Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

Our main use cases for the solution are B2B directions, some presale activities, and some of our service manager activities, which are mainly requests for supplies, certain products.

We do re-house implementation, sales calls for our B2B segment, so it's business to business. We are actually covering all of our sales interactions with our clients within Sales Cloud, just trying to keep the information in one place and all of the activities, according to the sales cycle, within the Sales Cloud, within the certain records inside Salesforce.

The main way the solution has improved the organization is by giving a good understanding of how the salespeople should be tracked, how to restructure their work. Normally salespeople can be disorganized, so we have people who do something which is very difficult to track. However, some people won't do anything until the deadline is tomorrow. So all of the directions, all of the processes should be tracked and sales will give you the understanding. If a salesperson is working to discover a relationship with a client and is trying to sell something, it can be very easy, very intuitive, with very few fields. 

Then you can see if something is moving on or still at the same place for months or even years. You can easily identify it by creating the opportunity and seeing whether you made progress or not. As long as you understand how it should be tracked, the only thing is left to go to sales and say that you expect anything you do to be reflecting this in a certain record, and either I see the progress there, or I can see there's no progress at all. You can say that you're doing something, but if I do not see it within the system, it does not exist.

One of the most valuable features is with management within Salesforce. This is one of the important parts of the process we have right now in place. 

First of all, the point of view that Salesforce gives you on certain object models normally satisfies the biggest parts of the business. In a lot of business scenarios, because the sales process is more or less at a high level the same, in different areas, it's been changing. On the high level, it's all about managing the clients, managing the opportunities around those clients, managing the tasks, calls, activities, all those things are already pretty fine on Salesforce. 

Flexibility is the second point I would like to mention. The flexibility is pretty high and we can set up different scenarios. We can use different pools, both with developer experience and with development experience, making things automated within Salesforce. So it gives you an opportunity for not just a flexible set up, the processes you would like to set, but also to automate the things and make the automation for different scenarios, like providing emails, assigning leads, assigning the right clients to the right people. And also automate that during the sales cycle, if we're talking about providing the resources and providing the information resources.

And I would say the interface isn't perfect, but it's much better than the other CRM systems can provide. So it's not 100% modern if they're talking about making it 21, but compared with the competitors, you can see that Salesforce is way better in terms of user experience. Working the system, it's much more intuitive, it's more user-oriented, user friendly than the other systems I had in my previous experience.

One area where the solution could improve is with handling feature requests. Salesforce has its own community all over the world and people submit ideas saying, okay, that's what's needed. The number of requests is pretty high, and all of these requests are stored for years, but people need these. These features that I requested really sound obvious, but they're still for five, four, six years remaining just the same. When you search for a feature and find that someone created a request years ago, and 6,000 or more are saying, "yes, of course, we need this," it's an obvious feature. It's not that difficult to implement but the waiting line can be up to 10 years long.

One of the features I'd like to see in a future release is a way to see the updates of all the records that I follow. Not an email notification, but a single page to see the information for all the records I'm following. There is a solution that can partially satisfy this need in Salesforce Classic, but it's also classic and old-fashioned, and we would not like to promote the initial sales software within our firm. We are trying to keep Salesforce Lightning as the main tool. Rather than asking the commercial director to switch to Salesforce Classic, just to see a part of the information, but if you need both, we'll be able to give it.

The other area that is definitely a waking point for me is the integration with Slack. Slack is pretty popular and we're trying to launch it as well. The basic integration that is out-of-the-box is pretty small. Having both of these products in the product portfolio in the same company, we actually really expect to have it highly integrated for different scenarios, like task assignments, following notification, so even the same balance can be done within Slack and assigned to a certain account record in Salesforce. There is a huge field for improvement; right now these two products are pretty separated, despite the service.

And the third thing I would say is a Salesforce strategy. A lot of countries, all over the world are trying to protect personal data. And the limitations are increasing here and in new territories, like China, Russia, India, Arabic countries, GDPR regulation, European Union, all of these things that you require the new response from the platforms that are actually dealing with this personal data, personal information. Salesforce itself, its data is a GDPR compliance system, out of the box. The only funny thing is it's two digital compliance until you start entering the personal data there. As long as you are entering personal data there, so they can do some GDPR compliance, in terms of Russian regulation, Chinese regulation, Arabic countries' regulation. It's definitely something that we expect to be improved.

I've been working with Salesforce Sales Cloud for three and a half years.

The stability and performance of Sales Cloud itself, which is provided by Salesforce, is pretty good. We are pretty satisfied with it. We didn't have any huge lags in months with Salesforce downtime; some certain tools that we actually implemented ourselves, were not the level of reliability of Salesforce, though. But that was something we implemented in our own home. The problem was not with Salesforce, but really the tools, the way we actually implemented it.

Ease of scalability depends on where we actually are scaling, and if we had a certain predicted behavior, such as we have a new region to sell, we have a new person in the new region or have a new account, etc. It definitely requires not just some maintenance, but some developments as well. 

We have approximately 100 users in our company. We're using the solution more and more often. Initially, it was a certain form where sales just gave everyone the opportunity. Then we came to the decision, we want this as a system to direct those people on a regular basis. Now we have a regular meeting and the information from Salesforce is checked by the commercial director. We're trying to introduce the solution to see the broader picture, the full pipeline for targeting the client, and finishing the client when you've closed the case.

Technical support has been pretty helpful, in those rare cases I actually use it. During my previous experience, which was also connected with Salesforce, we had some strange cases escalated to Salesforce, and the answer was, okay, we will fix this in one of our upcoming releases. But that was a matter of half a year, and we had a business stopping issue. But after a certain escalation, we actually managed to do this fix earlier. However, we expected it to be faster.

Previously, I've worked with this SAP, and I was working with a custom regionally developed CRM system based on the Microsoft platform. Salesforce has better flexibility and orientation to the user. SAP has perfect functionality and it's really powerful. However, I wasn't fulfilled with the SAP for five years before I actually left SAP. It was like people who developed it just forgot about the end-users. So the interface, how the end-users actually interacted with the system, was horrible. Salesforce is way better. However, SAP also had the best effort in giving data during the later five years.

The initial deployment can take time. We started the project in February, and the deployment was in June, end of June. Five months, and we are not talking about the prerequisites, because we gathered the business scenarios we need to finish the analysis. So if you're talking about the analysis and prerequisites as well, so it will three months more.

Update deployment prevents a lot of issues, as it gives you the opportunity to change the things that can be badly influencing the production system. So you invest some time to get a deployment done. It still takes hours to deploy and there is a certain benefit behind this. The more time spent on deploying, the fewer issues on production. However, there is certainly fuel for improvement there.

The initial deployment was a group of about 20, involving people from different parts, both development, quality assurance people, admins, business analysts, business representatives, salespeople, pre-sales people department. So this group was much broader than future deployments.

There is only one person who actually doing update deployment for us. However, the more we grow, the more people will be involved in the deployment. And we work with the vendor because certain parts of our implementation require the help of Salesforce authorized companies which help us to do this. And there were more people than one to do the deployment because different groups of people were involved in the development. To merge the codes of different groups of development, we required the efforts of recruiting people. Either two or three people were involved in the deployment; they were not only our internal team working with the development.

Right now I'm operating on the Russian market, and in terms of investment value and return of the investment, Salesforce right now is pretty good in the Western markets where the price of the employees is pretty high.

Here in Russia, the country has a cheaper workforce, so the investment into Salesforce Solution is questionable, in terms of the return on the investment. The price model, is oriented on the best markets and there is a certain sense of investment in Salesforce there; but here in Russia, prices for the workforce can do the same thing easily. It's the 21st century, probably manual work should be reduced each day. We think if we look at this problem in terms of the investment, it will be a big question if it's worth the money, as Salesforce is pretty expensive.

The biggest advice that I can give to anyone considering Sales Cloud is to develop a good pre-analysis before the implementation and don't overload the stages of the opportunity. Think what the main purpose of these stages is. The best way to make it work for salespeople and for the commercial department is to structure it that way, that it will now reflect the stages of the penetration to the client. Pursue methodology, when we have targets, interact, propose, close. It's not just throwing the opportunity between the different departments, but it's complete and clear and simple, which is very important. You don't have 20 stages, but you have five certain career stages, which actually reflect the steps when you're closer and closer to the deal. Not in terms of working with the documents, but in terms of structuring the sales process in terms of the penetration to the clients.

Also, very close to the implementation, the final day of the goal, dedicate as much time as possible to the data migration. Dedicate as much time as you have, consider doing data migration; it will be difficult. We will have a lot of migrant issues rolling the data from the previous system to the new one. So two or three weeks is the shortest period that should be dedicated to that purpose.

I would rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We use Salesforce Sales Cloud for keeping track of both clients and employees on different levels, whether they're client-facing or they're more behind the scenes, such as myself.

Salesforce Sales Cloud has helped our organization by giving it the flexibility to customize our products to fit tiers of products. There are many timing and automation features that have given us control over some of the very unique business processes.

Salesforce is such a widespread software in terms of what it can do and its scope. Theoretically, you can run a whole company off of it. There are many valuable features, such as reporting and analytics. You can customize almost the whole environment is what appeals to so many companies the most.

I would love Salesforce to keep on committing and building out what they call flows. It's their point-and-click version of coding. You don't have to be a coder to create essentially what a developer would have to normally, which is a great feature, but it could still be improved upon.

I have used Salesforce Sales Cloud within the past 12 months.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is reliable.

The scalability of Salesforce Sales Cloud is one of their biggest advantages.

We have a little over 150 employees using it Salesforce Sales Cloud. There are probably 10 of us that use the backend. We have five of us that are dedicated Salesforce developers and administrators and an additional five that you would call super users, who have a lot of permissions because they were very close with us, and we trust them. The rest of the workforce is more client-facing in different parts of the organization. We are the development team, they are part of who we support.

The leadership team is very dedicated to increasing the use of Salesforce, whether it's adding another cloud or adding more people to my team. Recently we added approximately 30 brand new users. this can happen again at any time.

Salesforce is such a large company, they have three feature releases a year. They're constantly addressing issues. However, their responsiveness could be better at times. I do not have many complaints and they have very good customer service when we developers need it.

Overall the support is very good. The responsiveness can vary, but nothing that has displeased me and they will always see the job through. They're very dedicated to filling those types of quotas. They can be very responsive when a case has been open for a while.

The delays we faced are more of a corporate issue, but if you contact them individually, you receive much better service.

I have always used Salesforce, I am a Salesforce specialist. However, the company I work for might have used something else previously but I am not sure about that.

The implementation of Salesforce Sales Cloud is straightforward because it does not matter who you trained with to receive your Salesforce certifications and work in the industry, you know the deployment process. Everyone tends to know that it can be clunky, it can be frustrating, but at the same time, it's not exactly a broken system by any means.

The time it takes for the deployment depends on the size. We work in sprint cycles, we do it every two to three weeks. It depends on the size of that particular sprint. When it comes to deploying and then testing to make sure it's already it will never be more than an hour and a half.

The deployment tool could use a lot of work. However, when compared to everything else they're doing, it feels it's more left on the side, they prioritize the newer features.

My whole team and I, do deployments together or at least after we finish our assignments. There are about five of us at the moment. We have both developers and administrators, who all come together, and we complete whatever needs to be deployed all at the same time.

We always need someone dedicated to regular maintenance. I would imagine it's no different than any kind of another software environment of the size of Salesforce. You always want to have someone dedicated purely to making sure everything is working all right.

When it comes to dollars and cents, I couldn't tell you what that return on investment is. What I can say is that as we've grown out and increased automation, and over the past six months we have seen a very noticeable improvement.

I've seen the prices for Salesforce Sales Cloud, but I haven't been the one to handle the money. As someone who's only visually looked at the price, I would imagine it's on the pricier side, but they do have a ton of leverage, and seeing that everyone I've worked for has always been dedicated to continuing Salesforce. I've never worked for anyone who has threatened to leave. Everyone has accepted the pricing for what they offer.

There are additional feature costs but licenses are definitely the most expensive, but once you add or talk to your account representative about more individual features. We're talking about Salescloud, and if we wanted to add Servicecloud, that would be much more reasonably priced than us asking for 50 new licenses. Licensing is where they make most of their money.

The three companies I've worked for who have all used Salesforce, they've never by any means brought up the idea of moving to a competitor. Everyone's been happy on a macro scale of what the product has brought to their firms.

I rate Salesforce Sales Cloud an eight out of ten.

They can always improve and, if 10 other people in my position were asked about features they could improve they would bring up different answers. They do release a lot of features three times a year, every year. They're listening to customers, but sometimes you have to be more persistent than you'd hoped for them to listen.

A client was running the sales and marketing operations in a spreadsheet, and they wanted to have everything in one place. So, they migrated to Salesforce, and we helped them out with:

• Creating the object structure
• Mapping their objects with native Salesforce objects
• Putting together the page layout for the team
• Adding the data from the sheet into the instance

In terms of deployment, it was on the Salesforce cloud. The users had to log into it through a browser.

It enabled them to centralize the location of all the information. For example, everyone could enter the lead information in the central location, and then the higher management had a high-level overview of all the leads that came in. They could see how long it was taking to process leads and close them from the time leads come in. It keeps track of the close date as well. 

You can set up automation for following up and sending emails to the rep when the leads first get assigned. You can also run automation where if there is no activity on a certain lead for 30 days or so, the lead owner gets the notification. 

The ability to work on it from anywhere is most valuable. All you need is a computer, a browser, and an internet connection to access your instance. It can be accessed from anywhere, which is pretty cool and user-friendly. 

Its licensing can be improved to accommodate small companies. They provide a certain number of licenses in a set or batch, and you have to buy the set. For example, if they have 20 licenses in a set, you have to get the whole set, even if you need just three licenses, which could be a barrier for small companies. There is no option to buy fewer licenses. So, small companies have to go for a smaller CRM, such as HubSpot.

It has been pretty stable. When they have any maintenance, they usually send a notification saying that the system is going to be unavailable from a certain time, which is usually over the weekends. Usually, no one uses the system at that time.

It seems to be pretty good. It provides the ability to use different types of automation. If you want to create complex solutions or automation, you can do that. You can also start with simple ones and then go into the more complicated ones.

Currently, we have around 10 to 15 users who use this solution. They are usually into business development. There is also a leadership team with around five or six people. There are two different divisions of the company. One is marketing, and one is sales, and then there is also a business development section. So, each team has a number of people associated with it.

It is being used extensively. If we onboard new people, it'll probably scale.

They're fairly responsive. They usually respond within half a day. They send the details or instructions about how to resolve an issue. If it's something that belongs to a future release, they redirect us to the post mentioning that.

Its deployment was fairly straightforward. It wasn't too complicated for this use case. The complicated part was figuring out and mapping the existing objects and data structure with the Salesforce data structure.

For deployment, we had a team of three people. This team included a project manager, a developer, and me. We didn't really need the developer. We had him in case we had any complicated deployment. It was a smaller implementation, and it took about two months.

Its maintenance depends on the scale. If it is a big deployment, you would need an admin. For our internal instance, currently, we don't have an admin, but in the next few months, we'll probably be looking for a dedicated internal admin because we want to implement a few data projects. We're trying to create a partner portal, and we are thinking of hiring a dedicated admin for that.

It is alright for now because we ended up getting a discount off the base price. So, for now, it is okay. We may have to renegotiate when we get more users, and I don't know if the price would stay the same or increase.

It has just a standard licensing fee. If you end up hiring a consultant for implementation, you will have to pay for the implementation. Other than that, there are no additional fees.

You should know what your use cases are. Try to figure out if you will be extensively using automation or not. If you're not, you can use the lower licensing versions that are pretty cheap. The basic model was about $25 a month per user, and you can probably have three users for that, but it doesn't give you extensive automation capabilities. You will have to do a cost comparison for your specific use case to see if the basic license fits the needs of your business.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

My primary use case of Sales Cloud is for account management. It's usually used by the sales teams, to organize our accounts and actually target certain accounts, to push certain products over to them. We have it linked with our current ERP platform, SAP, to give us visibility on invoices and products, what we call pack sizes, where we can build reports that help the sales teams do their jobs more efficiently. We also use it to create call cases, which is our product complaints process. 

The number one benefit of Sales Cloud is the visibility of accounts. Before, when people were communicating by email, for example, things could get lost in translation. Whereas, now, we can centralize all communication to a specific account. We can then tie it in and create follow-up tasks—based on what we call the chatted posts—on the actual records themselves. Communication has definitely been a lot more centralized, and it gives everyone the visibility needed on their accounts, whether it's on their desktop or even their phone, on the mobile app. 

One of the most valuable features is the automation of Sales Cloud. It gives us the ability to easily—without the use of coding—create automation in order for us to do our work a lot more efficiently, whether it's notification reminders or certain automatic processes. There are a lot of things that Sales Cloud can do that, in my opinion, make everyone's jobs a whole lot easier and give them the visibility they need when they require it, when talking to customers and prospecting. It makes the account management process easier as well. 

Sales Cloud could be improved with more training. In general, the training is very good, but you have to really seek out some good options in order to upskill yourself. Another thing, which could also be a benefit, is that Sales is very customizable. If you move from one organization to another, you can see your Salesforce as before, but their Sales Cloud may look completely different from what you're used to. It's not like Microsoft Excel or Trello, where the layout and all the functions are the same. Because it's so customizable, I feel like there is a bit of a learning curve when you inherit another Sales Cloud instance. To be honest, I think that's the beauty of Salesforce because you can customize it so much to fit your needs as a company. It follows your processes and use cases in order for you to get the most out of the system itself. 

The other thing I believe Salesforce could improve on is the file storage system. Salesforce is very good for its account management processes and automation, but when it comes to file storage, it could use a bit of work to rival that of something like Microsoft OneDrive or SharePoint. With that being said, there is a lot of integration with a tool called Files Connect, which allows you to connect to SharePoint or OneDrive, so it's not an issue moving forward, but it's something that they could improve. 

An additional feature we would like to see is better integration. A lot of software is already very well-integrated with Salesforce, directly as well, but I think that because we use SAP, we would like to see more of a direct link. We have one via a third-party solution, but I think that integration should eventually be a lot easier without the use of a third-party. For now, it's still very manageable, though. 

I have been using Sales Cloud for eight years now. 

The performance is very good. Every now and again, there may be something up with the system, but Salesforce is very transparent when it comes to these issues. 

Sales Cloud requires maintenance three times a year, so you need to be ready for when the product launchers come. 

This solution is definitely very scalable. We work in a multinational company—in Australia, we have approximately 70 people using Sales Cloud, but we use Salesforce in the other countries as well. In total, I'd guess there are around 2,000 people who use it. Our sales team uses it maybe 30% of the time because a lot of our main selling processes are still external. Given that our organization has a mature customer base, this is the way things have been done for a long time. We're translating processes bit by bit—maybe three projects a year—translating big things in order for us to do it within the Salesforce Sales Cloud CRM. We would like to get engagement up to 50-60% in the coming years, and we'll definitely see that engagement with initial projects that we're rolling out for the coming years and beyond. 

Salesforce replicated very well within multiple organizations. We've got one organization for several countries across the world, even though we've only got 70 people in Australia, and I think it will be very easy for us to use as we move forward. There are times when we need a bit more training, but I think that the onus is on them. Salesforce provides their own training and upskilling lessons called Trailhead, so they're very helpful. 

I contacted Salesforce in my previous role and I had a really good experience. Whenever you create a case, they get back to you quite quickly a lot of the time. I previously communicated with the account executive of Salesforce and they were very helpful with their processes. If they can't help us directly, they're more than happy to lead us in the right direction. So far, it's been a great experience. 

I don't have previous experience with similar products—I've only really worked with Salesforce. 

Just last year, I deployed this solution with my current company. It was a bit challenging to translate our current business processes into Salesforce. We have about 80% of the functionality that we used to—for example, copying and pasting from an email into a Word document or Excel is a lot easier than copying and pasting it into Salesforce. There's not that like-for-like translation. 

There were three people involved in the deployment process and it took about 18 months.

We implemented Salesforce through an in-house team. 

They're the best in the business, so I think their business model is definitely based on that. The cost is worthwhile, to me, and I think it's fair because of the customization capabilities. However, small organizations that are just starting out might struggle to pay for something additional like this, so they might have only one or two. You pay per license with this sort of solution, as well as any additional benefits. They have what they call managed packages, some of which are free, but some you have to pay for. My understanding is that Salesforce is a little bit expensive, but in terms of the efficiencies, automation, and visibility, I think it's definitely value for money. 

The advice I would give to someone looking into implementing Salesforce is to know the business inside and out—that would be what they call a functional consultant—because a lot of processes can be translated easily enough without the use of coding. For us, it took about 18 months of scoping in order to get the best process moving forward. The implementation can be as easy or as difficult as you want it to be. If you translate all your processes together, then I think it will be more difficult, but you essentially have to give a bit in order to take.

I recommend engaging with an experienced Salesforce consultant or partner in order to get the most out of the system because if you're doing it yourself, it might get a bit overwhelming, especially if you don't have any CRM experience. Just know that almost anything is possible with Salesforce. A lot of the companies I used to work for were built on Salesforce and all opportunities—revenue-driven processes—were driven through Salesforce. It's easily done, especially within the e-commerce and tech software industries. Sales Cloud is very applicable, but make sure to engage a partner who is experienced in rolling out Salesforce. There are partners who specialize in the education sector, F&B, etc., so you have options. 

I rate Salesforce a nine out of ten. 

We are using Salesforce Sales Cloud to develop sales processes. For example, from the lead creation, submitting the contract, and sending the contract via DocuSign for the user to sign it. We use principle objects, such as opportunity, lead, account, and contact, and some process automation to automate the process of sales.

The automation of Salesforce Sales Cloud makes the process very easier to focus on leads and converts them automatically to accounts, contacts, and opportunities.

Salesforce Sales Cloud could improve by allowing some customization of the processes with coding to avoid the problem of memory. When we use only flows in the process, which can become large flows, they are more complicated to debug and also for maintenance. It's better to invoke some Apex classes to make the process better.

I have using Salesforce Sales Cloud for approximately three years.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is stable.

We have approximately 100 users using this solution in my organization. 

Salesforce Sales Cloud has the ability to scale to large numbers.

We are using this solution on a daily basis.

I have been satisfied with the technical support of Salesforce Sales Cloud.

We deploy the solution using many different tools. The process is simple because you only need to create the package and component and choose the sandbox.

The time it takes to deploy the package depends, it could take a few minutes. However, when we use GitLab or another tool, it takes more time than changeset.

The amount of people involved in the implementation depends on many factors. I have worked with many managers, such as GitLab managers, and we created a branch and later deployed it.

There are some releases that need to be updated and some packages that are necessary for maintenance.

I have found Salesforce Sales Cloud to be expensive. However, it is the number one CRM solution in the world. It is worth the money.

I would recommend this product because it can give a company a chance to have new clients. There is a lot of functionality that can increase the number of clients they have.

I rate Salesforce Sales Cloud a nine out of ten.

I'm using it to track opportunities and keep track of customer relations.

It's fast. It's accurate. I can access it anywhere. I can log calls live, keeping the information fresh in my mind. It has really helped expand our customer base.

I can see activity per customer. I can find out quickly and easily who was the last person I talked to, when it was, and what we were talking about.

I like its reporting.

Sometimes, it is difficult to integrate it with my emails. I've had trouble integrating it with my emails. There were a couple of things I did try as well, but I wasn't able to do so. 

I've had difficulty in other areas too with integration. It was related to syncing my calendars. I want the tasks that I put in to automatically sync to my calendars and update my calendars, but I couldn't figure out how to do it.

I have been using this solution for three years now.

I haven't had any issues so far.

I'm only using a small portion of it. You can do a lot more than I'm using it for, but I haven't gone into that yet.

There are 10 people in our organization who are using this solution. It is currently not being used extensively in the organization. It could be used more. Right now, we're just scratching the surface.

They were good, and they helped me through my issues.

I used Sage CRM for a while, and it's not very much fun to use. I switched because every time I had to do something, I had to contact our company IT support. It was too cumbersome. They had to get involved every time I wanted to do something, and I needed to be able to do things quickly and without having to go through someone else.

I had to set it up myself. There were some parts of it that took a little bit of learning, but I found the videos and other resources helpful.

My advice to others would be that they should talk to a consultant and tell them everything they want to do beforehand. They should make sure that they have a plan in place to get it set up the way they want to right away.

I would rate it at least a nine because it is really easy to use, and it has helped me a lot.

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.

Positive

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.