Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a CRM-based platform, it is used for customer relationship management.

In Salesforce we store the customers' data and we are managing those customers' data. You can connect with your customer easily and you can securely store your customer data in the best environment. Salesforce Sales Cloud is one of the best companies that is providing CRM applications.

We can also customize Salesforce Sales Cloud to our customer's company requirements. As for your demand, you can customize it. There are so many configurations we can do with the application. There is a lot of functionality that you can implement. It's an easy-to-use, user-friendly, and secure platform.

The solution updates frequently, approximately every three months. It stays updated.

The solution is secure. However, they could always improve on security.

I have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud for approximately four years.

The solution is scalable.

We have approximately 150 users using this solution in my organization.

I have used the support from Salesforce and I am satisfied.

I am a Salesforce certified administrator and Salesforce Certified Developer.

There are two implementations. You can either install it on your mobile on iOS, or Android platforms and on the desktop in the web-based platform. In the web platform, you can easily log into your organization and you can see your customers' data. Additionally, this can be done on mobile platforms. You can receive all those notifications.

It takes time to set up the organization as per your requirement. However, using the application does not take a lot of time. It is easy to use.

I do the implementation of the solution.

We have 50 users who work on the deployment process of this solution.

There is a license required to use this solution and the price is expensive. It could be reduced.

I would highly recommend this solution to others.

I rate Salesforce Sales Cloud a nine out of ten.

I am a Salesforce consultant for multiple clients, and we have different scenarios wherein the Salesforce Sales Cloud has been used. Use cases include different scenarios and different industries, so from banking to automobile industries, to NGOs, nonprofits too.

One use case is for a client in the automobile industry. There is a sales process, sales funnel, that has been built for the particular company, according to the region. When there is a lead that comes into Salesforce, according to the region, they will be assigned to a particular salesperson. If the lead is converted, then an opportunity has been created and the opportunity is nurtured through Salesforce. There are different tasks that will then be allotted to the particular salesperson in each opportunity stage.

Sales Cloud in particular is a very, very powerful tool, and we can build on top of the existing platform for the requirements each company has. So if there is a particular workflow that we need to build, particular validation, or there is a particular scenario that we need to capture which is not there in Salesforce, or not in the inbuilt system -- then Salesforce is a very powerful tool that helps us to build that through tools like Process Builder or Flows, or even write code to achieve these scenarios. It's a very dynamic system.

One valuable feature with Sales Cloud is the opportunity for nurturing leads, and there are different sales processes that we can establish in Salesforce to do this. Having different sales processes helps us to diversify the whole system for different regions or different products. The same processes will help a lot in managing or helping out the salespersons to nurture those opportunities.

I've been totally into Salesforce, and almost everything can be achieved through either the configuration part or doing customization. One area that needed improvement though was with the record views. The record views were not aligned, and they have no split views. So to see each record, we had to go back and then select another one from the list, but that has been fixed. One current issue is the system requirement for running Salesforce Lightning. For current computers, it works fine, but for people who are using old systems, there is a lag in loading the Lightning pages. Lightning is the new interface that Salesforce has for the records and seeing the whole data. So if there is an old system used, or if the infrastructure is not correct, then customers are having an issue and it's taking a lot of time to load.

An additional feature that could be added is the email templates. At the moment, it is actually still not a feature to set up email templates. There are two views in Salesforce, the Classic and the Lightning. To set email templates and have those processes, we have to go back to Classic and then do the whole process. It would be beneficial if everything was happening in Lightning itself so that people don't have to switch back and forth. But I think that's down the roadmap of Salesforce to have everything in Lightning.

I've been working with Salesforce for the past five to six years.

With the cloud infrastructure, the stability of the solution is pretty good. There has not been much downtime, or I've never seen any downtime happening in my experience with Salesforce at all. They are evolving in performance, too. The transition from Classic to Lightning was a major shift they had, and that has increased a lot of performance. The solution has been more powerful since it was transitioned to Lightning. If you don't have the right infrastructure, then we see performance issues.

Salesforce is super easy to scale. If you want to add users, you just need the licenses. If you want to add additional features, scalability is not an issue with Salesforce.

The solution is suitable for every sized company. It makes things easier, even for small companies. The amount of manual work can be reduced if they have a proper automated system in place.

We've been in contact with technical support multiple times. They're very responsive and it seems we get an immediate response back from the technical team. In the case where the issues has not been resolved from the lower level, they escalate it to the technical team. I would say they say the technical support process is quite good. But for that too, there is a package I think needs to be bought for high-end technical support. For regular users, there is a certain level of technical support that Salesforce offers, and then if you need more, we need to have an engagement for that.

We have some experience with Zoho CRM, but I wouldn't say it is as comparable as Salesforce. It has a different set of Salesforce setups in Zoho.

With adding multiple sales processes or more fields to the layouts, Salesforce is more flexible and bigger than Zoho.

The initial setup of Salesforce is pretty straightforward. The deployment process is quite easy. With that being said, I would say there are a lot of instances where this pretty straightforwardness has been misused. There need to be some guidelines or DevOps processes in place so that people don't just push things to production.

The solution does not require any onsite maintenance; since it's cloud, the maintenance is done automatically. Since the platform is evolving, there are cases where they add in a few security points or depreciate a few old processes. Then we might need some enhancements done to the work that we did.

Just one developer can have test classes built in and then push it over to production. There have been cases where we see that even one admin team in companies just does the whole end-to-end, adding the component, then pushing to production. It is not an extensive, manpower-required process.

Pricing wise, I'm not sure how affordable the solution is, because for each market it's different. For small companies, I don't know how the pricing point works, but feature wise, I would say it is a very useful tool for all sized companies.

My advice to any company implementing any product is to have their processes lined up, at least on paper first, rather than going to a system. I've seen this happen with a few clients. Their structure is not set, but they come into the CRM and then they build on the go, which creates a lot of best practice issues when they do that.

Before implementing any CRM, I would suggest that any company should have a proper sales process or their processes lined up, and have a clear idea of what they want to happen in the system so that that can be translated easily onto the system.

I would rate Sales Cloud a nine out of ten because I'm totally into Salesforce and I appreciate the product a lot.

We use the solution for opportunity identification, pipeline management, and forecasting. Those are primarily the areas.

The solution has provided our company with a common platform, a common process, and has created a common skill set, and institutional awareness of major transactions. It's provided easier audit for opportunities, deal reviews, and automation features for reporting. 

The dashboards and dashboard customization are great.

The solution is stable and reliable.

You can scale the solution easily.

The setup is pretty fast.

Technical support is helpful and knowledgeable. 

The reporting formats could be better. We'd like to be able to graphically, optically, change what the selections are that we can choose to put a report or format in, just in how they appear, the aesthetics. There could be more presentation formats that are incorporated that would make them easier to transfer over to a PowerPoint or something. We should be able to export documentation capabilities that are more presentation-friendly outside of the system.

II want to be specific about what it looks like, what the actual report actually looks like. For example, the optics of the report, the colors that are used, the format that it's in. That's the main comment. The data is fine. It's how the report actually looks that's an issue.

I've been using the solution for more than 12 months at this point.

It's very stable. It's reliable. It's a good solution.

It scales well. A lot of people need to own that the solution will only work as well as its design, and how people apply it. The more information that can be given upfront about what the outcome requirements are, the better.

That's a conditional situation. It really depends on how engaged the client is in providing their requirements and then giving that stuff over so that it can be executed. It's a pretty well-thought-out solution that performs and scales well.

We have more than 5,000 users at this point. That's across departments in the services division. The solution is extensively used. 

I've dealt with technical support. They were good. They were on the better side. Nobody's perfect, however, they were pretty knowledgeable.

I've used multiple CRMs and NetSuite by Oracle in the past. In this organization, we had a homegrown solution that would not have been commercially marketed.

The initial setup was complex, however, it was well planned. There was a good approach. It was very formulaic. It allowed for customer feedback to help customize the solution. I thought it was a very interactive process.

The configuration part was relatively quick. It was the planning that took longer as it required a lot of internal reviews to discern what was important information and what wasn't. It's hard. I would say that the process was six months, however, the actual flipping the switch wasn't that long - maybe a couple of weeks.

That's why it's hard for me to discern where the breakpoint is. It was a lot of reviews, communication, et cetera. However, the enabling of the technology did not take very long. It was more or less deciding on how to enable the technology that took long.

There is a team that handles maintenance for the product. I don't deal with that directly.

I've done it probably two ways. One was an internal engagement. The other one was external. I know that Accenture was involved in that. I myself actually had to go to Chicago to train at one of the Accenture facilities to be a champion for their transition.

I'm an end-user. I'm using the most recent version of the solution.

I'd advise potential new users to make sure you're good by researching what's best for your organization and make sure that once you choose to go down that path, that you've put the right steps in for adoption. This or any other CRM will fail if the organization doesn't agree on the value or use of the tool.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. It is highly available, handles the majority of our business needs, and the consistency of its function is pretty strong. The capacity of capability is good.

We use Salesforce for the sales funnel from prospects to leads.  

Salesforce's user interface is easy to use, and the reporting is good. It worked well with Excel, so I was okay with it. I don't know about integration with any other software because I didn't have to deal with them.

I didn't use Salesforce too much, so I can't say much about it because I don't think it would be very accurate.

I don't have much experience with Salesforce. I've used it for about a month or so. Most of my experience is on the sales side, not the service parts. 

Salesforce is stable. I didn't notice any hangups.

We had about 50 sales and marketing people working with Salesforce. 

I rate Salesforce seven out of 10. 

We are primarily using it for tracking sales opportunities. Our company has done some things where we've plugged in some resources that it taps into, such as some databases of install base and LinkedIn information about different influential executives that we might reach out to. Those are probably the three primary things that I use.

I assume I am using the latest version.

It helps the company, or at least executives, with forecasting.

It is nice to have the install base information at your fingertips when you look up a company.

We have a very broad set of products at our company. The process to get that information accurately into the Sales Cloud system could use improvement. It shouldn't take weeks of time. The process of identifying products that are being sold for forecasting purposes and sales tracking purposes is too hard.

We're starting to prepackage new product builds that address replacing the install base. If we can get that to be really smooth, it would be great. If a storage array is going to end of service/life, I am looking at something that not only tells me that but also says, "You should replace it with this, and here's the build for it." This way, you don't have to go through the process of throwing up what the new array would look like to get it over to the customer.

I have been using this solution for two years.

I don't really have problems with it. It seems to work when I access it.

I don't perceive any problem from where I sit. 

We probably have 5,000 people who are using this solution. They range from salespeople to management. It is being used extensively. I don't know what the corporate plans are to expand its usage.

I did not contact their support.

I would rate it a five out of 10. The reason is that I'm not using it for myself. I'm using it for other people to get information because I have to do it for my job. It helps me with that, but it is not particularly useful for me in my sales tracking.

I am fundamentally a consultant to businesses exploring CRM solutions. My first choice, subject to the customer's budget, is Salesforce. At my office, we have been using Salesforce primarily for lead management, sales cycle management, renewal management, and sales performance management. We have also integrated it with our help desk and our HRMS. 

We use the Salesforce Platform edition with 300 objects which gives us a phenomenal ability to develop specific functionalities that we need for our unique requirements.

An integrated approach to CRM always helps in streamlining activities across all the departments. We have been able to better our response times, reduce our sales cycles, and have increased overall sales revenue. Similar results have been observed for all our customers who have implemented and adopted SalesCloud in the right manner. 

We have developed a module for integrating our digital marketing tool with Salesforce. The campaign ROI monitoring ability has helped us to increase our marketing effectiveness to a great extent.

There are many extremely useful features. Lead scoring is useful for automatically signaling the importance and urgency of acting on any particular lead. Website integrations are useful for getting in the lead data into Salesforce along with auto-tagging of the customer's point of interest. The automation rules that have been set up across all modules deliver tremendous value by speeding up things, ensuring process compliance, and increasing productivity. 

The customized and role-based dashboards help our team to make the right decisions.  

Featurewise, the product almost has all CRM features that one can think of. Beyond CRM, if the integration with MS Office can be made tighter and smoother, that could be great value for customers. Especially integrating MS Word and MS Excel would be really useful. 

If a lighter version of CPQ is made available, it would help many midsize customers. As of now, Salesforce is the most expensive CRMs out there - making it a bit more affordable will help them in a big way. 

There are also certain restrictions on the reports in terms of the number of records. Ideally, that should be removed.

I've used the solution for more than seven years.

The solution is extremely stable. We haven't seen any nasty surprises. trust.salesforce.com is a great place to check the stability and dependability of Salesforce.  

Irrespective of the number of concurrent users, the automation rules, reporting requirements, workflows etc, the system performance remains the same. There is no performance degradation by additional of number of users or increase in data or increase in automations or functionalities whatsoever. 

trust.salesforce.com gives a real-time view of all salesforce datacentres and the various clouds in terms of their health, availability, uptimes, maintenance status, security and compliances. There is a lot more indepth information if one really wants to dig deeper. 

It is highly and seamlessly scalable. it is very robust at any scale.

This is not applicable to us. However, the back-to-back support from Salesforce has been pretty good.

Positive

We have used a homegrown application earlier. Switching to Salesforce was due to the capabilities provided by the Salesforce platform. It practically molds itself as per an organization's working style. 

It wasn't complex for us as we are ourselves are implementation partners. For customers, it can turn out to be pretty overwhelming. 

There are so many features and so many possibilities, it is very easy for anyone to keep asking for more. That is often the biggest pitfall. A step-by-step phased approach is usually more successful.

We have a highly skilled implementation team.

We've seen an ROI of at least 20%.

Salesforce surely is one of the most expensive CRMs out there. However, if implemented in the right manner and adopted extensively, it does deliver a great value to the organization. 

While deploying Salesforce, I would generally suggest engaging a consultant for optimizing the license costs. Salesforce sales team may try to oversell. A 3rd party consultant like us can help you with an unbiased opinion. 

We did not evaluate others while choosing for ourselves. However, as a consultant, we frequently need to show customers comparisons with Navision, SAP, and Oracle.

I use Sales Cloud quite often through an apprenticeship I am doing at a non-profit organization. I do utilize Sales Cloud often, and practice using Trailhead. I also use Sales Cloud with the Nonprofit Success Pack, or anything pertaining to that. We also make use of the Education Data Architecture. I have used Sales Cloud in the past as an administrator.

Sales Cloud really helps to point out different numbers for our company in terms of what converts or what doesn't. Different leads and fields can be utilized inside of Salesforce, using Sales Path to follow those specific leads, and it demonstrates what leads convert over into opportunities. The leveraging of fields help to track progress on the user interface. I think that's fundamental, especially for users or individuals that don't know how to use Salesforce. It's easier to track. The page layouts are pretty good for users as well, to track those numbers.

I would say Sales Path is something that I do like to use to track leads and opportunities. It's a pretty cool feature to use inside of Sales Cloud. Different fields inside of Sales Cloud have pretty cool features in Salesforce too.

There are different applications that can definitely help leverage Salesforce when it comes to data management. Importing and exporting different applications can be used to help that process. 

In addition, applications that can help with migrating data over from the sandbox to production would make it easier because sometimes changesets can be bulky and they're not always as effective. This can be frustrating when you make a lot of changes and try to put those changes into production.

Sometimes uploading and making changes to processes can be a little slow.

The implementation of automated processes could be a little bit better understood.

It is a scalable solution. 

We previously used a Microsoft platform. 

It wasn't easy. The difficulty was in tracking the changes that were made inside of the Sandbox, and then trying to put all the changes into a changeset into production. There were certain fields that you needed to have inside the changeset that wasn't there, so it made it a hassle to deploy.

It took a couple of days to deploy. 

It was implemented in-house. There were about three people that were involved with deployment.

We track changes inside of the platform and they are major programs that help the non-profit to run and complete their mission and vision. 

Salesforce Sales Cloud is reasonably priced. 

I would recommend getting assistance from people that know what they're doing in Salesforce. They should get a good idea of what the client wants and take it from there. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. The implementation of automated processes could be a little bit and better understood.

My current use for the solution is in implementing it for a company that sells services. The aim is to use the Sales Cloud to track all the existing accounts of my customer.

I'm a consultant, so I don't implement Salesforce for myself, but for my customers. I need Salesforce to be valuable for my customers. Because if not, the project will not be a success. In every project, it's very important to define the KPIs. But if you define well the KPIs with your customers, Sales Cloud will improve the organization. 

For one customer, Sales Cloud helped him to save two FTE. I don't know the English word for that, but it's like two times of 2% a year. So you save two-incomes per year using Salesforce because your employees are going faster.

The most valuable feature of Salesforce is that it's a system where you can use declarative development. Just using point and click, you can configure it in very nice ways. For small customers, you can use it for 80% of their business. Then we will have to use the custom development using a code, JavaScript, HTML only for really complex business processes of your customer. It's a nice feature because developers and development are expensive, and long to payment. So it's good that you can do a lot with point and click.

One area that needs improvement is that it can be difficult to understand for customers of Salesforce. If you are subscribing to Sales Cloud, we will have an out-of-the-box solution that is good and easy to use. But if you are not keen on system language and things that, you will need a consultant. You will need me to implement it to answer your needs. Because it can be difficult to understand, customers have to pay for the system, and then they have to pay a consultant to implement it. So that is expensive. But in the end, you will win money if the project is well defined, and the design has been done in a good way. Then the system is designed for the customer.

An advantage of Salesforce is that they upgrade their system every time they have a new release. We have a community where we can ask for additional features, and then Salesforce implements the new features in the new release.

I'm currently working on a Sales Cloud project. I'm working on a CPQ project, but while you work with CPQ, you have to work with Sales Cloud at the same time because both products are linked.

The solution is reliable. Salesforce use is like renting an office in a building. You share the water and things with all the users of the building. So you have to be aware that you can use too much, or you can use the water of your neighbors. It's the same way for Salesforce. So as long as you spend time to find the solution the best way, the only concern you will have is the data you're using and the storage of files. But you can have best practices for your people in the company, and buy extra data from Salesforce if you are using too much. So it can be a concern, but you will always have a solution.

The solution can require some maintenance as there can be bugs, and the customer doesn't always understand why. Sometimes, the customer is allocating one of their employees to be the admin of the solution, so they do not require a consultant.

The solution is really easy to scale. One of my projects was to deploy Salesforce for a multinational company, we started with one country, and then deploy it to all the countries of the company. 

The risk there is about the right & access and to cover all countries requirements.
But Salesforce gives a lot of tools to answer to customer needs.

The customer service for the solution is good. You can log cases, but the one thing you have with Salesforce, you will not have the same maintenance quality. If you pay a lot, you will have the best support. If you pay less, your support will be maybe not that efficient as another customer. But overall, it's nice.

Salesforce will give you an answer. The time for the answer will depend on how much you paid to Salesforce.

To build and deploy the initial setup takes about one month for big needs, half a month for medium needs. 

First is the design parts where you have all your customer needs, we build it in what we call a sandbox. In this sandbox, you have all the custom fields and the custom features that you build for your customer. You deploy this in a user acceptance testing environment. Then your customer, the company, will subscribe to Salesforce, will test those features. Once it is tested you will have to deploy it to the production environment, where the customer has all his data. It takes some time, and you have to wipe down everything you've built, to not miss anything. Because if you do, the deployment can be long and difficult. But there are tools that can help you to easily deploy the Sales Cloud solution.

It's very rare that your customer is only subscribing to Sales Cloud. Sometimes he has Sales Cloud and Service Cloud and things like that. And all your clouds are linked. But it's easy. You don't have to independently deploy the Service Cloud and the Sales Cloud. You can deploy it together.

The implementation team depends if you have declarative development or custom development using Apex and things like that. As Salesforce is using the cloud, you are using shared resource. Salesforce asks you to test your development, to not use too much data. If you have custom development, you will need to test it, and you will need a developer to deploy this. If it is only custom fields and declarative, depending on the size of the project, you only need one person. But then you need someone to follow the test, that the customer tested the solution, is it accepted by the customer. That is the longest part.

The solution is expensive, but you don't have to install it. You can access it from any computer, and it's the only solution on the market allowing that many features. So it's expensive, but you know why that is. It's not surprising.

Salesforce is good for all sizes of customers because you can adapt Salesforce for all customer needs. My suggestion to anyone considering Salesforce would be to spend a lot of time in the designing phase. For me, that's the most important.

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.