Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

We use Salesforce Sales Cloud for management assistance and for CRM.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is not as simple to use as Zoho. It requires some level of expertise before you can use it. However, you can easily learn how to use the solution as you go along.

I have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud for a few years.

I have found Salesforce Sales Cloud to be stable.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is scalable.

We have approximately 75 users using this solution.

I have not contacted technical support.

I preferred using Zoho rather than Salesforce Sales Cloud. We switch to Zoho because the price of Salesforce Sales Cloud was expensive.

The initial setup of Salesforce Sales Cloud is simple and took approximately one hour, but not as simple as Zoho.

The overall price of Salesforce Sales Cloud could be better, it is more expensive than other competitors. There is an annual license for Salesforce Sales Cloud.

I would recommend the solution to others.

I rate Salesforce Sales Cloud a seven out of ten.

• The Sales Cloud platform
• The Service Cloud platform

It has touched every spectrum of our organization regardless of the roles the various department plays. Every department contributes to the revenue numbers through the use of this tool.

Improving reports/dashboards is needed. It is quite good, but taking it up a notch would be beneficial for the whole team.

I have used it since 2009, so six years.

There have been no issues with the deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

It has scaled well and every department in our organization uses it.

Start small, then leverage it to the whole team in phases. You will achieve greater success when doing it in small steps, which will also ensure that this product gets used most efficiently.

A six out of 10.

A six out of 10.

No other solutions were previously used.

The initial setup was quite straightforward.

We used a vendor team for implementation.

Get your requirements properly analyzed before walking it through with the deployment team.

My background is with Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. The product has versions which come in the form of three yearly releases for summer, spring, and winter.

With the new releases, upgrading certain features is not optional, it just happens on a designated date and your application gets upgraded automatically. For the more interactive parts of the upgrades, there is sometimes a need for admin intervention. This requires some sort of back end configuration by a system administrator.

Salesforce's release notes are extremely comprehensive - sometimes too comprehensive as they can top 300 pages per release. Most people should be able to find what they need from the table of contents fairly easily. The organization of the document stays very regular year over year.

I would like to see Salesforce scale back on the new items, and try to fix more of the old broken items, bugs, and enhancement requests. Sometimes, like with the new community templates, there can be obvious bugs that slide by unnoticed and then the end user has to find them as if it were a beta release.

I started using Salesforce when they were on the winter 2011 release.

Premier support costs a lot of money and oftentimes they do not have better information than a good admin could find out on their own. It is great for someone new to Salesforce without an experienced admin to turn to for support.

Don't do it yourself unless you plan to become a Salesforce Admin. Do it right the first time, which does not mean pay the highest price.

Make sure if you are using a consulting company they are as trustworthy as possible, research who your consultant is, previous successes of the individual you work with and not just the company as a whole. Find them on LinkedIn and ask people about them. If you hire someone in-house do the same research. If you are exposing all your company data and the system architecture of the company moving forward to one person's design, it is critical to make sure you have the right person guiding it.

Ask them about why they like doing Salesforce, the values that are important to them and how they picture the beginning, middle, and end of the consulting/work relationship. This should give you some insight into what guiding principles they are likely to follow

ROI depends on how good the guy setting up your Salesforce is.

Do your best to negotiate the cost if you can. Salesforce is one of the most expensive solutions out there.

The ease of customization makes every Salesforce implementation like a strand of company DNA. This can be a top-tier solution for companies who utilize the product with best practices. On the other hand, some companies who have a weak IT department or just are not ready to integrate their business with Salesforce should hold back! This is because the needs of a very young business will undoubtedly change again and again, and when a company takes their Salesforce system along for that roller-coaster ride, the company growing pains leave scars on the system. This causes some people to resent Salesforce as a system. I'm not going to say a young company should not use Salesforce, only that it is critical to have the most experienced system admin you can afford if the business wants to use Salesforce from an early age.

The amount of time you believe it will take to get Salesforce operational for your company, triple that time and then multiply by two. Here's why, say, I think it will take three months to roll this out, with documentation, or finding resources it will take six months and with unexpected delays it will take nine. Now multiply by two again because you should spend nine months planning out who, how, where, when etc. If you want your system to do well you need to do the work to get there. Otherwise you will end up having to redo your entire Salesforce implementation.

The core features as well as the ability to extend them using ‘click-vs-code’ configurations to drive workflow activities.

We have been able to automate a large portion of the manual processes for our sales activities.

We know that User Interface improvements are coming, as well as improvements to reporting and dashboards.

I have been using Salesforce for four years.

It is possible to use or configure the system in a way that can ‘slow it down’, but deployment, stability and scalability are some of the best features of Salesforce.

The technical support is the one area that Salesforce needs the most improvement. They are slow to respond, and in many cases you don’t get the help you need. There are different levels of support based on the license agreement, so make sure you know what you are getting, but don’t expect fast results except for the most basic questions.

A different solution was used several years ago and was called Goldmine.

The initial setup is very straightforward, and consists of many of the same considerations for any move to a CRM solution. However, the ability to configure Salesforce Sales Cloud is much faster.

We did use a partner for the implementation, but have not used them since. I would highly recommend that you have someone on the team who is close to a salesforce solution/technical architect. They don’t need to be certified, but they should have a track record for successful project management and understand the salesforce technology stack.

Negotiate during the end of the Salesforce year. You will get the best pricing. Review the licensing options to align it to your needs. And ask for help from people you know who are like your company and using Salesforce.

We did evaluate other CRM solutions as well such as Microsoft CRM.

Follow good practices for comparing it, don’t over customize the standard functionality, make sure you understand how you would use it based on your sales processes and which ones you should/could change.

We primarily use the solution for managing our organization's leads and our customer accounts.

Salesforce has made it so much easier to expedite the process of getting the information about our leads and clients. It's really sped everything up in a major way.

The solution is very user-friendly. Anyone can jump on and start working.

The product is very fast and responsive. There's no lag time when you are on the platform.

The initial setup is very easy.

The problem is the solution has gotten so big, it's very complex now. It's a bit difficult to figure out how to do certain actions.

The solution probably has between 300-500 features already. I can't think of one they are lacking.

The solution is quite expensive.

I've been using the solution since 2012. It's been a long time. I'd say it's just under a decade at this point.

The product is largely stable and dependable. Every once in awhile, you may get a bug or glitch. However, it's rare, and it rarely affects our work.

The solution is very scalable. It scales quite well, as a cloud solution.

We only have five people on the platform currently. It's not too many. We have one administrator and two or three sales people that are on it regularly.

We are not very satisfied with technical support. You have to go through these gateways, and sometimes the support will respond, and sometimes they don't respond at all. It's all depending on if you're a paid subscriber to the support or not. If you are not, then they won't respond. It's lacking. If we bought the service, they should want to help us, and yet the way it's set up, that's not the case at all.

Overall, I'd rate the technical support at a six out of ten.

I used to NetSuite, however, it was a very long time ago at this point. It's almost been ten years.

The initial setup isn't complex at all. It's very straightforward. It's basically an out-of-the-box product. You don't have to play around with configurations.

The solution isn't cheap. It's very costly for an organization like ours. It's also expensive to integrate the solution with other products.

We're a Salesforce customer. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

We're using the enterprise version of the solution.

It's a good product. It's perfect for people who really want to grow their company. If they have resources to really spend on organizing their leads and clients then Salesforce is a pretty good option. That said, it is not for everybody.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate this solution at a six. If it was more competitively priced and was a little less complex, I'd rate it higher. It's just too big for us.

The most valuable feature of Salesforce platform is the development model of Customer Facing Implementation/Applications. Salesforce provides a basic data model already prepared for users and allows developers to customize the platform according to their business needs.

Salesforce helps in increasing the productivity, sales, lead-management process (in which every lead is tracked in an efficient manner). The users within the organization are able to track their (and their sub-ordinates') opportunity pipeline. Sales managers have the tools, real-time tracking and instantaneous feedback are by far the best methods and hence they can give more energy to selling and immediately incorporate managers’ instant feedback with deals in motion.

Salesforce is itself expanding at a fast pace for all the partner, customer, and developer community. But as a Salesforce developer, it would be great of Salesforce can step towards the Open Source platform for development and implementation.

I have more than two years of experience working on the Salesforce platform. I have worked on Apex classes, VF pages, REST API, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, etc. for developing and customizing Salesforce for our clients.

While the Salesforce version upgrades are in process, there may be some performance issues (however, Salesforce does inform users about this beforehand).

In terms of scalability, the Salesforce platform is a multi-tenant platform and, hence, it focuses more on the governor limits and scalable applications. But if a company wants to expand the CRM, they can ask Salesforce for the 'unlimited' version which enables a larger limit with a per usage count.

Salesforce provides various levels of technical support for different types of customers based on the version they have purchased.

I have not worked on any other CRM application development platform.

Salesforce provides a basic data model which matches most all of organization models, but there is always a requirement to customize it according to a company's user needs in the most efficient manner. The consultants or the Salesforce developer can help the customers to achieve company-level customization.

We implemented it through a vendor team. I have worked on a Salesforce appExchange product (quick modular application specifically designed for companies to overcome implementation efforts).

The best advice for Salesforce implementation is to check if the feature is provided by Salesforce in the standard version; if not, then search for a Salesforce app on AppExchange which might fulfill the requirements, and if no such app exists, then we might have to develop it ourselves for the particular situation.

Costs and benefits in most cases are hard to determine, but don’t let perfection be the enemy of valuable information. If you are looking for a systematic functioning within your organization, Salesforce is one of your paths towards it.

There are various case studies on Google which suggests the options for choosing the best CRM. It depends on various factors such as cost, productivity, implementation cost, maintenance cost, etc.

You can try Salesforce as a free developer version (with lots of limits). You can contact me at vishal_kdn@yahoo.co.in for any kind of help and advice.