Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

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.

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.

We have a partnership with Salesforce. In addition to that, we have fully implemented Salesforce for one of the biggest automotive companies in Baghdad, ZSCO. There are some other companies that give support to and implement Salesforce for them in Iraq. 

We have implemented Sales Cloud to create leads, accounts, opportunities and workflows. We have API integration with our central and PBX, so it's fully integrated. 

In addition to that, we are dependent on Salesforce Enterprise Edition. We have some users who use Platform and some of the users are using Lightning, but usually we are using the Enterprise Edition for Salesforce in our implementation. It is more flexible and more capable to cover many activities. 

Salesforce is not used for financial things. It is not for inventory. It is not for financial activities or operation. It is for CRM, customer relation management.

It is an open platform with API integration with other systems. Salesforce is not a software. It is very famous and available. It is good for creating and generating leads and opportunities. It has wonderful reports as well. The dashboards are amazing. 

It has a workflow inside of it. If you need to send an email or send an SMS to a customer you can do it very easily in Salesforce. 

In addition to that, it is a brand. When we are talking to our clients about Salesforce, people are already aware of the brand. Any company, even big companies are saying that they use Salesforce, so this is wonderful. 

This system is a reliable system. It is without bugs, without problems, you can develop it. You can have outsourced support easily, including videos, all training, partner training, and webinars. It is easy as it's a worldwide software. 

So due to that, we usually go to this international solution to include our customers to help them with growth in their work. 

Salesforce is wonderful. 

The main issue is that is it is costly. Salesforce is not cheap, it's costly. Some of our customers say it is a costly solution. So, we have lost some sale opportunities regarding the high price. This is the main issue that we are facing. It is sales per user and the user price is about $150 per month, per user for the Enterprise Edition. The other edition is less than this, but it is costly. A company that has 70 or 80 users would pay more than $8,000 USD yearly because it is cloud based.

In addition to that, it does not include a professional accounting system, it is operations and it is a CRM. It is not capable of accounting things. 

It is most stable. We don't have any bad feedback on the technical side of Salesforce.

Scalability is wonderful.

Technical support is wonderful. When we open an issue, they call us and solve it well. We don't have any problems.

Previously we used IT Microsoft Dynamics CRM, it is a little bit like Salesforce, but Salesforce's capability is greater.

As for the deployment, you should have a professional guide you in order to do it. Nobody can do the implementation by themselves you can just set up some of basic things. You should have a developer, you should have a partner, you should have a person who has the knowledge. Have training courses in order to do the implementation the right way. 

Salesforce is user friendly in implementation and it is in using it, but you should have a specified person. 

I recommend Salesforce to customers that have commercial or workflow needs and CRM needs. 

I recommend Salesforce to customers that have commercial or workflow needs and CRM needs. I would rate it an 8 out of 10.

It's really the field sales mobility and alignment with the customer-service functions, so Service and Sales Cloud alignment through Salesforce.

We use the SaaS version. Predominantly, it's pipeline management and Salesforce optimization. We are a smaller company, so there are about 80 users working with Sales Cloud.

In my company, we have very manual backend disparate systems, but the good news is that through Salesforce—not only the Sales Cloud, but the Commerce Cloud—our customer-facing experience is best-in-class with this solution. We give all our customer service and sales teams a shared view of every one of our customers. Obviously, there's all the analytics and now the AI business analytics. 

It easily integrates with different ERPs, so we are now, in a progressive manner, implementing an ERP across a large food manufacturing business. There is no down time to the customers because the backend will implement this in terms of finance and operations, but the frontend and sales experience for customers is unaffected because Salesforce is basically ERP standalone, ERP agnostic.

I like that Salesforce is ERP agnostic. In the past and at different companies, I have implemented new or replacement ERPs. It's best in class. I like that it's a SaaS. I like that it can work on any device—any Windows, Android, or Apple device. It can also sync with your Office suite, i.e. your Outlook calendar. It has a lot of features: the dashboards, the reporting, the hierarchy, and just the ability to connect to many different technologies and main best-in-class ERPs and other systems, including eCommerce.

It would be nice if they had an ERP offering or a firm strategic partnership with a best-in-class ERP. So rather than say they're just ERP agnostic, you would pick whichever ERP you want, which is very generic. I think it would have a lot of merit if they partnered strategically with a best-in-class trusted ERP platform or acquired an ERP platform.

I would like to see AI leveraged for proactive business decision support. For instance, if some sales trends change, rather than relying on a business analyst to analyze reports, it would be nice to leverage AI so workforces could be notified of changes—be it business intelligence, or capability, whether it's good or bad—so you can respond to it proactively. It would be nice to see this done in a simple, automatic, cost-effective manner.

I was a long-term customer when I worked at Zodiac Marine & Pool, which is a global French company. I was the regional head of IT, which was the chief technology officer. I implemented Salesforce Sales Cloud in the region and worked very closely with the Americas and the EMEA—Europe, Middle East, Africa—counterparts to implement it across the globe. When I was at Hills Limited, which is an Australian public-listed company, I was the head of technology there as well, and I oversaw the whole Salesforce instance, which used Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Marketing Clouds. My new employer, My Muscle Chef, is also a large Salesforce customer.

In the earlier days, there were challenges with broadband and internet being cost-effectively and easily available at all times, but now, it's very good.

As long as your business rules and master data is clean, and as long as it's configured correctly, the up-time is excellent. I've never encountered any issues. It's a very trusted vendor. Their systems never have outages. I think there was one outage in 10 years, but it works really well. It's excellent.

It's very scalable. I implemented it in a region and then integrated it globally with my other counterparts for thousands of users. It's very scalable. It's agile. You can scale down or up depending on the term of your contract.

At My Muscle Chef, all the front-facing, customer-facing technologies are basically Salesforce, which basically compensates our current legacy, disparate backend applications. It's all compensated heavily by the effectiveness of how well we use Salesforce. I'm also a chairman of a National Rugby League club called the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs, and we are also a Salesforce customer.

We have our in-house team at the moment that deals with the partners, but when I was more technically involved in the implementation of the product, I dealt with customer support. As long as you are subscribed to the relevant type of support, it's excellent. It's global, and if you have 24/7 coverage, you get premium 24/7 coverage. It just depends on what type of subscription you have.

I've had a fair amount of experience with different platforms like Zendesk, SugarCRM, and ACT!. We replaced that with Salesforce. In the last four years, I have had experience with Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM.

I think Salesforce is industry agnostic. It works well across all industries: sales, service, marketing, Commerce Cloud. That is its strength. Some of the less known solutions are more industry or bespoke to the size of the company. SugarCRM is probably more for a smaller, marketing boutique type of organization. Salesforce can do this but can also work in enterprise size companies.

The big challenge I'm finding at the moment is there's a shortage of skills, and if you are implementing Salesforce Cloud, it could be costly from an implementation cost point of view, but once it's implemented, it's a best-in-class solution. So it's the cost of achieving the actual implementation that is a challenge at the moment, with the cost of the labor and a shortage of skills in the Salesforce community.

For the deployment process, we have five dedicated, highly paid resourcers that maintain our Salesforce platforms, but we also work with agencies and partners.

The time it takes to deploy Salesforce depends on the size of the business, but if you want to implement it properly and integrate it with your other ERP or data systems, I would say six to twelve months, depending on how big your business is. But to do this properly, the change management, training, and the ownership and handover to the business will take a minimum of six months. Depending on the size of the business, it can be as long as twelve months if it's done properly.

It is a premium product, so it is not the cheapest solution. I think if it's implemented well, and you're getting the soft cost benefits, the efficiencies, it's justified. But not if you're looking at just apples for apples as a subscription, without the complexity that you can achieve. It can deal with complex business requirements. Some other CRMs can't. But you certainly pay, so it's a premium-charged solution. It's one of the more expensive ones. 

The only other additional cost would be support, depending on how complex your business is and how much change is required. At the moment, there's a shortage of talent in the Salesforce community. They're in high demand and very costly to recruit or to have an arrangement with, whether it's in a formal employment or partner arrangement.

One thing Microsoft Dynamics has that Salesforce does not is the full suite of applications in ERP, so that's one of the advantages. While Microsoft CRM is rapidly gaining good rankings in terms of improving, it might not be on par with Salesforce, but the value-add is the whole Microsoft suite of products, so the Microsoft 365, which is Office, SharePoint. These can all integrate with Salesforce, but they can give you everything, including this CRM and ERP all together in a single vendor experience.

I would rate this solution 9 out of 10. It is a premium product.

My biggest advice is to know your scope. Make sure you have buy-in, the executive ,down. It has to come from the leadership down. It can't be from an employee up, otherwise you won't have the buy-in, the optimized use of it. Then form a continuous improvement committee to ensure that you're leveraging the true capabilities of a best-in-class technology. Otherwise, you risk just using it for business-as-usual administration without necessarily leveraging the benefits of a SaaS, where there's ongoing new enhancements and capabilities. Unless you're investing in leveraging those, you're probably not getting the best return on your investment.

We use the solution to manage our sales processes.

The reporting is easy and helpful.

The product is not stable when enhancements are done to the cloud.

I have been using the solution for three to four years.

I rate the tool’s stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a ten out of ten. We have 100 users in our organization. We use the product twice or thrice a week.

Salesforce is a huge competitor of Microsoft and other solution providers. We chose Salesforce Sales Cloud because it is quick to launch. We could start working with it immediately.

I did not face any major issues. I recommend the solution to others. It is easy to use. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

I use Salesforce Sales Cloud to customise order management and tracking. We also use it for revenue recognition, billing and analytics. Salesforce is our primary CRM.

This solution offers a good user experience. It is easy to learn and use, even for those who are using it for the first time.

I have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud since 2008.

This is a stable solution. When any issues are anticipated from Salesforce, we are notified. We have experienced a 99.9% stability rate. 

This is definitely a scalable solution. They have different types of licensing based on your needs. You can increase and decrease the number of users and access it from anywhere. The users are in business functions including the case management team, revenue team, analytics team, development, and QE. 

The support for this solution is good. If you have an enterprise account, you get access to really good support.

Positive

The company I work for used to use Microsoft Dynamics CRM and they switched to Salesforce because Salesforce was skyrocketing during that period of time.

We generally deploy through packages constructed within Salesforce and we use our own local deployments. We have ANT scripts and we were trying to come up with some CI/CD implementations. Currently, our deployment on Salesforce is out of the box. 

Our engineering team completed deployment. Every release cycle took one to three months. We take at least one day to deploy, because we have other integrations and components closely linked to Salesforce. Salesforce have their own release cycle. If they have any changes or new features they want to implement, they have push notifications to the customers on the features utilize.

The return on investment from this solution is from case management and the way billing information is captured. We have Tableau dashboards to pull up how many orders are created for a particular month. This information is supplied to the business to understand how we can streamline, improvise and improve marketing activities. 

Compared to other CRM solutions, Salesforce is expensive. It is more affordable for enterprise users than for small businesses. 

I would advise those considering Salesforce to first understand their business model and how a CRM would fit in. They should understand their use cases and how their business functions can be changed from a technological perspective. 

The Salesforce Lightning feature is a new concept and we need to understand how it could help our business. We need to understand the usability and user experience for customization and to provide solutions for specific industries.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.