Salesforce Platform Reviews

I am an end-user, I was never a power user or an architect, and I never developed any reports.

I use Salesforce for logging meetings, sales information, and metrics. I also use it for updating opportunities and looking at my own sales performance reports.

The company's sales team was at least 5,000 people.

I was hoping that with the integration of Tableau that they would have better end-user analytics to play around with. Coming from a MicroStrategy background, I was kind of disappointed. 

MicroStrategy is actually easier to use than Tableau. It was a function of the license that I was given.

Salesforce is incredibly slow. It was difficult to run live sales calls and leverage Salesforce at the same time. You can't ask a customer to hold for 45 seconds while you are looking for information about the account.

Salesforce also did not integrate well with some of the other systems that we had.

More end-user functionality would be useful. They should have some pre-canned reports that other analysts or salespeople would find valuable. 

I tried Salesforce Einstein, but that never really worked for me. The PowerSeller tool was just as helpful.

We would gather news reports about specific customers and identify if there were any buzzwords attached to it. I was able to create customized daily intelligence reports that would go out directly to my customers. TechnoMile integrated these reports directly into Salesforce allowing every salesperson that had the Archintel module to subscribe to specific reports giving them a compelling reason to reach out to the customer. Salesforce has a news feed function, but it is pretty ugly and very clunky to use. If they leveraged some sort of tool like this one, it would be amazing.

I use Salesforce every day.

I personally did not use the tech support at Salesforce. We had our own IT team.

The slowness of Salesforce could have been due to the fact that it is on the cloud. I had used Salesforce at other companies and it was not as slow.

Salesforce is the best one out there. I know that SugarCRM claims to be better but I haven't had a chance to use it to compare.

I would rate Salesforce a 6 out of 10. It wasn't great and wasn't terrible.

In my role at the company, I use Salesforce Platform for many purposes, such as opportunity tracking, lead management, lead tracking contacts, and forecast productivity measurement.

Salesforce Platform overall helps me to track my business better.

What functions we don't get out of Salesforce, we typically receive from third-party applications that extend the capabilities. We integrate a lot of different products with Salesforce.

Salesforce Platform has a cumbersome interface when creating reports, dashboards, and those types of things. They could be a little bit more simple. The administration has to be an aficionado to do any sort of administration and maintenance, for example, setting up the way you want to modify the lead tracks or functions. These systems tend to be quite cumbersome.

I have been using Salesforce Platform for approximately 20 years.

We have had the typical amount of bugs or glitches while using Salesforce Platform, however, none that were significant. There are always bugs and glitches in software, but not anything enormous. I think it's become much more stable over time.

The scalability of the Salesforce Platform is good. We had a small implementation, we don't really have too much data or too many people. It has been scalable for what we have used it for.

We have 20 people in my organization that use this solution.

We hire someone to maintain the solution for us and we use them for technical support. However, they might call Salesforce or tech support but I have not contacted technical support.

The setup of the Salesforce Platform is complex. You have to be very well-educated; no one can set the Salesforce Platform up on their own. They have to be a trained Salesforce developer in order to set it up and in order to maintain it. It's not something you can do overnight; there is a lot of work involved.

For the number of people that are using Salesforce Platform in my organization, I feel the price is reasonable.

Salesforce Platform is a good solution that does its job. However, I don't know that every company needs it. A company our size could probably manage with a less capable CRM with less overhead, but it does more than what we need it to do.

I rate Salesforce Platform an eight out of ten.

We use Salesforce Platform for marketing, opportunity tracking, and account management within the sales element.

Coming into the early 21st century, actually automating a number of processes and work activities were done with legacy tools like Excel, Word, and so on. It's really just bringing everything into a modern integrated platform.

I like the reports and the dashboards. Since I'm a managing partner, I use the reports and dashboards to understand my team's contact management, opportunity management, and account management activities. We use Pardot for marketing campaigns.

Reporting could be better. Reporting is Excel-based, and it has sucked since the inception of the company. That's why I was excited about the fact of them bringing MuleSoft into the fold and Tableau.

I have been using Salesforce Platform since the late 90s.

The Salesforce Platform is very stable.

The Salesforce Platform is scalable. In consulting work, about four years ago, I did some work for GE. GE then consolidated 80 different Salesforce instances into either two or three instances. That's a company of 300,000 people globally at that point. Today, my business has a hundred partners, of which probably 60 or 70 partners use Salesforce.

My admin has used Salesforce technical support, and to my knowledge, everything has been very positive and very successful.

Over the years, we've created our own custom objects in fields. We try to keep the applications as standard or vanilla as possible, but we've tailored them to our business model and processes. The product is used moderately, and we have one Salesforce administrator to manage it.

I've been against Salesforce for many years, and even today, with Lightning, they haven't migrated everything that the platform did within Classic to Lightning. It's just continuing to improve the user interface and the integration capabilities with other non-Salesforce applications.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Salesforce Platform an eight.

I was using the Salesforce Platform for forecasting, client opportunity creation, tracking, and client input and tracking.

The solution has improved over the years and the inputting of opportunity information is done a lot better and the GUI is good. The ability to customize dashboards and other elements was useful, we were able to move things around, for example, the forecasts. Most of the cells and input places were set, but we can customize the view and what we were looking at, such as on a daily, or weekly basis.

The solution is comprehensive, there is a wide range of features available. There are features that have been available from the beginning I am just learning about them now. 

I have found it takes an exceedingly long time to put opportunities or clients in the system. If I have an opportunity that I need to put in the system it could take approximately 10 minutes. This is a lot of time when you have multiple opportunities to put in. There are other tasks to do that are required by supervisors, such as forecasts. What I have done to save time is I did not input as much detail as I could have because I knew it was going to take me an hour to get five leads in.

I have used Salesforce Platform for approximately four years.

The stability of the solution was good.  There were some bugs or glitches but nothing substantial or out of the ordinary that took us down for the day or prevented functionality.

The solution is easy to scale. For example, adding new employees.

We have approximately 1,000 people using Salesforce Platform in my organization. This includes managers, sales teams, and other employees.

In general, we would log calls into our company technical support for issues, and then they would escalate it as needed to the Salesforce team.

I have used other solutions similar to Salesforce Platform, such as Microsoft Dynamics. As a standard, the past three or four companies I have worked for have been using the Salesforce Platform.

Our IT did the implementation of the solution.

The price of Salesforce Platform is very expensive. There are other solutions that are similar that cost a quarter of what Salesforce Platform does, such as HubSpot.

I have evaluated HubSpot and it does 85% of the functionality of the Salesforce Platform.

I would advise those wanting to implement Salesforce Platform to have a dedicated Salesforce administrator who is used to have all changes go through them. Everything has to go through one person or it can get really complicated to manage.

Salesforce Platform is very good at what it does. However, it is still cumbersome, but then again, all the solutions I have used that are similar are all cumbersome. They all are asking for a lot of information in order to capture good realistic data. I have been doing technical sales amongst other things for 30 years and I do not know how these solutions can be made less cumbersome and still capture accurate information out of it.

I rate Salesforce Platform a seven out of ten.

We primarily use Salesforce to manage pipeline opportunities. We are customers of Salesforce and I'm a senior enterprise multicloud strategist.

Salesforce enables us to track the percentage of opportunities that progress, the percentage that don't, and the reasons why.

This solution gives us a great platform to import and save customer data from various sources, and then manage them using outreach and various plugins to keep activity up. The dashboards are great, I can see lost or suspended accounts, year to day, total opportunities either as owner or team member, team pipelines, etc. It's very modular, so I don't have to continue to run reports and then track them myself. They have third-party plugins which are basically the same as features that enable you to get whatever functionality you need. It's fast and it works well, it's easy to aggregate information from multiple sources and all in all, I feel like it makes us a lot more productive as opposed to having to go to multiple websites. Here you can pull up an account, see all the tabs for that account without the need to have seven different tabs open on your browser.

The reporting functionality is very granular and you can do a lot with it, but unfortunately, it's not very intuitive. It's hard to get the report to show exactly what you want. It works if you turn it into a tile in the dashboard but working through it and creating the report is a little cumbersome, it's terrible. It's not super user-friendly, it takes time and some fiddling around. Simplified reporting would be great, but perhaps I don't have enough experience. I could spend some time figuring it out but for now, I create a report that I never have to create again. It's in a dashboard, so I don't get the opportunity to create much. With some training, I'd likely be better at creating reports. 

I've been using this solution for six months. 

The solution is stable. 

I've been able to scale very easily. We've doubled the size of our team in the last year and it's really easy to add new users and with a couple of minutes of training they've pretty much got it down. For that kind of internal growth and for everyone to be using it relatively well in such a short period of time, is great.

We have an internal technical resource that's able to assist on the Salesforce side. One of the things we've added recently is a button where you can essentially open a ticket for questions related to the use of Salesforce. In the past, I would reach out to our internal support team to help me build a report. Now, we simply have a request button that gets us to Salesforce.com support. I open the ticket and get a very quick response which is really great. 

From my perspective, they need to incorporate plugins. Salesforce is a great platform. It's like being able to use the apps on an iPhone. It looks good, you can make calls and it's easy to use but it's the ability to add apps which makes it great. In Salesforce terms, the value lies in the modular solutions through the plugins.

In terms of rating, the solution loses points because of the non-intuitive reporting. On the other hand, it provides many benefits. I would therefore rate the solution eight out of 10. 

There are many use cases as we have done more than 300 projects globally. One of the projects was where we implemented a customer care solution for dealers, sub-dealers, contractors, et cetera. We have worked in aviation, where we designed solutions there as well. One client was a manufacturer of parts for the aircraft. The quality check of each product, each spray part, what they were manufacturing, was pretty hard. It's supposed to go through ten different testing checkpoints. We designed a solution for them on Salesforce, to follow the protocol and the process.

Apart from that, I've worked on many real estate projects where a company used it for managing properties, including rental properties and construction. We have worked with integrating Salesforce with a government website where they used to update the new buyers of the property across Philadelphia. We pushed data from that government website into a client's Salesforce. That way, they were always aware of sold properties, when, and by whom. They used the information to make a pitch for renovation assistance services. 

The solution has grown its services over time. Now, for example, it includes a Sales cloud, Marketing cloud, Service cloud, et cetera.

I liked the classic version of Salesforce. There are a lot of really great basic features.

It's very flexible and offers tremendous features for customers.

The solution is stable. 

The product works well at an enterprise level.

Pricing is the biggest factor. The cost right now is too high and I've had a lot of clients leave. 

Sometimes customers can get annoyed as there are just too many features to understand and work with. They should consider reducing their offering, or work to streamline it so that it is not so overwhelming. There are now many great competitors that offer more streamlined, easy-to-understand services. 

Customers need accounting, and, right now, they need to go elsewhere, to something like Xero, for example, or QuickBooks. It would be nice to have some kind of accounting available right in Salesforce. 

The stability could be better. 

We don't get any leads from Salesforce here in India. It would be helpful if we could use the product to get us leads. 

We've been on the Salesforce platform for about 11 years at this point. It's been over a decade and we've used it for quite a while. 

In Salesforce, I haven't seen many issues. However, in some cases, we have clients that for some reason don't see specific add-on features and we bring in Salesforce to understand why certain things do not appear. 

However, for the most part, the stability is good and doesn't cause any issues. 

We have not set a benchmark in terms of the size of companies we work with. We don't work with thousands of users. We are helping single users from companies and we have worked with 4,000 plus users at an enterprise level.

That said, this solution works well for enterprise-level organizations. 

A customer who is coming to Salesforce for the first time, and doesn't understand CRMS, may need to take time to understand business practices. However, if a person is in IT or software, they usually get it a bit faster. They can handle the complexity.

During implementation, it's best to take baby steps before getting into complex cases. There's a learning curve, however, the level of the learning curve varies from customer to customer. 

The amount of time deployment takes depends on the kind of project.

The pricing is pretty expensive. 

We're using the enterprise version of the solution. 

I've done only four or five projects since I started my own shop back in 2010. Most of the projects which we have done are all for overseas companies. 80% are from the US and 20% are from the rest of the globe, including Australia, Canada, Europe, and the UK.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for the CRM, the customer relationship management, but now we are expanding its usage to allow our customers use access an online customer portal based on salesforce community and using B2B commerce  

It was a great add-on to our digital landscape. It is an easy-to-use, easy to customize platform.

Salesforce is not a product, it is a platform, there is a huge difference between the two use cases. 

The platform allows us to receive and collect information easily.

There's a great ecosystem within Salesforce:

1) A huge network of implementation-certified  partners  who have great knowledge about the platform

2) A Market place where you  can download 3rd party apps on the platform

3) There is very good online documentation available and Salesforce offers good communication with its clients. It's very user-friendly and has a system that is easy to learn.

We've found the stability to be quite good.

The initial setup is easy.

The product can scale well.

The solution doesn't really have any weak areas. Overall, it's a very good product, but technical support could be a bit faster. For the standard support, their SLA is about 48 hours which is not that fast if you have a serious issue 

Based on the platform capabilities. I see that the Platform is very, very capable of handling a full ERP, and not only a CRM.

Maybe in the near future, SF will launch their own ERP system.

We've been using this solution for ten years at this point. It's been a decade. It's been a long time.

The stability of the product has been good overall. We don't experience any downtime. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. You do need access to a good internet connection, however. Without a strong internet connection, you may experience some problems. However, that's not the fault of the Salesforce backend in any way. 

The scalability is very good. If you need to expand it, you can do so relatively easily.

Technical support is okay. It's average. Their response times could be faster in terms of getting assistance to us. I'd rate it overall at a four out of five. Mostly we are happy with the level of support.

We did previously use another solution before Salesforce.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not overly complex or difficult. 

The time it takes to deploy depends on what your plans are for the solution. Without any specific customizations, it's a very quick process. Once you log on, you have access.

The solution is relatively expensive. It also comes with extra costs. For example, extra technical support is a bit more. It can add up.

We did evaluate a few other options before ultimately choosing Salesforce. Among these was Microsoft.

We're just Salesforce customers. We don't have a business relationship with them.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We're mostly quite satisfied with the product and its capabilities.

I'd recommend the solution to other users and companies. However, you need a strong team to manage it. You need to have suitable admins on hand to properly implement the rules. 

We use it to manage the customer base, sales funnel, and sales team. We also intend to use it for CRM.

It is very modular in approach. It is very light, and it can be used on various devices. It could be used on an Android phone or a laptop, which makes it good for the sales team on the road.

It could have a lot more customization options in terms of fonts and reports. 

There should be an even lighter version with just two or three fields. It could be a bit more light if the field guys want to use it on a mobile phone on the road. 

For deploying it for CRM, maybe we can have our customer database, project funnels, and projects to help us in managing our supply chain business.

I have been using this solution for almost ten or eleven years. In my current organization, we have been using it for the last two years. I have also used it in my previous company.

It has been quite stable. We didn't have any challenges.

In terms of scalability, it has been good so far. I have seen it working fine for a team of 10 people as well as for a team of 1,000 people. There are probably more than 1,000 users in our organization globally.

In this organization, it is primarily for managing the sales team and sales funnel, but we also intend to use it for CRM around three years down the line.

I am a sales guy, and from my point of view, I never had any problem.

It is straightforward.

I have heard that it is fairly priced. It offers ROI.

It is a good platform. To deploy it in your organization, users should identify their problems and needs. They should align it with their needs in terms of customization. 

I would rate Salesforce Platform an eight out of ten.

We used it for sales and mobile access. We had to create mobile access for sales agents. We also used it for customer service and for onboarding in the treasury space with the nCino product. 

It has definitely improved the way our organization functions.

We used it for providing a 360 view of the customers from within Salesforce. So, a lot of data got presented there, for which we used Einstein Analytics. The Einstein Analytics dashboards were really great.

It is quite expensive. It has gotten to that point where it is a lot more pricey. It has kind of got its own proprietary language for development. It is probably never going to change, but if it had a more market language for development, it would be easier to find developers. They come at a premium cost, so it is expensive.

I have been using this solution for more than four years.

Overall, it is stable. We generally tend to wait until somebody else has upgraded.

It is highly scalable. In my previous organization, we probably had 2,000 or 3,000 users.

They have a model where there are a lot of user groups before you get into really calling them. We go through the sales channel and get assistance through that. We didn't really use the tech support itself that much. We kind of leveraged sales engineers to help us with things that we had questions about.

Based on my knowledge, we were not using any other solution. I have used it here for four years, but they have had it for eight years.

It really depends on what you're doing.

It is quite expensive. Its developers come at a premium cost, which makes it expensive.

I would advise others to go with the base functionality first and then develop specific use cases for your expansion and customization. Try to leverage, as much as possible, the core capabilities without customization. Rely on configuration because customization is really expensive. The developers are expensive.

I would rate Salesforce Platform an eight out of ten.

We originally started using Salesforce Platform for our sales guys who go into the market every day. They wanted a common platform that is scalable and easy to work with, especially for the clients. We took to Salesforce because it filled this need, and because it came with multiple apps from different vendors and partners that could be integrated with it.

The sales team do route planning, meeting planning, and then they take a particular vehicle to particular retailers. Then they talk to them and find out their reason for taking or not taking a particular order, so that my marketing team and other teams can take action.

In 2015, we decided we should be on cloud. That is, we should not build our own infrastructure, hardware, network, database, etc., because then you cannot focus on the business outcomes; you're focusing more on the infrastructure. With Salesforce Platform, we are able to focus on business outcomes and we need not worry about infrastructure at all.

We found that the dashboard creation is very simple, so we got all our data in one place and we told users: now it's your job to create whatever analytics you want on the backend. So instead of generically recreating and redefining everything, what we did is we allowed our users access to all the fields that let them select and define their own graphs and analytics and so on. When used like this, it is very simple for users and doesn't require any technical IT skills from their point of view.

We like that the technology is very agile and flexible in the sense that there's a large partner ecosystem within Salesforce Platform. This enables us to choose from many different partners with different advantages, and all of it can be done in a plug-and-play kind of way.

One other aspect that is very important to us is that Salesforce Platform is a global platform and widely available across all of India.

Although the platform is already set up for you, there's a lot of customization that needs to be done, especially for any new component we start using. For whatever solution we wanted, we had to think for ourselves and design it all on our own. And, unfortunately, there were some components that were not really mature in the beginning, like Tableau for example. I would like to see Salesforce better, or more quickly, integrate the applications that they acquire, like Tableau and Slack.

Technologies are changing rapidly nowadays, and customers are requesting all sorts of new integrations. For example, some are asking for WhatsApp integrations, AI and ML integrations, etc. When you're using a single platform such as Salesforce or SAP, your data quality is the one thing that is taken care of, and we would like to continue managing our data across many different integration channels.

We've been using Salesforce Platform for almost four years. 

It's a very stable solution. We haven't had many issues with stability. 

With our environment of around 1500 users, there have hardly been any performance or scalability issues.

I don't think I have ever called technical support for an explanation or anything. At least not for the solution that we use for our sales staff who visit the markets. 

The setup was really straightforward. The one hitch was that when first setting up our customers, to capture their details and enter them into the system, we found that not all of them had reliable internet access. However, I understand that this is not a product challenge, but rather a practical or technical challenge.

The licensing is per user per month, which we took out a contract on a long time back. It's really an okay price for what solutions are available and for how many features and what kind of functionality you get.

The only thing is that, regarding the pricing contract, if you agree on 2000 users, you have to pay for 2000, even if you only have 1500. An agreement for 2000 users was in our contract, so we had to pay a little bit extra because we only have about 1500 users currently.

I can recommend Salesforce Platform to others with no hesitation. For a PaaS, all the infrastructure was in place. But when you begin with a new platform, you have to start from scratch at level zero and then keep on maturing. Thus, my advice to my team and everyone else is: don't complicate from day one. You start, make it simple, keep on using it, make sure it's working correctly and so on, and from there on out things are very easy for users.

I would rate Salesforce Platform a seven out of ten.