Salesforce Platform Reviews

We use it to manage the customer base, sales funnel, and sales team. We also intend to use it for CRM.

It is very modular in approach. It is very light, and it can be used on various devices. It could be used on an Android phone or a laptop, which makes it good for the sales team on the road.

It could have a lot more customization options in terms of fonts and reports. 

There should be an even lighter version with just two or three fields. It could be a bit more light if the field guys want to use it on a mobile phone on the road. 

For deploying it for CRM, maybe we can have our customer database, project funnels, and projects to help us in managing our supply chain business.

I have been using this solution for almost ten or eleven years. In my current organization, we have been using it for the last two years. I have also used it in my previous company.

It has been quite stable. We didn't have any challenges.

In terms of scalability, it has been good so far. I have seen it working fine for a team of 10 people as well as for a team of 1,000 people. There are probably more than 1,000 users in our organization globally.

In this organization, it is primarily for managing the sales team and sales funnel, but we also intend to use it for CRM around three years down the line.

I am a sales guy, and from my point of view, I never had any problem.

It is straightforward.

I have heard that it is fairly priced. It offers ROI.

It is a good platform. To deploy it in your organization, users should identify their problems and needs. They should align it with their needs in terms of customization. 

I would rate Salesforce Platform an eight out of ten.

I use the Salesforce Platform for quoting, tracking, and updating customer information. We've also had a solution that we've created or built on top of Salesforce. We've recently deployed some native solutions, which I haven't used yet. Our entire project management team has been a recent adoption. There's is another third-party solution called Hot Docs, for reports.  I think you're going to be moving to another application that's even more functional.

The solution has plenty of features that are useful.

We have a lot of strategic accounts and large accounts that are tied with all the growth and acquisitions across North America, being able to tag parent-child accounts in an easier fashion would be better. This is the biggest pain point is associating parent to child and being able to align and manage it better. Overall a better parent-child relationship between accounts would be a benefit.

I have been using Salesforce Platform for approximately seven years.

The solution is stable and reliable.

We have multiple things that we built on top of the Salesforce Platform which our team utilizes. One's called Customer Planning Opportunities, which is about 16 globally. When through an opportunity, a salesperson on the service side can create requests for us for some of my teams, and then it sends out a mass email. 

There are multiple public and private pages that they've developed which we can log activities, such as sales, pre-sales, and pre-sale planning. We can upload documents that everybody can go and gather. If we upload a document in our Customer Planning Opportunity, which is built on top of Salesforce, it doesn't have to send attachments within the CRM. 

There are some places where there are some disconnects

The technical support is responsive. I don't personally call them, but they're very good about if you want to learn or receive additional training within the application. It's pretty good.

We have a technical team that does the implementation, and we hired third-party resources too for the deployment. I wasn't part of the deployment team.

Salesforce does a user capacity analysis on a regular basis. For example, if you're not using certain areas, you may lose access. If you don't go in and quote and edit quotes, all of a sudden you may lose your rights to quote.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Salesforce Platform an eight out of ten.

There are many use cases as we have done more than 300 projects globally. One of the projects was where we implemented a customer care solution for dealers, sub-dealers, contractors, et cetera. We have worked in aviation, where we designed solutions there as well. One client was a manufacturer of parts for the aircraft. The quality check of each product, each spray part, what they were manufacturing, was pretty hard. It's supposed to go through ten different testing checkpoints. We designed a solution for them on Salesforce, to follow the protocol and the process.

Apart from that, I've worked on many real estate projects where a company used it for managing properties, including rental properties and construction. We have worked with integrating Salesforce with a government website where they used to update the new buyers of the property across Philadelphia. We pushed data from that government website into a client's Salesforce. That way, they were always aware of sold properties, when, and by whom. They used the information to make a pitch for renovation assistance services. 

The solution has grown its services over time. Now, for example, it includes a Sales cloud, Marketing cloud, Service cloud, et cetera.

I liked the classic version of Salesforce. There are a lot of really great basic features.

It's very flexible and offers tremendous features for customers.

The solution is stable. 

The product works well at an enterprise level.

Pricing is the biggest factor. The cost right now is too high and I've had a lot of clients leave. 

Sometimes customers can get annoyed as there are just too many features to understand and work with. They should consider reducing their offering, or work to streamline it so that it is not so overwhelming. There are now many great competitors that offer more streamlined, easy-to-understand services. 

Customers need accounting, and, right now, they need to go elsewhere, to something like Xero, for example, or QuickBooks. It would be nice to have some kind of accounting available right in Salesforce. 

The stability could be better. 

We don't get any leads from Salesforce here in India. It would be helpful if we could use the product to get us leads. 

We've been on the Salesforce platform for about 11 years at this point. It's been over a decade and we've used it for quite a while. 

In Salesforce, I haven't seen many issues. However, in some cases, we have clients that for some reason don't see specific add-on features and we bring in Salesforce to understand why certain things do not appear. 

However, for the most part, the stability is good and doesn't cause any issues. 

We have not set a benchmark in terms of the size of companies we work with. We don't work with thousands of users. We are helping single users from companies and we have worked with 4,000 plus users at an enterprise level.

That said, this solution works well for enterprise-level organizations. 

A customer who is coming to Salesforce for the first time, and doesn't understand CRMS, may need to take time to understand business practices. However, if a person is in IT or software, they usually get it a bit faster. They can handle the complexity.

During implementation, it's best to take baby steps before getting into complex cases. There's a learning curve, however, the level of the learning curve varies from customer to customer. 

The amount of time deployment takes depends on the kind of project.

The pricing is pretty expensive. 

We're using the enterprise version of the solution. 

I've done only four or five projects since I started my own shop back in 2010. Most of the projects which we have done are all for overseas companies. 80% are from the US and 20% are from the rest of the globe, including Australia, Canada, Europe, and the UK.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We primarily use Salesforce to manage pipeline opportunities. We are customers of Salesforce and I'm a senior enterprise multicloud strategist.

Salesforce enables us to track the percentage of opportunities that progress, the percentage that don't, and the reasons why.

This solution gives us a great platform to import and save customer data from various sources, and then manage them using outreach and various plugins to keep activity up. The dashboards are great, I can see lost or suspended accounts, year to day, total opportunities either as owner or team member, team pipelines, etc. It's very modular, so I don't have to continue to run reports and then track them myself. They have third-party plugins which are basically the same as features that enable you to get whatever functionality you need. It's fast and it works well, it's easy to aggregate information from multiple sources and all in all, I feel like it makes us a lot more productive as opposed to having to go to multiple websites. Here you can pull up an account, see all the tabs for that account without the need to have seven different tabs open on your browser.

The reporting functionality is very granular and you can do a lot with it, but unfortunately, it's not very intuitive. It's hard to get the report to show exactly what you want. It works if you turn it into a tile in the dashboard but working through it and creating the report is a little cumbersome, it's terrible. It's not super user-friendly, it takes time and some fiddling around. Simplified reporting would be great, but perhaps I don't have enough experience. I could spend some time figuring it out but for now, I create a report that I never have to create again. It's in a dashboard, so I don't get the opportunity to create much. With some training, I'd likely be better at creating reports. 

I've been using this solution for six months. 

The solution is stable. 

I've been able to scale very easily. We've doubled the size of our team in the last year and it's really easy to add new users and with a couple of minutes of training they've pretty much got it down. For that kind of internal growth and for everyone to be using it relatively well in such a short period of time, is great.

We have an internal technical resource that's able to assist on the Salesforce side. One of the things we've added recently is a button where you can essentially open a ticket for questions related to the use of Salesforce. In the past, I would reach out to our internal support team to help me build a report. Now, we simply have a request button that gets us to Salesforce.com support. I open the ticket and get a very quick response which is really great. 

From my perspective, they need to incorporate plugins. Salesforce is a great platform. It's like being able to use the apps on an iPhone. It looks good, you can make calls and it's easy to use but it's the ability to add apps which makes it great. In Salesforce terms, the value lies in the modular solutions through the plugins.

In terms of rating, the solution loses points because of the non-intuitive reporting. On the other hand, it provides many benefits. I would therefore rate the solution eight out of 10. 

It is our customer base, and we use it for just about everything.

I am using the unlimited latest version. It is on the Salesforce cloud.

We use the whole gamut of it. We use it for customer information. We also use it for prospecting. It has information about our delivery team such as who has got a particular account. It also has any type of service information that is needed, such as billing address, demographics, system information, account teams, and account planning. If we want to delve into a customer, we can account plan and find out what they've got and what their networking environment looks like, and this information is held in our records. If something happens to me, and somebody called about that particular record, they can find this information and pick from where I left off.

It is easy to close pending deals. When a customer signs the paperwork, it has got the e-sign incorporated in it. So, when a customer says, "Yeah, let's move forward with that.", we send an amendment or a contract to the customer via e-sign. They sign it, and it comes right back to us. After that, the person who does the sign off on contracts signs it, and when they're finished with it, it comes right back to me stating that it has been signed and countersigned, and now I can go ahead and process that order and get to the customer a copy of the record so that they have a copy in their records. It is overall an easy place to keep things organized.

It is a good solution. It has a learning curve, but once you learn it, it is a very good piece of software to have to keep up with everything, such as cancellations, new accounts, new contacts, and new opportunities. We also sell co-location, so it gives us a lot of data center information, such as what rack this customer is in and how much power they've got on that particular rack. It gives a lot of information. You just need to know where to find it. Once you learn it, it is just easy to navigate. 

I can go anywhere with it because it is web-based. All I need to do is get to it, and I can get to my customer. It is pretty straightforward. It's like any piece of software nowadays. It has an application that can be taken with you anywhere. It is on my phone, and it is also on my iPad, desktop, and laptop, so I can take it with me anywhere. It is very easy to use and easy to access.

I like it because of the fact that it lets me know what I'm working on and what I've recently worked on. It also helps me and allows me to do tracking. If I want to go out and find out how many times I've touched customers, I can find that information out. It tracks such information, and we use it. If we send any type of promotions out, it tracks who gets those promotions and how they've responded to those promotions. It is just a well-organized space that kind of has everything that you need to take care of your customer.

There is always room for improvement. It can be hard to learn, but when you have somebody who is experienced in this, it is like anything else. It is like Excel, you'll never know everything about Excel, but there's somebody who would possibly know. I'm sure I don't know all of the ins and outs of Salesforce.

In terms of additional features, it has got pretty much everything in there. It has a lot of information, and it is perfect for me. I'm an old-school guy, so I think it's perfect, but I'm sure there's going to be some room for improvement somewhere along the line.

I have been using this solution for the last five years, but my company has probably been using it for quite some time.

The only glitches that you'll have will be the operator, but once you know the navigation of it all, you won't have a problem with it. It's like anything else you learn.

It is easy to scale. I use the unlimited version, so I've not been stumped on anything here. In terms of usage, all the personnel in our company use it.

I've signed up for difficult classes, and they've been Johnny-on-the-spot to help out and to see if there's anything else that they can do. Their customer service is top-notch.

It is pretty straightforward. It is pretty easy to set up accounts.

I don't know anything about its cost, but I'm sure it has got a nice little price tag that goes along with it. 

I would recommend this solution to others if they can afford it. It doesn't mean it is expensive. I don't know what it costs, but if you can afford it, it is a good way to get in. 

It is a good product, and it has served us well. It keeps us organized, and it keeps us with our customer numbers. It has a learning curve, but you got to start somewhere. Like anything, you have to learn it. If you've got a good attitude and an open mind, you can learn anything.

I would rate Salesforce Platform a 10 out of 10.

We primarily use the solution for Account Management and Lead Management.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the unit coordination between sales and marketing when it comes to lead management.. We needed one CRM where we can have all the relevant lead lists, customize lead information fields over there, upload important information, update information and pass the information from sales to amrketing and vice versa and ensure a seamless coordination - that was the best part of it because it improved the productivity and no longer we rely on email threads or manual excel sheets -we had a robust mechanism.

Another interesting feature is integration with other marketing automation platforms like ZoomInfo, Outreach etc. This significantly reduces our workload or maintaining or integration of data across tools and seamlessly helps us execute our activities. 

The initial setup was straightforward.. It didnot take any time to learn and set it up. 

The product has proven to be stable. We have not faced any productivity or workability issues. 

The pricing is good.

We've found the technical support to be very helpful and responsive. 

Basically, Salesforce has two different views. One is the plastic view and one is the lightening view. If I log in the view is not returned for me specifically. For example, if I'm working with view number one, and I toggle to view number two and then log out when I log out, I come back and I'm still back in view number one. I'd like to stay in whichever view I need.

Sometimes what will happen is we work on it and then we move to a different tab and work on something else. After five minutes, when we come back, it automatically signs out. The thing is, every time we need to re-login. I would like to propose a session extension pop-up. This means that there will be some kind of reminder that your session is going to expire in the next two minutes and to please sign in if you want to continue. 

We haven't been using the solution for a short amount of time. We've used it for about two to four months.

The solution is quite stable. There are no bugs or glitches. We haven't found that it crashes or freeze. Its performance is reliable.

We have yet to attempt to scale the solution generally. 

We did not add any users, however, we have added more and more workflows. We've been able to customize to our needs. In that sense, it can scale.

We have five users on the solution currently.

I'm not sure if we have plans to expand the product at this time.

I've been in touch with technical support and would give them a rating of nine out of ten. They are quite responsive. We've been very satisfied with their level of assistance.

The initial setup is not complex or overly difficult. It's very straightforward, very easy. A company shouldn't have any issues with the process.

I cannot recall the exact amount of time that the deployment took.

I don't have too much insight on the licensing, however, the pricing is quite reasonable. It's not overly expensive. 

We did evaluate one solution, however, Salesforce is the best when it comes to marketing.

We are just a customer and an end-user.

It is my understanding that we are using the latest version of the solution at this time. 

Salesforce is great. Without any doubt, I would say one should definitely go for Salesforce. It does a lot of sales and marketing in the CRM that would help you if you work on productivity. If someone wants to have a single place where they need to be productive and that will deliver to the sales and marketing list, then yes Salesforce is the place.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've been very happy with its capabilities overall. 

We originally started using Salesforce Platform for our sales guys who go into the market every day. They wanted a common platform that is scalable and easy to work with, especially for the clients. We took to Salesforce because it filled this need, and because it came with multiple apps from different vendors and partners that could be integrated with it.

The sales team do route planning, meeting planning, and then they take a particular vehicle to particular retailers. Then they talk to them and find out their reason for taking or not taking a particular order, so that my marketing team and other teams can take action.

In 2015, we decided we should be on cloud. That is, we should not build our own infrastructure, hardware, network, database, etc., because then you cannot focus on the business outcomes; you're focusing more on the infrastructure. With Salesforce Platform, we are able to focus on business outcomes and we need not worry about infrastructure at all.

We found that the dashboard creation is very simple, so we got all our data in one place and we told users: now it's your job to create whatever analytics you want on the backend. So instead of generically recreating and redefining everything, what we did is we allowed our users access to all the fields that let them select and define their own graphs and analytics and so on. When used like this, it is very simple for users and doesn't require any technical IT skills from their point of view.

We like that the technology is very agile and flexible in the sense that there's a large partner ecosystem within Salesforce Platform. This enables us to choose from many different partners with different advantages, and all of it can be done in a plug-and-play kind of way.

One other aspect that is very important to us is that Salesforce Platform is a global platform and widely available across all of India.

Although the platform is already set up for you, there's a lot of customization that needs to be done, especially for any new component we start using. For whatever solution we wanted, we had to think for ourselves and design it all on our own. And, unfortunately, there were some components that were not really mature in the beginning, like Tableau for example. I would like to see Salesforce better, or more quickly, integrate the applications that they acquire, like Tableau and Slack.

Technologies are changing rapidly nowadays, and customers are requesting all sorts of new integrations. For example, some are asking for WhatsApp integrations, AI and ML integrations, etc. When you're using a single platform such as Salesforce or SAP, your data quality is the one thing that is taken care of, and we would like to continue managing our data across many different integration channels.

We've been using Salesforce Platform for almost four years. 

It's a very stable solution. We haven't had many issues with stability. 

With our environment of around 1500 users, there have hardly been any performance or scalability issues.

I don't think I have ever called technical support for an explanation or anything. At least not for the solution that we use for our sales staff who visit the markets. 

The setup was really straightforward. The one hitch was that when first setting up our customers, to capture their details and enter them into the system, we found that not all of them had reliable internet access. However, I understand that this is not a product challenge, but rather a practical or technical challenge.

The licensing is per user per month, which we took out a contract on a long time back. It's really an okay price for what solutions are available and for how many features and what kind of functionality you get.

The only thing is that, regarding the pricing contract, if you agree on 2000 users, you have to pay for 2000, even if you only have 1500. An agreement for 2000 users was in our contract, so we had to pay a little bit extra because we only have about 1500 users currently.

I can recommend Salesforce Platform to others with no hesitation. For a PaaS, all the infrastructure was in place. But when you begin with a new platform, you have to start from scratch at level zero and then keep on maturing. Thus, my advice to my team and everyone else is: don't complicate from day one. You start, make it simple, keep on using it, make sure it's working correctly and so on, and from there on out things are very easy for users.

I would rate Salesforce Platform a seven out of ten.

I am an end-user, I was never a power user or an architect, and I never developed any reports.

I use Salesforce for logging meetings, sales information, and metrics. I also use it for updating opportunities and looking at my own sales performance reports.

The company's sales team was at least 5,000 people.

I was hoping that with the integration of Tableau that they would have better end-user analytics to play around with. Coming from a MicroStrategy background, I was kind of disappointed. 

MicroStrategy is actually easier to use than Tableau. It was a function of the license that I was given.

Salesforce is incredibly slow. It was difficult to run live sales calls and leverage Salesforce at the same time. You can't ask a customer to hold for 45 seconds while you are looking for information about the account.

Salesforce also did not integrate well with some of the other systems that we had.

More end-user functionality would be useful. They should have some pre-canned reports that other analysts or salespeople would find valuable. 

I tried Salesforce Einstein, but that never really worked for me. The PowerSeller tool was just as helpful.

We would gather news reports about specific customers and identify if there were any buzzwords attached to it. I was able to create customized daily intelligence reports that would go out directly to my customers. TechnoMile integrated these reports directly into Salesforce allowing every salesperson that had the Archintel module to subscribe to specific reports giving them a compelling reason to reach out to the customer. Salesforce has a news feed function, but it is pretty ugly and very clunky to use. If they leveraged some sort of tool like this one, it would be amazing.

I use Salesforce every day.

I personally did not use the tech support at Salesforce. We had our own IT team.

The slowness of Salesforce could have been due to the fact that it is on the cloud. I had used Salesforce at other companies and it was not as slow.

Salesforce is the best one out there. I know that SugarCRM claims to be better but I haven't had a chance to use it to compare.

I would rate Salesforce a 6 out of 10. It wasn't great and wasn't terrible.