Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

• Email marketing
• Full sales cycle
• CRM to record everything.

You must have a process and record everything to automate and keep track.

Learning how to generate specialized reports. The more metrics and understanding of functionality, the better.

If you don't have sysadmin rights, you can be hamstrung doing many things manually and one at a time.

Multiple editions available and all cloud based.

Have recently began working with the new interface called Lightning and feel that its a great improvement to the "classic" version.

1. The entire organisation is now on the same page, with one source of truth.
2. Forced people to become compliant in reporting and updates - if its not in Salesforce it did not happen.
3. No more "versionitis", data, reports all in once central place.

The only time I have ever been upset with Salesforce was when I failed my certification exam. I thought to myself "Why do they make the exam so hard ? Why is the training so expensive ?" Now that I have passed I am grateful that it was a difficult exam. Other than that I support clients all over the world and Salesforce are quite stringent about sticking to regional offices.

Just over eight years

I thought I could manage on my own with the first deployment but needed an expert which we called in.

No

No

Excellent and that's the regular support not premium level. Support staff are always helpful polite and do not close a case until the customer smiles.

Excellent

We were using a combination of Google docs and contacts in Outlook. We switched because it was a mess.

We needed the help of an expert and it had just as much to do with scoping our needs as it had with configuring Salesforce to meet those needs.

We started in-house and moved quickly to a vendor whose expertise level was very good.

Never calculated it but cannot understand how we ever managed without Salesforce.

I have been involved with the deployment of a number of versions starting with contact manager (very reasonable) all the way up to their enterprise version. You get what you pay for and whilst the enterprise version is not cheap, its worth every penny.

Zoho CRM, Goldmine and Act.

Spend as much time as you can scoping your needs and understanding what you want to achieve today, next year and in 2 years time.

I am really happy that Salesforce gives admins and developers access to the latest release in their sandbox (test environment) weeks before the release. This gives you a chance to evaluate and become familiar with the new release features.

The new interface Lightning is an important and extensive makeover that is even slicker and leaner than the existing interface

The ease of customization plus the availability of an extensive selection of apps.

We have moved away from sharing docs and now everyone is on the same page with only one source of truth.

It is still relatively expensive - would like to see it a little cheaper.

I have worked with all versions, contact manager. group, professional, enterprise, unlimited and non profit starter pack for almost seven years.

I did need some external help initially but the reason for that was my fairly complex formula fields.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It's outstanding.

It's outstanding on standard support plus they off premier support.

I worked, for a limited time, with Zoho and was looking for a bigger "ecosystem."

I had a few issues with the formula fields otherwise it was straightforward.

We used an in-house with some vendor assistance who had a very high level of expertise.

It's never been measured, but our year on year growth would have never been possible without Salesforce.

I would rather go for a version with less functionality, but allows a budget for more users.

Zoho CRM

It is not a perfect solution to all needs but is certainly an ideal solution for most.

Prepare an extensive needs analysis - ensure that Salesforce can deliver the solution you need.

We use Salesforce Sales Cloud for management assistance and for CRM.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is not as simple to use as Zoho. It requires some level of expertise before you can use it. However, you can easily learn how to use the solution as you go along.

I have been using Salesforce Sales Cloud for a few years.

I have found Salesforce Sales Cloud to be stable.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is scalable.

We have approximately 75 users using this solution.

I have not contacted technical support.

I preferred using Zoho rather than Salesforce Sales Cloud. We switch to Zoho because the price of Salesforce Sales Cloud was expensive.

The initial setup of Salesforce Sales Cloud is simple and took approximately one hour, but not as simple as Zoho.

The overall price of Salesforce Sales Cloud could be better, it is more expensive than other competitors. There is an annual license for Salesforce Sales Cloud.

I would recommend the solution to others.

I rate Salesforce Sales Cloud a seven out of ten.

• The Sales Cloud platform
• The Service Cloud platform

It has touched every spectrum of our organization regardless of the roles the various department plays. Every department contributes to the revenue numbers through the use of this tool.

Improving reports/dashboards is needed. It is quite good, but taking it up a notch would be beneficial for the whole team.

I have used it since 2009, so six years.

There have been no issues with the deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

It has scaled well and every department in our organization uses it.

Start small, then leverage it to the whole team in phases. You will achieve greater success when doing it in small steps, which will also ensure that this product gets used most efficiently.

A six out of 10.

A six out of 10.

No other solutions were previously used.

The initial setup was quite straightforward.

We used a vendor team for implementation.

Get your requirements properly analyzed before walking it through with the deployment team.

My background is with Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. The product has versions which come in the form of three yearly releases for summer, spring, and winter.

With the new releases, upgrading certain features is not optional, it just happens on a designated date and your application gets upgraded automatically. For the more interactive parts of the upgrades, there is sometimes a need for admin intervention. This requires some sort of back end configuration by a system administrator.

Salesforce's release notes are extremely comprehensive - sometimes too comprehensive as they can top 300 pages per release. Most people should be able to find what they need from the table of contents fairly easily. The organization of the document stays very regular year over year.

I would like to see Salesforce scale back on the new items, and try to fix more of the old broken items, bugs, and enhancement requests. Sometimes, like with the new community templates, there can be obvious bugs that slide by unnoticed and then the end user has to find them as if it were a beta release.

I started using Salesforce when they were on the winter 2011 release.

Premier support costs a lot of money and oftentimes they do not have better information than a good admin could find out on their own. It is great for someone new to Salesforce without an experienced admin to turn to for support.

Don't do it yourself unless you plan to become a Salesforce Admin. Do it right the first time, which does not mean pay the highest price.

Make sure if you are using a consulting company they are as trustworthy as possible, research who your consultant is, previous successes of the individual you work with and not just the company as a whole. Find them on LinkedIn and ask people about them. If you hire someone in-house do the same research. If you are exposing all your company data and the system architecture of the company moving forward to one person's design, it is critical to make sure you have the right person guiding it.

Ask them about why they like doing Salesforce, the values that are important to them and how they picture the beginning, middle, and end of the consulting/work relationship. This should give you some insight into what guiding principles they are likely to follow

ROI depends on how good the guy setting up your Salesforce is.

Do your best to negotiate the cost if you can. Salesforce is one of the most expensive solutions out there.

The ease of customization makes every Salesforce implementation like a strand of company DNA. This can be a top-tier solution for companies who utilize the product with best practices. On the other hand, some companies who have a weak IT department or just are not ready to integrate their business with Salesforce should hold back! This is because the needs of a very young business will undoubtedly change again and again, and when a company takes their Salesforce system along for that roller-coaster ride, the company growing pains leave scars on the system. This causes some people to resent Salesforce as a system. I'm not going to say a young company should not use Salesforce, only that it is critical to have the most experienced system admin you can afford if the business wants to use Salesforce from an early age.

The amount of time you believe it will take to get Salesforce operational for your company, triple that time and then multiply by two. Here's why, say, I think it will take three months to roll this out, with documentation, or finding resources it will take six months and with unexpected delays it will take nine. Now multiply by two again because you should spend nine months planning out who, how, where, when etc. If you want your system to do well you need to do the work to get there. Otherwise you will end up having to redo your entire Salesforce implementation.

The core features as well as the ability to extend them using ‘click-vs-code’ configurations to drive workflow activities.

We have been able to automate a large portion of the manual processes for our sales activities.

We know that User Interface improvements are coming, as well as improvements to reporting and dashboards.

I have been using Salesforce for four years.

It is possible to use or configure the system in a way that can ‘slow it down’, but deployment, stability and scalability are some of the best features of Salesforce.

The technical support is the one area that Salesforce needs the most improvement. They are slow to respond, and in many cases you don’t get the help you need. There are different levels of support based on the license agreement, so make sure you know what you are getting, but don’t expect fast results except for the most basic questions.

A different solution was used several years ago and was called Goldmine.

The initial setup is very straightforward, and consists of many of the same considerations for any move to a CRM solution. However, the ability to configure Salesforce Sales Cloud is much faster.

We did use a partner for the implementation, but have not used them since. I would highly recommend that you have someone on the team who is close to a salesforce solution/technical architect. They don’t need to be certified, but they should have a track record for successful project management and understand the salesforce technology stack.

Negotiate during the end of the Salesforce year. You will get the best pricing. Review the licensing options to align it to your needs. And ask for help from people you know who are like your company and using Salesforce.

We did evaluate other CRM solutions as well such as Microsoft CRM.

Follow good practices for comparing it, don’t over customize the standard functionality, make sure you understand how you would use it based on your sales processes and which ones you should/could change.