Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

It's really the field sales mobility and alignment with the customer-service functions, so Service and Sales Cloud alignment through Salesforce.

We use the SaaS version. Predominantly, it's pipeline management and Salesforce optimization. We are a smaller company, so there are about 80 users working with Sales Cloud.

In my company, we have very manual backend disparate systems, but the good news is that through Salesforce—not only the Sales Cloud, but the Commerce Cloud—our customer-facing experience is best-in-class with this solution. We give all our customer service and sales teams a shared view of every one of our customers. Obviously, there's all the analytics and now the AI business analytics. 

It easily integrates with different ERPs, so we are now, in a progressive manner, implementing an ERP across a large food manufacturing business. There is no down time to the customers because the backend will implement this in terms of finance and operations, but the frontend and sales experience for customers is unaffected because Salesforce is basically ERP standalone, ERP agnostic.

I like that Salesforce is ERP agnostic. In the past and at different companies, I have implemented new or replacement ERPs. It's best in class. I like that it's a SaaS. I like that it can work on any device—any Windows, Android, or Apple device. It can also sync with your Office suite, i.e. your Outlook calendar. It has a lot of features: the dashboards, the reporting, the hierarchy, and just the ability to connect to many different technologies and main best-in-class ERPs and other systems, including eCommerce.

It would be nice if they had an ERP offering or a firm strategic partnership with a best-in-class ERP. So rather than say they're just ERP agnostic, you would pick whichever ERP you want, which is very generic. I think it would have a lot of merit if they partnered strategically with a best-in-class trusted ERP platform or acquired an ERP platform.

I would like to see AI leveraged for proactive business decision support. For instance, if some sales trends change, rather than relying on a business analyst to analyze reports, it would be nice to leverage AI so workforces could be notified of changes—be it business intelligence, or capability, whether it's good or bad—so you can respond to it proactively. It would be nice to see this done in a simple, automatic, cost-effective manner.

I was a long-term customer when I worked at Zodiac Marine & Pool, which is a global French company. I was the regional head of IT, which was the chief technology officer. I implemented Salesforce Sales Cloud in the region and worked very closely with the Americas and the EMEA—Europe, Middle East, Africa—counterparts to implement it across the globe. When I was at Hills Limited, which is an Australian public-listed company, I was the head of technology there as well, and I oversaw the whole Salesforce instance, which used Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Marketing Clouds. My new employer, My Muscle Chef, is also a large Salesforce customer.

In the earlier days, there were challenges with broadband and internet being cost-effectively and easily available at all times, but now, it's very good.

As long as your business rules and master data is clean, and as long as it's configured correctly, the up-time is excellent. I've never encountered any issues. It's a very trusted vendor. Their systems never have outages. I think there was one outage in 10 years, but it works really well. It's excellent.

It's very scalable. I implemented it in a region and then integrated it globally with my other counterparts for thousands of users. It's very scalable. It's agile. You can scale down or up depending on the term of your contract.

At My Muscle Chef, all the front-facing, customer-facing technologies are basically Salesforce, which basically compensates our current legacy, disparate backend applications. It's all compensated heavily by the effectiveness of how well we use Salesforce. I'm also a chairman of a National Rugby League club called the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs, and we are also a Salesforce customer.

We have our in-house team at the moment that deals with the partners, but when I was more technically involved in the implementation of the product, I dealt with customer support. As long as you are subscribed to the relevant type of support, it's excellent. It's global, and if you have 24/7 coverage, you get premium 24/7 coverage. It just depends on what type of subscription you have.

I've had a fair amount of experience with different platforms like Zendesk, SugarCRM, and ACT!. We replaced that with Salesforce. In the last four years, I have had experience with Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM.

I think Salesforce is industry agnostic. It works well across all industries: sales, service, marketing, Commerce Cloud. That is its strength. Some of the less known solutions are more industry or bespoke to the size of the company. SugarCRM is probably more for a smaller, marketing boutique type of organization. Salesforce can do this but can also work in enterprise size companies.

The big challenge I'm finding at the moment is there's a shortage of skills, and if you are implementing Salesforce Cloud, it could be costly from an implementation cost point of view, but once it's implemented, it's a best-in-class solution. So it's the cost of achieving the actual implementation that is a challenge at the moment, with the cost of the labor and a shortage of skills in the Salesforce community.

For the deployment process, we have five dedicated, highly paid resourcers that maintain our Salesforce platforms, but we also work with agencies and partners.

The time it takes to deploy Salesforce depends on the size of the business, but if you want to implement it properly and integrate it with your other ERP or data systems, I would say six to twelve months, depending on how big your business is. But to do this properly, the change management, training, and the ownership and handover to the business will take a minimum of six months. Depending on the size of the business, it can be as long as twelve months if it's done properly.

It is a premium product, so it is not the cheapest solution. I think if it's implemented well, and you're getting the soft cost benefits, the efficiencies, it's justified. But not if you're looking at just apples for apples as a subscription, without the complexity that you can achieve. It can deal with complex business requirements. Some other CRMs can't. But you certainly pay, so it's a premium-charged solution. It's one of the more expensive ones. 

The only other additional cost would be support, depending on how complex your business is and how much change is required. At the moment, there's a shortage of talent in the Salesforce community. They're in high demand and very costly to recruit or to have an arrangement with, whether it's in a formal employment or partner arrangement.

One thing Microsoft Dynamics has that Salesforce does not is the full suite of applications in ERP, so that's one of the advantages. While Microsoft CRM is rapidly gaining good rankings in terms of improving, it might not be on par with Salesforce, but the value-add is the whole Microsoft suite of products, so the Microsoft 365, which is Office, SharePoint. These can all integrate with Salesforce, but they can give you everything, including this CRM and ERP all together in a single vendor experience.

I would rate this solution 9 out of 10. It is a premium product.

My biggest advice is to know your scope. Make sure you have buy-in, the executive ,down. It has to come from the leadership down. It can't be from an employee up, otherwise you won't have the buy-in, the optimized use of it. Then form a continuous improvement committee to ensure that you're leveraging the true capabilities of a best-in-class technology. Otherwise, you risk just using it for business-as-usual administration without necessarily leveraging the benefits of a SaaS, where there's ongoing new enhancements and capabilities. Unless you're investing in leveraging those, you're probably not getting the best return on your investment.

We use the solution to manage our sales processes.

The reporting is easy and helpful.

The product is not stable when enhancements are done to the cloud.

I have been using the solution for three to four years.

I rate the tool’s stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a ten out of ten. We have 100 users in our organization. We use the product twice or thrice a week.

Salesforce is a huge competitor of Microsoft and other solution providers. We chose Salesforce Sales Cloud because it is quick to launch. We could start working with it immediately.

I did not face any major issues. I recommend the solution to others. It is easy to use. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

It's for managing the sales cycle.

When it comes to the lead management process, we track and evaluate the different stages and the challenges in each stage. It's so that the entire team has visibility of what's going on with each individual lead.

It has significantly impacted the sales cycle because we are able to get more precise updates, report back to our senior execs using the Salesforce stats, and make database judgments. So, it has shortened the sales cycle.

I like that I can customize the sales process to a particular team so that, based on whatever framework I use, I can significantly adapt sales. That's the security of the system.

It might be easier if there were better integration with other sales systems or clouds that are not powered by Salesforce. For example, when we work with partners, such as Amazon or any other major tech company, sometimes we collaborate to develop a sales lead. 

We use integrations between Salesforce instances so the partner can add opportunities to our account and vice versa.

The integration between systems used by different partners is very hard. So, that's something that can definitely be improved.

There are features I would like to see in future releases. It could give recommendations on what could be a possible next step and highlight important points; that's where AI would come in. If it sees patterns in sales and Sales Cloud could evaluate it and showcase to us how that sales cycle could be shortened – that would be a great feature.

I have been using it for five years now. 

The solution is fairly stable. I have not faced any issues. 

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten.

The solution adapts to our use cases. It's highly customizable, but you just need to know how to customize it.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup a six out of ten, with one being easy and ten being difficult. 

It's just a matter of enablement. Sometimes, when it comes to inputting data, it has to be in certain formats, and it doesn't work properly. When you convert it to a report, it doesn't display the report correctly, so you need to know exactly how it needs to be tailored.

Our IT team deployed it.

I would recommend having a good Salesforce administrator. Other than that, it's pretty easy to use. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. I would recommend using it. 

We use Salesforce Sales Cloud for lead management, contact and account management, sales forecasting, collaboration, and workflow automation.

I've found lead management to be the most valuable feature of Salesforce Sales Cloud. It helps capture, track, and manage leads throughout the sales process. The tool is easy to learn. 

One aspect I find challenging with Salesforce Sales Cloud is its forecasting feature. While it's useful for analyzing sales data and predicting future revenue, I've encountered instances where the outcomes weren't as perfect as expected.

I have been using the product for three years. 

I haven't encountered any bugs with the product. 

The tool is scalable. My company has 35 users. 

Whenever we encounter issues or have questions regarding the product, we contact their support team by creating a ticket. They are always ready to assist us. 

Positive

Our organization decided to go with Salesforce Sales Cloud because it provides all the features we need to offer to our customers.

The tool's deployment is easy. 

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten. 

We use the solution for CRM and to monitor customers, projects, and sales. We are using Salesforce Sales Cloud as a forecast platform. The solution forecasts the current data, current project stages, and the probability of it happening or not happening.

The most valuable features of Salesforce Sales Cloud are increased productivity and business accuracy.

The solution's design could be improved.

I have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud for two years.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for stability.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a scalable solution.

With Salesforce Sales Cloud, you have visibility and competency and see all the information you need from the sales side on one page.

We chose Salesforce Sales Cloud because we need everything in one place to have one forecasting platform, one sales platform, and one customer management platform. The solution's forecasting feature gives us visibility on one page to give us better guidance and understanding of what's going on and what could happen. Since the solution is an appliance, there's nothing to deploy.

I would recommend the solution to other users. From my perspective, it's a tool that should be used for every purpose because it could be scalable from a small number of users to huge ones. Usually, it's flexible enough to implement all the features that customers could need. Salesforce Sales Cloud is a native integrated solution.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We use this solution for opportunity and account management, contact management, quoting, marketing and for registration of events.

It is a good platform that shows consolidation of information for our customer base.

The performance is sometimes slow. There is too much information and this makes it difficult to find the answers we are looking for.

I have been using this solution for three and a half years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

We have not needed to contact customer service and support. 

I would advise others to customize the solution according to their business needs and goals and to make it as user friendly as possible.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

We use Salesforce for lead management, opportunity tracking and sale tracking. It provides insight into what has been sold and a forecast for future opportunities.

Salesforce highlights what are we selling in different regions and which regions or areas offer opportunities. We are able to view sales by month, quarter or year.

I like how you can create marketing campaigns. In five minutes, you can create a marketing campaign and send the campaign to users in less than 10 minutes. 

Salesforce is a powerful tool and you need specialists to create or to develop new functionalities. It is a difficult platform to learn to manage and you need years to know the whole product. 

I have used Salesforce for four years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. I previously used Asana but Salesforce offers better scalability compared to Asana. 

The customer service team respond really quickly. I would rate their support a five out of five. 

Even though we have more than 50 employees in our organization, only 10 users use Salesforce. This is because licenses are expensive and more employees use Asana which we have free licenses for.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We primarily use Sales Cloud to process internal requests from field sales and operations.

The reporting features are useful. 

I would like if Sales Cloud had the flexibility to create or edit the forms used to submit requests. Right now, they're fixed, and users can't edit them. Only administrators have editing privileges, so it takes too long to make changes.

I've been using Sales Cloud for about four years.

I haven't had any stability issues. Sales Cloud seems to be highly stable.

We have thousands of people using Sales Cloud at this company. 

I rate Salesforce Sales Cloud a solid eight out of 10.