Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

The primary use case is if you want to update old legacy systems and go into a more mobile way of doing business. One of the main competitive advantages of this solution is that it already offers an 85% solution (out of the box), and you can modify it if you wish.

Salesforce does not offer anything on premise. It's always in the cloud.

No installation of software, or security updates. Easily working together with colleagues.

Salesforce wishes to push for a declarative way of solving IT problems.
As an end user, you can do a lot by yourself, so you do not have to write code. The idea is that they go for low-code and they use flow. It's possible to update records and do things like automation without writing real code. I think this is one of the advantages of the solution.

Also you can easily collaborate with your colleagues. Another main benefit is that you can find a lot of information on websites, and you can learn it yourself through Trailhead. It's a guided way of learning new topics, and it's completely free.

The company has a policy of three releases per year.

One of the advantages of Salesforce is that it's fun. With features like Trailhead, the gamification makes it a joyful environment.

The reporting part is a bit low. You have other possibilities, like Einstein, or Tableau.

The deployment of (meta) data from the sandbox environment to production is also a weaker point because their solution is not powerful (even non-existent).

I have been working with Salesforce Sales Cloud for more than five years. 
I work as a Salesforce functional consultant. My role is to improve the adoption ratio of the client. I help implementing (declarative) and migrating legacy systems towards Salesforce.

The stability of Sales Cloud (and Salesforce in general) is extremely reliable. Ten years ago, we were one of the first Belgium customers that got a massive implementation of Sales Cloud. Servers were in the United States, there were several complaints from customers that it was taking too long. Salesforce acted and invested heavily in data centers in Europe, and now I have never had any issues with reliability or stability.

The solution is extremely easy to scale up because you can go from the Professional Edition to the Unlimited Edition.

You will only have a problem if you wish to downgrade.

If you have a problem, you can open a case with Salesforce. They give it a status, like high, low, or medium. If it takes a bit of time, maybe it's linked to the fact that your case is not crystal clear. If they don't do anything after a while or if you haven't heard back from them, then you can escalate the case.
Of course all is linked to your service contract and SLAs.

Salesforce doesn't require any specific maintenance. Salesforce works like a hotel. You just rent a room for a particular period, and the rest is done for you.

The main issue is the price. Because it's SaaS, you will have to pay on a monthly basis. It will become very expensive because you'll be thinking, "I have Sales Cloud, and I want to do service and help my customers, so I need another cloud." This is something I have already seen with other customers. They would like to jump into the Salesforce environment, but it can become a hefty price tag, so that's an issue.

There are different licensing models. 
You could have the Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited edition. It is linked to functionality. I only work for multinational clients, so they usually use an Unlimited or Enterprise solution.

If you are a big company, then you have a lot of leverage and more power to decrease the cost of your system per month. A lot of people aren't aware of that. If you go into a full-fledged solution, you can still bargain or discuss the price.

Only one person is required for deployment, and you can automate it if you wish. If you have a good developer who creates that, and you have your deployment street, you can push information into the production environment on a nightly basis.

I would rate this solution a 9 out of 10.

Sales Cloud is suitable for everyone, even a mom and pop shop, if you have the money to invest in it ( I would not recommend it for a very small company that has only one FTE). 
If you have five or 10 SEs, you can definitely use it, all the way up to Fortune 500 companies. Most companies that use Salesforce are Fortune 500 companies.

I would definitely recommend that you try to stick to what Salesforce offers. You should not try to change the native setup of Salesforce, otherwise you will face issues with new releases. You should try to follow the spirit and idea of Salesforce, for example avoid large coding because then you will/can screw up the system.

I primarily use the solution for persuing sales. You can follow up on opportunities very easily when you use it. I also use it for case tracking.

The product offers sales best practices. If I establish a funnel and I've got four salespeople, and the average conversion rate of new leads is 18% and one person's at 30%, I could ask them what they're doing and I could get them to show me their pitch. Then I could teach the other salespeople to imitate them. I could quickly look at that in the forecast year and go, okay, I don't know what that person's doing, however, they're converting to the stages at a higher rate so let's ask them what they're doing and then orient all the other salespeople to follow that best practice. That way, all numbers could go up as well.

The aspect I found most valuable was the conversion rates. As a new business, we figured out by filling out the funnel that we can convert 18% of stage one. Therefore, if you could use that math, you can say "if I want to make a million dollars in sales this year, and I make $20,000 a sale, I will need X number of people." You can work backward and project, for example, this is how many people you better have on the file. It's helpful sales forecasting.

While they've done a really good job of being a CRM tool and being, in my case, a sales forecasting tool, if they could integrate with other enterprises' IT aspects - like SAP and ERP - it would be great. A little bit of integration across the corporation would be helpful. If they could have convenient APIs into the other parts of the corporation that I wish to share data with, that would be helpful.

I've used the solution for around ten years or so. 

The stability is very, very good. There are no bugs or glitches. The performance is great.

The solution can scale massively. I've been quite impressed.

In my one organization, we went from ten to 40 people with no issues. 

The solution is being extensively used. I haven't looked back at the competition and had to make a new purchase evaluation, however, my perception is Salesforce took over the space.

It's one of those solutions where you can just start using the product immediately. You don't really need to do any setup or any thinking. You just start using it. After using it for three months, you probably will never go back.

I did use technical support in the past. They walked the talk on CRM. They're one of the companies that eats their own dog food. They're super knowledgeable with the support that was clearly ahead of the game. Whoever I called could quickly pull up my account and know who I was and what my company was. They were using a lot of their own business intelligence and things in the back end.

Overall, I was impressed with the level of support.

I mostly use Excel, however, for clients, I tend to use Salesforce and ZenDesk as well.

The move to Salesforce was mostly due to the fact that it was super easy to use. The best sales guys also recommended it. They liked it as they were always selling and always making money and always on the road. The sales team hated the idea of coming back into the office and doing their stats. The fact that they could update it on the road, and I could just go in and look at it every week and talk to everybody from their phones and say, here's the story was ideal for their sales process. They hated pushing their money to this big enterprise product that seemed not to create any great insight and forced them to have a meeting on site. Everyone preferred Salesforce's ease of use and remote updates.

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. 

I'm not sure of the exact pricing. My understanding is that it was super cheap on RAM - a lot like Jira. If you're at a really small startup and you have 10 people, the licenses are practically free. Their theory is, as you grow, you're going to scale and hit 50 pretty soon and then they'll start charging more.

I'm not sure which version of the solution I'm using. It's mostly set up by the client.

I'm familiar with the cloud and on-premises deployment models. Most clients are on the cloud now. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. They have an excellent reputation and live up to it. 

I am a consultant and deliver the build for Salesforce to our customers. The company has a partnership with Salesforce and I'm the director. 

There are many benefits to Salesforce. It allows companies to know who their customers are, how much they spend, then relate that to earlier purchases so that a company can focus their efforts where necessary. You can also determine how sales staff are working against their targets and whether they need assistance.

I think Salesforce as a whole is all about understanding your customers and the pipeline with customers. Through an account, you can capture all the contacts that relate to that account or business, including personal details. It's highly configurable so you can completely adjust it to whatever business requirements you have. Once you've understood who your customers are, you can decide what you might want to sell them. It can all be captured and put into reporting. As a result, you can forecast against the reporting and figure out where you want to go on quotas for your sales team. You can also see how long it might take for a sale to go through and whether any sales opportunities get stuck.

You can track any issues with Sales Cloud functionality once a customer purchases by capturing your phone calls and storing them in Salesforce, along with any emails. Everything can be stored and tracked. The company brings out new features three times a year. I haven't used all the features because there are so many of them and the solution is now very large. They've changed their custom UI and it's now more configurable so that you can change it to suit your needs. I might only want to see certain fields at certain times throughout my journey and it can do that. There's a ton of functionality that I haven't even started to really explore.

Salesforce has a built-in functionality called changesets to move functionality from the sandbox and into production. That's a little dated now, and it's not very good for version control or backups. There are third party apps that can provide a slicker service to manage version control and deployments between environments.

I've been using Salesforce since 2007. 

The solution is highly stable and they have serious backups. If there are any glitches you can go to their site, trust.salesforce.com, and check on any problems. In terms of maintenance, once you've implemented it, it's important to get a team onboard internally to maintain things; users come and go so you're constantly canceling or adding users. Some will need help with reporting and once they understand the benefits and power, they'll want more teams to use it which will require more functionality. Our customers are always wanting to increase use. Salesforce is in major demand and most clients have continuous new project ideas and as a result, an expanded functionality. 

The solution is easy to scale and our customers range from small to enterprise size organizations. 

We sometimes need to contact support and for most customers, it's beneficial for them to have premise support because you do get a quicker response for resolution. You do have to ring them sometimes in order to get features enabled but once you're part of a consulting firm, you rarely need to contact them because you can generally resolve the problems with internal expertise.

There's no simple answer regarding complexity of deployment. It actually depends on the size of your implementation. If you're on a huge project, deployment can take months, if not years. These days, Salesforce has better version control using external tools which speeds up the setup because you keep a version in control and you move it through the different processes in order to push it through. You can deploy something within an hour of building and testing, and capture all the requirements. It's highly configurable.

The minimum time for deployment is generally a couple of months but it is absolutely dependent on how much you want to tweak it and make it your own. It can be a very quick turnaround.

Every finance director I've spoken to will say that Salesforce is expensive and that's mainly because it is a per-user license. The more you use it, the more it will cost. There are licensing costs and implementation costs in configuring the system to your needs. It's expensive but also one of the largest business systems you'll have in your company because it'll integrate absolutely anything you need it to. It should be viewed as an investment.

The solution needs to be considered as a long-term investment, and I suggest engaging a partner to implement it. Salesforce will tell you it's possible to implement in-house, particularly for smaller organizations, but I would recommend a certified expert with experience and knowledge.

I rate this solution 10 out of 10. 

Clients create business opportunities in the life sciences and retail industries. They launch their initiatives using Salesforce CRM and Salesforce Cloud.

Salesforce Sales Cloud enhances deal closures. We can implement checks to ensure proper data entry with validation rules. For instance, when the first option is selected, the second option can be automatically pre-selected based on default settings, simplifying the user’s job. The user does not need to manually address all possibilities or answer all customer questions. Using permutation and combination constraints, we can automate subsequent selections based on previous choices, managed through validation rules at the back-end level.

Primary features include navigation and process flow, which indicate your stage throughout the opportunity’s life cycle. At any given point, it shows your current status and probability. The reports and dashboard functionality are major highlights of Salesforce. Additionally, it is user-friendly and has a simple configuration, making it easily adaptable to any sales-related detail.

They should also include ATP and CTP functionality. Whenever there is a sale or opportunity, sales representatives should be able to determine what is available in the inventory and how much can be delivered to the customer. For example, if I take an order today, it might take ten days to produce and deliver the product. This is the ATP. If a customer orders 100 cell phones, the CTP functionality helps determine if we can deliver that quantity.

This insight is provided when ERP systems are integrated, as ERP systems handle inventory. However, even without an ERP system, this information is crucial. The ATP and CTP stock should be monitored or mentioned somewhere in Salesforce to make decisions easier for sales representatives.

If my inventory has 10,000 cell phones from 8 AM to 6 PM at the start of the day, any confirmed orders should reduce this inventory count. We can monitor my inventory in real-time and decide whether to accept new opportunities based on current stock levels.

I have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud as a partner for five years.

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

We cater the solution to medium and large businesses.

I rate the solution’ scalability a nine out of ten.

Support is good.

Positive

The initial setup is easy. Deployment will take a minimum of one week. Once you buy the license from Salesforce, it typically takes two to three days. After that, we need to start configuring the system in a separate process.

I rate it an eight out of ten.

Our customers have gained significant benefits. The customers I worked with used to manage their leads and opportunities using Excel and other local applications. When we implemented Salesforce, we unified all the data from different companies within a group onto a single platform. We performed the data migration and provided access to all sales representatives. 

As a result, the sales process, lead generation, and opportunity management saw a drastic reduction in order processing time. Previously, closing an opportunity took at least two to three weeks. With Salesforce Sales Cloud, due to the visibility of the data structure, insights, and analytics, they could make decisions more quickly.

Pricing is reasonable.

Workflows are a concept and an automation tool. They require a trigger—whenever an action takes place based on user input, the system will trigger a workflow and handle the rest of the tasks. This automation happens with the help of the workflow functionality.
It depends on the organization. For example, if it's a defense-related or government organization, they use the government or private cloud.

I recommend the solution. The availability of resources in the market has increased tremendously. Salesforce technical support, knowledge base, and manpower are widely available. Training materials, tutorials, and other resources are also freely accessible, making it easy for anyone to use Salesforce. It is easy to understand, user-friendly and offers many key features.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use the solution to manage sales forecasting.

The solution has the ability to run reports on the pipeline and understand the likelihood of the sales. The analytics tools are very good.

The connectivity has some latency. It could be more responsive.

I have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud for ten years.

The tool has some latency.

I rate the solution’s stability a seven out of ten.

It is scalable up to several hundred thousand users. It is highly scalable. We use it daily. I rate the solution’s scalability a ten out of ten.

I have used Oracle Sales Cloud and Microsoft Dynamics.

The initial setup takes three minutes.

I rate the initial setup a seven out of ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy

ROI is very good. There are productivity and efficiency gains.

I rate the product’s pricing a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.

It is very easy to integrate with other tools and APIs.

I recommend the solution because they are the market leaders in what they do.

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

We can store our leads and track the sales. We can store objects like contacts, opportunities, and accounts in our Salesforce database. It will help to close deals faster. Suppose a contact is interested in purchasing something. That information is stored in the Salesforce database, and you can track the current level of contact.

For example, before they sign the deal, the contact wants some discount. You can see this data, know the sales process, and close the deal easily. One advantage of the solution is that it helps to improve our sales.

The most valuable features of the solution are reporting and dashboards. You can easily compare how many products were sold last year and this year.

The solution's scalability has some limitations.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a stable solution.

The solution's scalability has some limitations. If you want to add more users, you need to purchase or subscribe to the advanced version. Some big organizations purchase an unlimited edition, which allows more than 1,000 users. Only a few people can use the basic version.

The technical support team is available 24/7, and I am satisfied with the technical support for the solution.

I would recommend the solution to other users.

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

We're using it for tracking sales opportunities and networking with prospects that we're trying to establish business with.

We're leveraging Salesforce's cloud, and we're logging in with our own individual IDs.

Contact records are most valuable.

Its reporting capabilities can be improved. Its reporting interface should be improved to personalize reports.

Shortcut keys for us diehard shortcut key people would probably be helpful. We should be able to perform actions with shortcut keys.

I've been using Salesforce for years. It has easily been a decade-and-a-half.

It's very stable.

It's very scalable. In terms of its users, there are different levels of salespeople inside sales and outside sales. There are about 100 or so users in the company.

It's pretty straightforward for me.

I would advise others to just do their due diligence. I would rate it an 8 out of 10. It does what it's supposed to do with relatively little intervention on my part where I don't have to completely think about everything every step of the way. So, it's more or less intuitive.

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 are using Salesforce Sales Cloud to create opportunities and tickets. We are updating the information and running reports.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is very user-friendly, and simple to create dashboards and extract the reports. Additionally, it integrates well with other applications.

When integrating Salesforce Sales Cloud with other applications it can be difficult to maintain security.

The next release of Salesforce Sales Cloud should add better integration with communication systems, such as Webex.

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

The stability of Salesforce Sales Cloud is good.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is scalable.

We have approximately 1,000 users using this solution. We have plans to increase usage in the future.

The support from Salesforce Sales Cloud is very helpful.

In my previous company, I used an in-house built CRM system.

We use ten technicians that support Salesforce Sales Cloud.

I would highly recommend this solution to others.

I rate Salesforce Sales Cloud a nine out of ten.

I use Salesforce Sales Cloud for managing opportunities. I also go through leads on it. I also use it for managing the revenue generated from my book of business. I also use its dashboard.

I like that Salesforce Sales Cloud performs really well. I have no problem with its performance. I also find it extensible.

What I'm expecting from Salesforce Sales Cloud is a more user-friendly interface. It's what could be improved in the solution.

I've been dealing with Salesforce Sales Cloud for four and a half years.

I'm a salesperson and I'm using Salesforce Sales Cloud, e.g. it's what we're using in our company currently. We're using the latest version. It's a cloud-based solution.

I didn't find any issues with the solution. I don't have any negative feedback about it.

I'm a user, not an admin of Salesforce Sales Cloud, so I wasn't part of the process of setting it up, but I could access the solution without any issue.

I would assume there is over 1,500 people who use the solution within the company, and it's being used extensively. I'm not aware of how many people handle the deployment and maintenance of Salesforce Sales Cloud, as I'm not involved in those processes.

I never needed technical support for the solution, because I never had any issues to complain about.

I'm recommending Salesforce Sales Cloud to others, without doubt.

I would rate Salesforce Sales Cloud an eight out of ten.