Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

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. 

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.

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. 

We are using Salesforce Sales Cloud to create opportunities and tickets. We are updating the information and running reports.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is very user-friendly, and simple to create dashboards and extract the reports. Additionally, it integrates well with other applications.

When integrating Salesforce Sales Cloud with other applications it can be difficult to maintain security.

The next release of Salesforce Sales Cloud should add better integration with communication systems, such as Webex.

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

The stability of Salesforce Sales Cloud is good.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is scalable.

We have approximately 1,000 users using this solution. We have plans to increase usage in the future.

The support from Salesforce Sales Cloud is very helpful.

In my previous company, I used an in-house built CRM system.

We use ten technicians that support Salesforce Sales Cloud.

I would highly recommend this solution to others.

I rate Salesforce Sales Cloud a nine out of ten.

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.