Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

We use the solution for opportunity identification, pipeline management, and forecasting. Those are primarily the areas.

The solution has provided our company with a common platform, a common process, and has created a common skill set, and institutional awareness of major transactions. It's provided easier audit for opportunities, deal reviews, and automation features for reporting. 

The dashboards and dashboard customization are great.

The solution is stable and reliable.

You can scale the solution easily.

The setup is pretty fast.

Technical support is helpful and knowledgeable. 

The reporting formats could be better. We'd like to be able to graphically, optically, change what the selections are that we can choose to put a report or format in, just in how they appear, the aesthetics. There could be more presentation formats that are incorporated that would make them easier to transfer over to a PowerPoint or something. We should be able to export documentation capabilities that are more presentation-friendly outside of the system.

II want to be specific about what it looks like, what the actual report actually looks like. For example, the optics of the report, the colors that are used, the format that it's in. That's the main comment. The data is fine. It's how the report actually looks that's an issue.

I've been using the solution for more than 12 months at this point.

It's very stable. It's reliable. It's a good solution.

It scales well. A lot of people need to own that the solution will only work as well as its design, and how people apply it. The more information that can be given upfront about what the outcome requirements are, the better.

That's a conditional situation. It really depends on how engaged the client is in providing their requirements and then giving that stuff over so that it can be executed. It's a pretty well-thought-out solution that performs and scales well.

We have more than 5,000 users at this point. That's across departments in the services division. The solution is extensively used. 

I've dealt with technical support. They were good. They were on the better side. Nobody's perfect, however, they were pretty knowledgeable.

I've used multiple CRMs and NetSuite by Oracle in the past. In this organization, we had a homegrown solution that would not have been commercially marketed.

The initial setup was complex, however, it was well planned. There was a good approach. It was very formulaic. It allowed for customer feedback to help customize the solution. I thought it was a very interactive process.

The configuration part was relatively quick. It was the planning that took longer as it required a lot of internal reviews to discern what was important information and what wasn't. It's hard. I would say that the process was six months, however, the actual flipping the switch wasn't that long - maybe a couple of weeks.

That's why it's hard for me to discern where the breakpoint is. It was a lot of reviews, communication, et cetera. However, the enabling of the technology did not take very long. It was more or less deciding on how to enable the technology that took long.

There is a team that handles maintenance for the product. I don't deal with that directly.

I've done it probably two ways. One was an internal engagement. The other one was external. I know that Accenture was involved in that. I myself actually had to go to Chicago to train at one of the Accenture facilities to be a champion for their transition.

I'm an end-user. I'm using the most recent version of the solution.

I'd advise potential new users to make sure you're good by researching what's best for your organization and make sure that once you choose to go down that path, that you've put the right steps in for adoption. This or any other CRM will fail if the organization doesn't agree on the value or use of the tool.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. It is highly available, handles the majority of our business needs, and the consistency of its function is pretty strong. The capacity of capability is good.

I am a salesman with a systems integrator we use Salesforce Sales Cloud as our CRM solution.

As a CRM, it's relatively easy to use.

This product is lightweight.

The user interface could be more intuitive. I had some challenges with how to convert from a lead to an opportunity. It may have been due to our configuration, rather than the software, but I did not find it was intuitive.

Assigning team members to a deal is something that I found challenging.

It offers some level of integration with LinkedIn, although closer integration with LinkedIn would be good. On top of that, having tighter integration with other tools, like Franklin Covey or Miller Heiman would be good.

I have been working with Salesforce Sales Cloud for approximately five years, on and off.

This solution is super stable.

I've used a couple of other CRM solutions.

At a recent company, I used Siebel for a couple of years and it was very clunky. Anytime I wanted to use it, it would consume a lot of resources on my computer and it took a long time to load up. I haven't experienced that at all with Salesforce Sales Cloud.

Any of the limitations that I've felt when using this product could be due to our configuration, and not necessarily due to the software itself.

This is a product that I would recommend. The only thing that I would suggest is that if somebody is going to implement it, then what they need to do is collect more feedback and more input from different levels of sales leaders beforehand.

I would rate this solution a nine out of 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.

We use Salesforce Sales Cloud for keeping track of both clients and employees on different levels, whether they're client-facing or they're more behind the scenes, such as myself.

Salesforce Sales Cloud has helped our organization by giving it the flexibility to customize our products to fit tiers of products. There are many timing and automation features that have given us control over some of the very unique business processes.

Salesforce is such a widespread software in terms of what it can do and its scope. Theoretically, you can run a whole company off of it. There are many valuable features, such as reporting and analytics. You can customize almost the whole environment is what appeals to so many companies the most.

I would love Salesforce to keep on committing and building out what they call flows. It's their point-and-click version of coding. You don't have to be a coder to create essentially what a developer would have to normally, which is a great feature, but it could still be improved upon.

I have used Salesforce Sales Cloud within the past 12 months.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is reliable.

The scalability of Salesforce Sales Cloud is one of their biggest advantages.

We have a little over 150 employees using it Salesforce Sales Cloud. There are probably 10 of us that use the backend. We have five of us that are dedicated Salesforce developers and administrators and an additional five that you would call super users, who have a lot of permissions because they were very close with us, and we trust them. The rest of the workforce is more client-facing in different parts of the organization. We are the development team, they are part of who we support.

The leadership team is very dedicated to increasing the use of Salesforce, whether it's adding another cloud or adding more people to my team. Recently we added approximately 30 brand new users. this can happen again at any time.

Salesforce is such a large company, they have three feature releases a year. They're constantly addressing issues. However, their responsiveness could be better at times. I do not have many complaints and they have very good customer service when we developers need it.

Overall the support is very good. The responsiveness can vary, but nothing that has displeased me and they will always see the job through. They're very dedicated to filling those types of quotas. They can be very responsive when a case has been open for a while.

The delays we faced are more of a corporate issue, but if you contact them individually, you receive much better service.

I have always used Salesforce, I am a Salesforce specialist. However, the company I work for might have used something else previously but I am not sure about that.

The implementation of Salesforce Sales Cloud is straightforward because it does not matter who you trained with to receive your Salesforce certifications and work in the industry, you know the deployment process. Everyone tends to know that it can be clunky, it can be frustrating, but at the same time, it's not exactly a broken system by any means.

The time it takes for the deployment depends on the size. We work in sprint cycles, we do it every two to three weeks. It depends on the size of that particular sprint. When it comes to deploying and then testing to make sure it's already it will never be more than an hour and a half.

The deployment tool could use a lot of work. However, when compared to everything else they're doing, it feels it's more left on the side, they prioritize the newer features.

My whole team and I, do deployments together or at least after we finish our assignments. There are about five of us at the moment. We have both developers and administrators, who all come together, and we complete whatever needs to be deployed all at the same time.

We always need someone dedicated to regular maintenance. I would imagine it's no different than any kind of another software environment of the size of Salesforce. You always want to have someone dedicated purely to making sure everything is working all right.

When it comes to dollars and cents, I couldn't tell you what that return on investment is. What I can say is that as we've grown out and increased automation, and over the past six months we have seen a very noticeable improvement.

I've seen the prices for Salesforce Sales Cloud, but I haven't been the one to handle the money. As someone who's only visually looked at the price, I would imagine it's on the pricier side, but they do have a ton of leverage, and seeing that everyone I've worked for has always been dedicated to continuing Salesforce. I've never worked for anyone who has threatened to leave. Everyone has accepted the pricing for what they offer.

There are additional feature costs but licenses are definitely the most expensive, but once you add or talk to your account representative about more individual features. We're talking about Salescloud, and if we wanted to add Servicecloud, that would be much more reasonably priced than us asking for 50 new licenses. Licensing is where they make most of their money.

The three companies I've worked for who have all used Salesforce, they've never by any means brought up the idea of moving to a competitor. Everyone's been happy on a macro scale of what the product has brought to their firms.

I rate Salesforce Sales Cloud an eight out of ten.

They can always improve and, if 10 other people in my position were asked about features they could improve they would bring up different answers. They do release a lot of features three times a year, every year. They're listening to customers, but sometimes you have to be more persistent than you'd hoped for them to listen.

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'm using it to track opportunities and keep track of customer relations.

It's fast. It's accurate. I can access it anywhere. I can log calls live, keeping the information fresh in my mind. It has really helped expand our customer base.

I can see activity per customer. I can find out quickly and easily who was the last person I talked to, when it was, and what we were talking about.

I like its reporting.

Sometimes, it is difficult to integrate it with my emails. I've had trouble integrating it with my emails. There were a couple of things I did try as well, but I wasn't able to do so. 

I've had difficulty in other areas too with integration. It was related to syncing my calendars. I want the tasks that I put in to automatically sync to my calendars and update my calendars, but I couldn't figure out how to do it.

I have been using this solution for three years now.

I haven't had any issues so far.

I'm only using a small portion of it. You can do a lot more than I'm using it for, but I haven't gone into that yet.

There are 10 people in our organization who are using this solution. It is currently not being used extensively in the organization. It could be used more. Right now, we're just scratching the surface.

They were good, and they helped me through my issues.

I used Sage CRM for a while, and it's not very much fun to use. I switched because every time I had to do something, I had to contact our company IT support. It was too cumbersome. They had to get involved every time I wanted to do something, and I needed to be able to do things quickly and without having to go through someone else.

I had to set it up myself. There were some parts of it that took a little bit of learning, but I found the videos and other resources helpful.

My advice to others would be that they should talk to a consultant and tell them everything they want to do beforehand. They should make sure that they have a plan in place to get it set up the way they want to right away.

I would rate it at least a nine because it is really easy to use, and it has helped me a lot.

The primary use case is if you want to update old legacy systems and go into a more mobile way of doing business. One of the main competitive advantages of this solution is that it already offers an 85% solution (out of the box), and you can modify it if you wish.

Salesforce does not offer anything on premise. It's always in the cloud.

No installation of software, or security updates. Easily working together with colleagues.

Salesforce wishes to push for a declarative way of solving IT problems.
As an end user, you can do a lot by yourself, so you do not have to write code. The idea is that they go for low-code and they use flow. It's possible to update records and do things like automation without writing real code. I think this is one of the advantages of the solution.

Also you can easily collaborate with your colleagues. Another main benefit is that you can find a lot of information on websites, and you can learn it yourself through Trailhead. It's a guided way of learning new topics, and it's completely free.

The company has a policy of three releases per year.

One of the advantages of Salesforce is that it's fun. With features like Trailhead, the gamification makes it a joyful environment.

The reporting part is a bit low. You have other possibilities, like Einstein, or Tableau.

The deployment of (meta) data from the sandbox environment to production is also a weaker point because their solution is not powerful (even non-existent).

I have been working with Salesforce Sales Cloud for more than five years. 
I work as a Salesforce functional consultant. My role is to improve the adoption ratio of the client. I help implementing (declarative) and migrating legacy systems towards Salesforce.

The stability of Sales Cloud (and Salesforce in general) is extremely reliable. Ten years ago, we were one of the first Belgium customers that got a massive implementation of Sales Cloud. Servers were in the United States, there were several complaints from customers that it was taking too long. Salesforce acted and invested heavily in data centers in Europe, and now I have never had any issues with reliability or stability.

The solution is extremely easy to scale up because you can go from the Professional Edition to the Unlimited Edition.

You will only have a problem if you wish to downgrade.

If you have a problem, you can open a case with Salesforce. They give it a status, like high, low, or medium. If it takes a bit of time, maybe it's linked to the fact that your case is not crystal clear. If they don't do anything after a while or if you haven't heard back from them, then you can escalate the case.
Of course all is linked to your service contract and SLAs.

Positive

Salesforce doesn't require any specific maintenance. Salesforce works like a hotel. You just rent a room for a particular period, and the rest is done for you.

The main issue is the price. Because it's SaaS, you will have to pay on a monthly basis. It will become very expensive because you'll be thinking, "I have Sales Cloud, and I want to do service and help my customers, so I need another cloud." This is something I have already seen with other customers. They would like to jump into the Salesforce environment, but it can become a hefty price tag, so that's an issue.

There are different licensing models. 
You could have the Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited edition. It is linked to functionality. I only work for multinational clients, so they usually use an Unlimited or Enterprise solution.

If you are a big company, then you have a lot of leverage and more power to decrease the cost of your system per month. A lot of people aren't aware of that. If you go into a full-fledged solution, you can still bargain or discuss the price.

Only one person is required for deployment, and you can automate it if you wish. If you have a good developer who creates that, and you have your deployment street, you can push information into the production environment on a nightly basis.

I would rate this solution a 9 out of 10.

Sales Cloud is suitable for everyone, even a mom and pop shop, if you have the money to invest in it ( I would not recommend it for a very small company that has only one FTE). 
If you have five or 10 SEs, you can definitely use it, all the way up to Fortune 500 companies. Most companies that use Salesforce are Fortune 500 companies.

I would definitely recommend that you try to stick to what Salesforce offers. You should not try to change the native setup of Salesforce, otherwise you will face issues with new releases. You should try to follow the spirit and idea of Salesforce, for example avoid large coding because then you will/can screw up the system.

I am a consultant and deliver the build for Salesforce to our customers. The company has a partnership with Salesforce and I'm the director. 

There are many benefits to Salesforce. It allows companies to know who their customers are, how much they spend, then relate that to earlier purchases so that a company can focus their efforts where necessary. You can also determine how sales staff are working against their targets and whether they need assistance.

I think Salesforce as a whole is all about understanding your customers and the pipeline with customers. Through an account, you can capture all the contacts that relate to that account or business, including personal details. It's highly configurable so you can completely adjust it to whatever business requirements you have. Once you've understood who your customers are, you can decide what you might want to sell them. It can all be captured and put into reporting. As a result, you can forecast against the reporting and figure out where you want to go on quotas for your sales team. You can also see how long it might take for a sale to go through and whether any sales opportunities get stuck.

You can track any issues with Sales Cloud functionality once a customer purchases by capturing your phone calls and storing them in Salesforce, along with any emails. Everything can be stored and tracked. The company brings out new features three times a year. I haven't used all the features because there are so many of them and the solution is now very large. They've changed their custom UI and it's now more configurable so that you can change it to suit your needs. I might only want to see certain fields at certain times throughout my journey and it can do that. There's a ton of functionality that I haven't even started to really explore.

Salesforce has a built-in functionality called changesets to move functionality from the sandbox and into production. That's a little dated now, and it's not very good for version control or backups. There are third party apps that can provide a slicker service to manage version control and deployments between environments.

I've been using Salesforce since 2007. 

The solution is highly stable and they have serious backups. If there are any glitches you can go to their site, trust.salesforce.com, and check on any problems. In terms of maintenance, once you've implemented it, it's important to get a team onboard internally to maintain things; users come and go so you're constantly canceling or adding users. Some will need help with reporting and once they understand the benefits and power, they'll want more teams to use it which will require more functionality. Our customers are always wanting to increase use. Salesforce is in major demand and most clients have continuous new project ideas and as a result, an expanded functionality. 

The solution is easy to scale and our customers range from small to enterprise size organizations. 

We sometimes need to contact support and for most customers, it's beneficial for them to have premise support because you do get a quicker response for resolution. You do have to ring them sometimes in order to get features enabled but once you're part of a consulting firm, you rarely need to contact them because you can generally resolve the problems with internal expertise.

There's no simple answer regarding complexity of deployment. It actually depends on the size of your implementation. If you're on a huge project, deployment can take months, if not years. These days, Salesforce has better version control using external tools which speeds up the setup because you keep a version in control and you move it through the different processes in order to push it through. You can deploy something within an hour of building and testing, and capture all the requirements. It's highly configurable.

The minimum time for deployment is generally a couple of months but it is absolutely dependent on how much you want to tweak it and make it your own. It can be a very quick turnaround.

Every finance director I've spoken to will say that Salesforce is expensive and that's mainly because it is a per-user license. The more you use it, the more it will cost. There are licensing costs and implementation costs in configuring the system to your needs. It's expensive but also one of the largest business systems you'll have in your company because it'll integrate absolutely anything you need it to. It should be viewed as an investment.

The solution needs to be considered as a long-term investment, and I suggest engaging a partner to implement it. Salesforce will tell you it's possible to implement in-house, particularly for smaller organizations, but I would recommend a certified expert with experience and knowledge.

I rate this solution 10 out of 10.