you to get the most out of the system itself. 

The other thing I believe Salesforce could improve on is the file storage system. Salesforce is very good for its account management processes and automation, but when it comes to file storage, it could use a bit of work to rival that of something like Microsoft OneDrive or SharePoint. With that being said, there is a lot of integration with a tool called Files Connect, which allows you to connect to SharePoint or OneDrive, so it's not an issue moving forward, but it's something that they could improve. 

An additional feature we would like to see is better integration. A lot of software is already very well-integrated with Salesforce, directly as well, but I think that because we use SAP, we would like to see more of a direct link. We have one via a third-party solution, but I think that integration should eventually be a lot easier without the use of a third-party. For now, it's still very manageable, though. 

I have been using Sales Cloud for eight years now. 

The performance is very good. Every now and again, there may be something up with the system, but Salesforce is very transparent when it comes to these issues. 

Sales Cloud requires maintenance three times a year, so you need to be ready for when the product launchers come. 

This solution is definitely very scalable. We work in a multinational company—in Australia, we have approximately 70 people using Sales Cloud, but we use Salesforce in the other countries as well. In total, I'd guess there are around 2,000 people who use it. Our sales team uses it maybe 30% of the time because a lot of our main selling processes are still external. Given that our organization has a mature customer base, this is the way things have been done for a long time. We're translating processes bit by bit—maybe three projects a year—translating big things in order for us to do it within the Salesforce Sales Cloud CRM. We would like to get engagement up to 50-60% in the coming years, and we'll definitely see that engagement with initial projects that we're rolling out for the coming years and beyond. 

Salesforce replicated very well within multiple organizations. We've got one organization for several countries across the world, even though we've only got 70 people in Australia, and I think it will be very easy for us to use as we move forward. There are times when we need a bit more training, but I think that the onus is on them. Salesforce provides their own training and upskilling lessons called Trailhead, so they're very helpful. 

I contacted Salesforce in my previous role and I had a really good experience. Whenever you create a case, they get back to you quite quickly a lot of the time. I previously communicated with the account executive of Salesforce and they were very helpful with their processes. If they can't help us directly, they're more than happy to lead us in the right direction. So far, it's been a great experience. 

I don't have previous experience with similar products—I've only really worked with Salesforce. 

Just last year, I deployed this solution with my current company. It was a bit challenging to translate our current business processes into Salesforce. We have about 80% of the functionality that we used to—for example, copying and pasting from an email into a Word document or Excel is a lot easier than copying and pasting it into Salesforce. There's not that like-for-like translation. 

There were three people involved in the deployment process and it took about 18 months.

We implemented Salesforce through an in-house team. 

They're the best in the business, so I think their business model is definitely based on that. The cost is worthwhile, to me, and I think it's fair because of the customization capabilities. However, small organizations that are just starting out might struggle to pay for something additional like this, so they might have only one or two. You pay per license with this sort of solution, as well as any additional benefits. They have what they call managed packages, some of which are free, but some you have to pay for. My understanding is that Salesforce is a little bit expensive, but in terms of the efficiencies, automation, and visibility, I think it's definitely value for money. 

The advice I would give to someone looking into implementing Salesforce is to know the business inside and out—that would be what they call a functional consultant—because a lot of processes can be translated easily enough without the use of coding. For us, it took about 18 months of scoping in order to get the best process moving forward. The implementation can be as easy or as difficult as you want it to be. If you translate all your processes together, then I think it will be more difficult, but you essentially have to give a bit in order to take.

I recommend engaging with an experienced Salesforce consultant or partner in order to get the most out of the system because if you're doing it yourself, it might get a bit overwhelming, especially if you don't have any CRM experience. Just know that almost anything is possible with Salesforce. A lot of the companies I used to work for were built on Salesforce and all opportunities—revenue-driven processes—were driven through Salesforce. It's easily done, especially within the e-commerce and tech software industries. Sales Cloud is very applicable, but make sure to engage a partner who is experienced in rolling out Salesforce. There are partners who specialize in the education sector, F&B, etc., so you have options. 

I rate Salesforce a nine out of ten.