Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

You can have non-sales and marketing personnel using Chatter without driving up licensing cost.

The bulk edit page is nice for creating multiple users at once with the most basic information.

The integration piece is missing.

Salesforce has a integration capability, but the moment we say integration, it's categorized into the following types:

- Synchronous and Asynchronous integration

- Hybrid integration: direct and middleware based

- Cloud-to-Cloud integration such as Salesforce.com to RightNow

So my point was whether Salesforce has the mentioned integration capabilities or not and answer is always the same -- it depends.

In such cases, we have to consider integration from the beginning and what kind of legacy systems we have and what the architectures of the current accounting system are, etc.

But also have to recognize that simply because we use a legacy system from a vendor who has a Salesforce too, that doesn't mean it integrates all that easily.

For Salesforce.com products to truly add business value to the enterprise, integration is thus crucial.

The increasing shift toward hybrid architectures, moreover, means that integration solutions must be able to seamlessly connect Salesforce.com with other SaaS applications and on-premises legacy systems.

And here, based on my past experience, I can say that Salesforce still have room for integration improvements.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues with scalability.

The ease of customization plus the availability of an extensive selection of apps.

We have moved away from sharing docs and now everyone is on the same page with only one source of truth.

It is still relatively expensive - would like to see it a little cheaper.

I have worked with all versions, contact manager. group, professional, enterprise, unlimited and non profit starter pack for almost seven years.

I did need some external help initially but the reason for that was my fairly complex formula fields.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It's outstanding.

It's outstanding on standard support plus they off premier support.

I worked, for a limited time, with Zoho and was looking for a bigger "ecosystem."

I had a few issues with the formula fields otherwise it was straightforward.

We used an in-house with some vendor assistance who had a very high level of expertise.

It's never been measured, but our year on year growth would have never been possible without Salesforce.

I would rather go for a version with less functionality, but allows a budget for more users.

Zoho CRM

It is not a perfect solution to all needs but is certainly an ideal solution for most.

Prepare an extensive needs analysis - ensure that Salesforce can deliver the solution you need.

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.

There are several valuable features, but the ones most useful to us are:

• Contact Management - this allows for better tracking of communication with end-customer tracking.
• Opportunity Tracking - you do not forget about opportunities that could slip through cracks.
• Excellent tech support for premier partners - pay for premium support as they always answer rather quickly.

It gives us great visibility into tracking opportunities and interactions with customers through email and phone conversations.

It needs improvement on integration with common apps, such as Outlook and iContact.

We've had no issues deploying it.

We haven't had any issues with instability.

We've been able to scale it as needed.

It was easy to do. 

We did it in-house, but help from having their premium support team. 

To use it in the most beneficial way for your organization, be sure to find a company that is familiar with the product for the integration.

I have only ever used the Sales Cloud as customized by the Nonprofit Starter Pack (NPSP) as provided by Salesforce.org and virtually all aspects of that application are incredibly helpful from a nonprofit perspective. It really takes the ‘Sales’ Cloud and turns it into the ‘Nonprofit’ Cloud. We use it for fundraising, grant management, volunteer management and everything in between.

We use Salesforce for every aspect of our business and it improves efficiency and gives us one source of truth when it comes to organizational information. Everything from fundraising to volunteer management goes through Salesforce!

There are data limitations on the platform – in terms of how much data you can store on the platform without having to purchase more. Generally, anything over one GB of data is going to cost your organization extra – this happens fast too so watch out. There is a lot you can do with zero programming knowledge and you can automate most repetitive tasks with no code!

I've used it for roughly five years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

I would call out the one GB data limits as a scalability concern – as it is often an unexpected cost as Salesforce generally hides this nugget of information in the documentation/limitations of the product. From a deployment perspective – not really. It’s a complicated tool so the amount of time, expertise and/or money you have is generally going to impact deployment.

Salesforce relies heavily on their Community to do the work of support/customer service and it has paid big for them. I am usually headed to the Power of Us Hub or the Salesforce Community before I pick up a phone to call support. Overall, that experience is far more positive than trying to contact support. In the rare instances where I have had to call support, they are responsive – but beware of the additional costs for the ‘Premium’ support packages.

In my current role, no. In previous roles, we evaluated other donor solutions and determined that Salesforce was best suited for fundraising and program management. The flexibility and 360 degree view of your constituents is really the draw.

It’s a fairly straightforward purchase process – but the set up can be complex depending on your organizational requirements. The NPSP makes it easy to get off the ground quickly, but additional customization can often require consultant assistance.

I’ve done both – generally working with a vendor for any heavy development/coding work that needs to happen. Everything else I was able to learn. Salesforce does a great job empowering customers and ensuring that they have what they need (including access to peers) to learn the platform. I would say this is a core organizational strength of Salesforce.

In terms of non-profit licensing, you get your 10 free Enterprise Edition licenses as a 501(c)(3) and take advantage of those to learn the platform! As your organization grows, see Salesforce as an investment, not as a free tool that you must ensure continues to cost your organization $0. This will do more harm than good – learn the platform and allow it to grow with you.

You generally have two routes to go when implementing; you can hire a vendor to do the work for you, or you can invest in/hire a staff member/team to learn the platform, gain expertise and implement internally. In the non profit space, I heavily favour the second option as I think investing in some staff time to learn this is great and there is an amazing community to support the process.

The most valuable features for us are

• Visualforce and Apex
• Process Builder
• Knowledge Base

Our productivity and capability to solve and anticipate problems in the Call Centre team increased at least 50%.

Although the implementation was straightforward with our in-house team, it did take 12 weeks to complete the process.

I've been using it for five years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

Through their site, they expose their stability KPIs for their customers.

Considering they are 100% cloud, if the customer needs scalability you just have to contract more users.

10/10

10/10

We had a different solution, and switched because they have a 100% integrated platform where my team can develop our business processes almost without code.

It was straightforward, and it took 12 weeks to do the first implementation.

We did it in-house. I strongly recommend good project management and some Salesforce certified people to help with the system integrations.

Start with a small group of users, and take care with user adoption.

Salesforce has a great Customer Community where the users can add their suggestions and ideas.

I personally find the Opportunities to be the most valuable aspect of the tool. It helps me keep a close eye on the business' pipeline. We've also developed a native project management solution on the Salesforce platform called Mission Control. We use this to track the scheduling and performance of all implementation projects. This is of great importance to our business in understanding our bandwidth and efficiencies. We also find the Case object to be of great value, including the email to case functionality that helps simplify the process for our clients when submitting support requests.

We run our entire business in the cloud and Salesforce.com sits at the heart of our solution stack. We have a subscription based model for our products, such as Mission Control, Mercury SMS and InteliMail. We've integrated Salesforce.com with eWay, an online payment gateway to automate our monthly billing process.

The main area that I feel could be improved is the performance of the Salesforce1 mobile application. I find it to be too slow to be of any real value whilst out on the road.

I have been using the Salesforce.com CRM system for over 12 years. I first used it as a Marketing Manager for the company I was working for at the time. In the last six years, I've been running Aprika, a Salesforce.com Consulting Partner helping to implement the solution for clients in Australia.

We've implemented Salesforce.com for over 200 clients and we've never come across a requirement that could not be delivered on the platform.

We've implemented Salesforce.com for over 200 clients and we've never come across a requirement that could not be delivered on the platform.

We've implemented Salesforce.com for over 200 clients and we've never come across a requirement that could not be delivered on the platform.

The standard Salesforce.com support process is very good. They also have a premier support option which provides a very quick response time. In addition to this, the community of users are extremely helpful and supportive to one another and using the success.salesforce.com website, you're always guaranteed someone will be able to help you out.

We are a Salesforce.com Consulting Partner, so we're the team helping the client implement their required solution. Salesforce.com conducts regular, independent research which states a client that works with a consulting partner to implement the solution is 65% more likely to be successful.

We have implemented Salesforce.com for over 200 clients, as you can imaging, there's been varying scales of complexity in the requirements ranging from a simple out of the box configuration through to solutions requiring a lot of customisation using Apex and Visualforce as well as integration with third party systems.

I do hear that Salesforce.com licensing is expensive, but once clients start using the system and the light goes on in relation to understanding the power of the platform, they realise it's well worth the investment.

From a personal perspective, one of the key things Salesforce.com provides us is insight into our business that would be difficult to achieve otherwise. We're able to easily track conversion rates, budget performance, staff efficiency rates and many other key metrics that are important to our business.

12 years ago, I initially compared it to a number of other solutions through a tender process. We conducted our due diligence and Salesforce.com came out top by a long way. As a Consulting Partner, we typically see prospects comparing Salesforce.com and MS Dynamics. Generally, we see them evaluate the two products and in most cases, they'll establish Salesforce.com is the more powerful, flexible and scalable solution.

Don't hesitate - if you're looking at using Salesforce.com, you're on the right track. After a few months, you'll wonder how you managed without it. In terms of implementation, I would strongly recommend engaging a consulting partner, it doesn't have to be Aprika. They can bring real value add to the project and ensure the system is set up to support user adoption. Engaging staff from various parts of the business in the initial implementation is also a key ingredient to successful adoption.

The reporting and dashboards functionalities are the most valuable features for us.

Also, the CRM's built-in information indexation with standard and custom fields provides complete control in manipulating data. This functionality remains key to driving informed decision making.

It's driven comprehensive decision making by associating marketing spend with the lead source to revenue generation from completed sales efforts over an extended sales cycle.

Also, the information indexation is fantastic and this facilitates a comprehensive understanding when you need to correlate marketing spend with sales efforts to ascertain ROI. This helped to reallocate marketing spend to more effective lead-generating activities that contributed to higher ROI. Information indexation of the tool facilitates associating ROI by lead source which won opportunities for sales.

• Reporting can become slow to pull once you reach a certain limit of contact records due to the complexity and volume of the data available.
• It's a comprehensive tool that is not intuitive to use in order to effectively leverage the benefits of its customization capability.
• The tool can appear complex and there are key understandings needed to leverage this CRM properly. Not creating an opportunity upon lead conversion for example, prevents correlating data between lead source and opportunities won at a later date - so important!

I've used it for over 5 years.

No, it's straightforward to get an account. From there, it's knowing how to customize it properly to optimize process and facilitate quality data input. It's also been straightforward to deploy for my clients.

There are only stability issues if the report pool involves data from 10,000+ records. The pull can be very slow. Other than that, the tool is both robust and stable.

Scalability issues only arise around reporting from my experience as the data pulls can become slow.

Never called customer service.

I've had insufficient engagement with technical support to comment.

We didn't switch, but different CRMs apply to different business sizes and integration requirements. 17 Hats is quite comprehensive for entrepreneurs, for example, but you might consider this more of a simplified ERP solution.

I have not come across the circumstance where I migrated to Salesforce from something else. Either it was chosen from the beginning or not chosen when the complexity of data control was not needed.

Setup is complex, but worth the time to get things the way you want it. Complexity is commensurate with what you want to get out of the tool.

You sign-up online with immediate access to the tool. I feel the setup can appear complex to those not familiar with the tool initially and creation of customizations is not intuitive at the admin level. There is a learning curve with detailed control.

We did it in-house.

N/A

Professional is what I choose unless the enterprise functionality is immediately relevant to the business operations. Standard license is usually sufficient. In my professional opinion, the pricing is small compared to the value Salesforce brings.

We evaluated InfusionSoft, Sugar, Karma 2.0, Netsuite ERP, and Zoho.

CRM deployment is part of a bigger strategy to centralize your data. By mapping out all the area data enters and exits first with requirements for each point, you can assess if Salesforce is the right fit properly.

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.

• Quick go-to-market with a sales process
• Utilization of the "platform as a service" features of Salesforce
• Appexchange packages help to quickly hit requirements
• Robust feature set when considering all the Salesforce packages - Sales Cloud, communities, Service Cloud etc.

I've implemented a Saleforce solution at a hedge fund where we were immediately able to connect the marketing and customer relations department for tracking up-selling opportunities.

By building on the Salesforce platform, we were able to work through potential data problems such as tagging financial advisor owned accounts separately from individual investor accounts, bringing much needed granular tracking of the new money subscription opportunities.

The reporting functionality of Salesforce is much more a query engine than a true reporting module.

Salesforce have made some great strides towards addressing this deficiency with the advent of the analytics cloud, but it still needs improvement for customers not paying for the additional service.

I've been consulting on the platform for five years. I have implemented it at Rhymeo as a customer and currently utilize the platform at another client.

Being forced to run through all test classes to deploy to production has always been a concern for organizations that are apex heavy and need the ability for quick, impromptu deployments. Some “quick deploy” features are incredibly helpful for organizations trying to meet this requirement.

One look at their website will show you the incredible stability of this product.

Scaleability has never been in doubt.

Premier support has always been incredibly helpful when solving problems.

However, the true benefit of the salesforce community comes from the helpful users that are constantly contributing to the Salesforce support forums.

You’re usually always a quick Google search away from advice to solving a problem.

While consulting for the platform, we were always brought in to assist with implementation after vendor analysis.

Good consulting on the platform is the key to a straightforward vs. complex implementation.

Users are always reluctant to change so managing expectations and involving business users very early in development is the key to success. The robust configurability vs. code allows implementers the ability to demo early and often to business users. Lightning and process builder are taking this to a welcome new level.

Always via a vendor team. Speaking to experienced implementers when planning the release schedule for Salesforce manages the risk that integration inevitably always brings forth.

Spend as much time with Salesforce customer success managers as possible. The wealth of Salesforce accelerators and their solution engineers have built help show the potential features of Salesforce early in the planning stage and go a long ways to a smoothful project planning and execution