What is our primary use case?
I'm in an architect role. Primarily, it's for CRM. Service Cloud is used as our call center using the CRM.
How has it helped my organization?
Essentially, it's the CRM solution for managing customers and leads.
The features that had the most significant impact on our sales efficiency include flexibility, regular updates, and very good end-to-end sales and customer management processes.
AI and machine learning are on the agenda for next year. Initially, it will be very silo-based, but eventually, we'll be integrating MIBI data into our solution.
Sales Cloud's reporting and analytics capabilities influenced our sales strategy quite a lot. We can build every report as a dashboard, and there are various sorts of things. We are using Tableau as our MIBI analytic solution, which is also owned by Salesforce these days.
What is most valuable?
Sales Cloud is invaluable because it's a cloud solution that's well-used, provides businesses with essential sales tools, and is infinitely customizable.
FlowBuilder and DBSync are critical. DBSync is a tool that manages our databases.
Lucidchart is valuable for creating diagrams.
What needs improvement?
There is room for improvement in Documentation and third-party documentation.
CI/CD is the biggest room for improvement. Deployment between environments and configuration. They've come up with their own CI/CD solution recently, but it still feels a bit like it's held together with string and paper.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using it for two years. We use the latest version. It was deployed in Spring 2024.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. It's pretty good. Sales Cloud has defined upgrade paths—three upgrades a year. Things very rarely break. They fix bugs and update code that we're currently using. The APIs they use to support multiple versions. The stability of the platform is very good.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. The biggest impediment there is storage costs. It's very expensive.
At the moment, we've not gone live. So, it will be around 250 end users.
How are customer service and support?
The customer service and support are excellent. I'm overall satisfied with it. It could be improved, but everything could be improved.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used a different solution. We decided to move mainly because the old solution was long in the tooth, no longer supported, and would have needed substantial updates. It wasn't really a solution that could be used for a membership management system.
How was the initial setup?
I would rate my experience with the initial setup a six out of ten, with one being difficult and ten being easy to set up.
The reason for that is it's ultimately customizable. It's out of the box—it doesn't really give you anything. You need to customize it.
Sales Cloud could deliver a whole package of design patterns or out-of-the-box solutions that work better for different industries.
What about the implementation team?
The deployment took quite a while, maybe a year, mainly because of customization issues.
It's fully CI/CD delivered. It's not very manual at all. We want to move to an automated process where you make changes, test them, deploy them, and they're automatically tested, which is a bit awkward but it's getting there.
Around 20 people, doing various jobs were included in the deployment process.
More than 20 because we got a third party to help us develop it. We outsourced a lot of the development to a system integrator.
What was our ROI?
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I would rate the pricing as seven out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.
It's expensive, storage being the most costly aspect. We got a good deal, but it's quite a lot.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated other options. We looked at upgrading our legacy system and the latest version, which didn't work well with our membership organization—it works best for customers.
We also tried Microsoft Dynamics, which didn't fit our business needs, and SAP, which was a bit clunky and not customizable enough.
What other advice do I have?
Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten.
It's very flexible, and customization varies greatly. The key is to accurately collect your requirements and manage the delivery of your requirements. Otherwise, you'll encounter problems, and that's the same with every solution.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Microsoft Azure
*Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.