Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

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

• Sales reports
• Graphics

It has allowed the Sales Directors to have better visibility about pipelines and working deals.

Sale items for complex-solution sales.

We've used it for a year and a half.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

We haven't needed to use support as we have a specialised partner.

We used an alternative solution but it didn't meet our expectations on user interface and data consolidation. We switched, as Sales Cloud exceeded our expectations in these areas.

It was very straightforward. The only problems with the initial setup was created by us in our discussions about our internal sales process.

We used an internal team with help of an hired partner specialized in the platform.

We haven't calculated the ROI because our main objective was to provide an effective solution that our sales team can use without issues.

I would recommend this product for beginners and advanced sales teams. Considering the alternatives that I know, it is the best solution.

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.

All the features of this product are valuable to me.

It helps our sales organization manage their workload, manage their sales pipeline, and our execs can track performance and perform all relevant sales functions.

I cannot think of anything right now.

I've used it for four to five years.

As it is a cloud computing managed technology, all these headaches are taken care of by Salesforce itself.

As it is a cloud computing managed technology, all these headaches are taken care of by Salesforce itself.

As it is a cloud computing managed technology, all these headaches are taken care of by Salesforce itself.

5/10.

5/10.

No previous solution was used.

It was straightforward.

We did it in-house, but I would suggest enterprise companies to use a vendor team, as there are a lot of minute details with Salesforce. Experienced vendors will help you harness the real power of Salesforce using industry practices and previous experience.

I am a technical person and do not look at those details.

Cloud computing is the future. Many companies are jumping on the Salesforce bandwagon as it integrates and works well seamlessly with other cutting edge technologies.

• Open API
• Big ecosystem of applications, knowledge, and training
• Flexibility

I’ve worked with about 30 nonprofit organizations implementing Salesforce. I’ve seen it answer questions that are key to an organization’s strategy, e.g. Does our program work? Which people does it work best for? Where is the revenue coming from? How many people are we serving today/this week/this month/this year?

In addition, it saves hours a day for staff members who track donations, volunteers, etc.

Reporting is still not as strong as it should be.

I've used the Enterprise Edition for three years/

Salesforce is complicated, and there are plenty of things that can go wrong. With small to medium non-profits, the biggest issue is typically that staff don’t have time to spend using the new system, or that leaders aren’t asking questions of the system. When the system doesn’t get used, it definitely doesn’t work.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It really depends. The free customer service isn’t so useful, but that is mitigated by the huge number of consultants, YouTube videos, and KB articles. These resources are just a different level of magnitude than for any other similar product. If you pay for tech support and additional customer service, I believe that the experience is better, but I don’t have direct experience with that.

The free tech support is really only useful for pretty basic stuff. They get the job done, but it isn’t any fun. It would be nice if they would consent to fix things via email instead of phone calls.

I’ve switched organizations from various home-grown solutions, eTapestry, Donor Perfect, Gift Works, and piles of spreadsheets. All those options have their advantages, but none are as flexible as Salesforce.

I did set it up for an organization where I worked, and it was complex but now I’m very comfortable doing it, however, your average non profit staffer is not.

I've been the vendor, except when I set it up for the organization where I worked.

The price point for non profits is very low, as the first 10 users are free and subsequent users are about $30 per user per month. There’s also the investment either in significant staff training or in a consultant, but for something as simple as a donor database, you’re probably looking at a one time cost of about $3000-$5000. Ongoing costs depend on the time and tech skills you have on staff. Organizations with one person who is interested and able to spend some time on it can need as little as 10 hours from a consultant per year, but those who need more assistance might need more like 48+ hours per year. Prices for consultants vary widely, as does quality. In terms of the return on that investment, a non profit that uses the system well should be able to raise more money with the data and time savings provided. Some organizations do this by better identifying and following up with donors, and some are able to demonstrate their effectiveness and better compete for grants.

It depends entirely on how complex the use of the system is. A system that does day-to-day program management, volunteer management, donor management, and outcomes tracking can cost upwards of $40K. A basic donor database can be as little as $3000-$5000.

For different organizations, I’ve evaluated Sugar CRM, eTapestry, Gift Works, Donor Perfect, Wild Apricot and Neon. These products all have their advantages, but only Sugar CRM has the open API and flexibility of Salesforce. Unfortunately, Sugar’s ecosystem is tiny compared to Salesforce’s. It is much harder to find qualified consultant, online resources are paltry in comparison, and I’ve been told by web developers that Sugar is horrible to interface with.

Hire someone to help, even if you just hire them to spend a few hours pointing you in the right direction. Make sure you’re ready to use the product, Salesforce provides pretty good resources for evaluating this. However, the big thing you need are leaders who are asking the important questions and who will give staff time to devote to setting up and using the product. Without those two things, it doesn't matter who you hire or how much money you spend, you won’t be successful.

The ability to customize many things, from the UI to the business logic, and the fact that the solution uses a cloud platform were valuable features for our organization.

It has sped up development and delivery within the organization.

The areas for improvement are adding more options to customize the UI, and the business logic.

I have been using the solution for 3 years.

No issues with deployment.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

The customer service was good.

The technical support was good.

Initial setup was straightforward. It is just a matter of receiving the initial user credentials, change its password and create the other users after logging in. This is the initial setup prior to developing any customizations.

We implemented through an in-house team.

Setup cost: $280 per month per user, $600 per month per developer + 20% of the total yearly cost (users x individual cost) per sandbox - pre-paid annually.

Before choosing we looked at Microsoft Dynamics.

If seeking help, make sure that the people who will work on your project are certified (don't merely ask if they are certified, ask for a list of their certification numbers prior to agreeing with their statement of work). There are companies that assign junior people to your projects and bill them as senior consultants.
Expect to pay $200+/hour for HIGH quality consultants - if less than that, you may not getting high quality and may end up paying more in the end for the rework or the costs associated with a inadequate implementation.
Start with smaller, short term projects and add functionality and users gradually.
If you're in a large company (has divisions/regions), before attempting companywide adoption, choose a smaller group of users and make sure they are so pleased that they become champions of the product.