Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

Our onboarding team uses Salesforce for onboarding new customers. It allows us to track communications, activities, mark task that have been completed and create reports and dashboards to show how accounts are progressing through the onboarding process. Salesforce is the best in class tool when it comes to customization and trackability. We can setup whatever fields we need and collect whatever data we need based on various workflows. You can also create automated tasks.

Salesforce is a bit clunky and slow at times. We had to have training by a Salesforce expert to implement the systems we needed, so I wouldn't say it's very user-friendly (but that's expected when you have such a robust system).

I LOVE Lightning as a whole, and I personally believe it was Salesforce's best huge update/release since I first started using the platform in 2011. My favorite Lightning feature is Lightning App Builder for its non-code-based UI and its simplified yet vast customization capabilities.
I also f*ing love AppExchange, Trailhead, and the seemingly endless list of available integrations.

I'm sorry (but not sorry) to say, I HATE how very very little SFDC has improved their incumbent reporting and dashboard functionalities and UI. It's been one of the primary areas of SFDC, as an admin, I use the absolute most yet I always find myself having to resort to external reporting/data analysis tools (shout out to my Ride-or-Die, Excel!) to accomplish all of the data analysis and reporting needed in my role. Einstein Analytics (formerly Wave Analytics) is a godsend but costs a little too much ON TOP OF the already exorbitant price we pay just for base licenses.

Using Salesforce Sales Cloud has been very productive and effective for our organization. The platform customization options allow us to adapt it to our needs. It has many tools being a suite that has several services, its wide range of solutions offers third-party solutions to fill that gap. What makes it even more powerful is its wide compatibility; It seems like every other software out there has or is developing an integration with Salesforce. I have used other Salesforce services and over this time I have noticed how the platform has improved internal collaboration between our teams and has elevated the customer experience with more personalized solutions.

As for the reporting features, they are promising, but plagued with a few glitches. I have noticed errors, particularly when trying to drag and drop fields into reports. Creating reports is more cumbersome than what I've found with platforms like Microsoft dynamics. The tool requires a certain level of proficency, especially if you are trying to create reports that include complex variables, such as accounts and specific types of engagements.

I recently transitioned out of venues and over to the vendor side of things. However, while in venues (90% of my career) I participated in the implementation of salesforces' product delphi.fdc (latest version) in my last two positions (Director of Events at a country club 2016-2018 and Sales Manager at a Boutique Hotel 2018-2020). While at the Country Club, I completed extensive research reviewing SalesForce against several other standard industry event softwares. SalesForce is the most streamlined and inclusive option available. As a vendor, there are numerous tools that would not apply to my current position however if I was still working in venues, I would be pushing for the delphi.fdc as the best option to prepare teams for their current workload and any curve balls the future may throw their way.

However, there are some spin off components to the software that may still need some work such as meeting matrix. The set up process is lengthy and requires a lot of back log work to ensure old data that is moved over is clean and new habits are in place for your team to ensure the new system remains clean.

The ability to customize around any data solutions that your company needs is a huge benefit of the platform. And its popularity means there are integrations with most sales and marketing tools.

The setup and implementation require a Salesforce administrator. You can navigate some things on your own but without hiring someone or finding a consulting partner to customize your applications, you won't get much value.

What I like the most with Salesforce its automation and analytics. It makes our job easier as an admin to maintain the application and and also to manage different end users that rely on its function to deliver the needs of the business.

The complexity. Sometimes its very hard to do some task since the application it self is designed with such complexity. Sometimes I found it hard to follow some procedure in salesforce specially when handling it for the first time.

I've been a salesforce administrator 3 times. At one of the companies we integrated nearly everything into salesforce. The joke was the janitor couldn't take out the trash without a salesforce entry.

It does some things well. But, over the years it has become too bloated. Small companies just don't need all the functionality and costs.

The cost has gotten too high. There are competitors on the market that do it very well for a lot less. Programming used to be pretty easy. That has gotten more difficult over the years. To the point where I am no longer a fan. I am a firm believer in CRM. I built my first CRM from scratch in 1988. There was no shrink wrap back then. But the program has gotten bloated and suffers from mission creep.

Since integration of SalesForce to our sales engineering team we have full visibility of quote, inquiry and sale pipeline activities. In previous systems these activities we're silo functions which depended on spreadsheet analysis lots of discussions and sales person memory. Salesforce has proven a great central repository and clearing House for all of this information.
The linking with Outlook was a critical piece of this which we purchased from a third party.

The front end pricing seemed ok. BUT it took a LOT of customization to get the level of user friendly interface and process integration we needed. We ended up having to expand the customization scope twice after the initial contract. So the overall cost per user and startup was much higher than budgeted.

The level of customization available through the UI without needing any coding/dev work

Price

As a CRM platform, it's everything you could ask for. Also, its AppStore is top notch. From a functionality perspective, you cannot go wrong with Salesforce. Also, as one of the biggest and most widespread platforms, there are plenty of Salesforce resources out there, so there is no shortage of help available should you need it. If you are a small non-profit particularly, Salesforce can be an incredible resource as your first 10 licenses are free (as long as you qualify as a non-profit with Salesforce)

If you are a for-profit firm, be aware that Salesforce builds in an annual 7% licensing cost increase into it's contracts. As a result, you will be continually negotiating and re-negotiating with them to keep licensing costs reasonable. Even then, Salesforce will continually look to increase your spend with them. Their sales teams/account managers can be very aggressive and a lot of things you may want or need will cost you extra. They're also continually rotating their account managers. This can be very frustrating as a customer because just when you feel that you've built a good relationship with your account manager, Salesforce will switch people on you and then you have to work to rebuild a new relationship.

Speed of implementation, excellent approval system. For CRM most functionality has already been thought of and available out of the box, with only configuration required. Excellent development platform for custom changes and is a complete platform to build any application on.

Bugs/Defects can take a long time for Salesforce to resolve, Some issues require a development support agreement in place before they will investigate.

Everything. I love salesforce. I love its ease of use, navigation, walk-me, training, integration, features, functionality, you name it. Chatter is my favorite feature and once adopted by organizations you see the whole organization migrate to making salesforce their homepage. I love the adaptation the teams have to it and that you can customize your dashboard so sales, marketing, integration, and other teams can all use it as they need to.

The cost, and sometimes Salesforce does not do a good job of showing the interoperability it has. There are so many features that make it a one-stop-shop for companies large and small, but it seems if the product is sold as a sales tool, it remains that way instead of showing the integration options for marketing and other teams.

Form many years we used another CRM - that was just that - a CRM. Salesforce has become a platform capable of infinite applications and integrations. It requires an investment in funds - and yes - time. But anything of high-yield does. Key - is securing a solid company for the customization Salesforce Corporate does a fine job connecting with the best. I frankly am shocked that in today's world many organizations are still operating without robust CRM and synchronous applications. I would suggest to those about to embark on this - GO WITH SALESFORCE - the leader and don't waste precious time going through all kinds of demos with others. Bottom-line - Salesforce is ahead and keeps ahead and will continue to do so. This greatly lessens your risks, Just make the move then make the commitment to optimize the core capabilities.

It's an odd thing - but - what like least is; far too many capabilities. One can be overwhelmed and fixated on constantly wanting more. So - there's the good news - a company will probably never be able to keep up with the options available - it will never be limited - therefore Salesforce is aspirational and helps to drive growth. I believe the company will never stop keeping way ahead of what customers or prospects want. Just advise to master the basics and then progress.

The ability to customize really makes SalesForce its own beast. I've worked for two companies that have used the software, and both looked very different, yet still intuitively the same. I like that if there isn't currently a solution for you, there are add-ons and plug-ins that can be fitted into your experience to make it an extremely tailored solution for a wide range of companies. Not only that, the customer support staff have some great tools at their disposal that give you an even deeper dimension of control, should you be unable to quite round the edges for your perfect fit. I like the seamless integration with Pardot. In addition, with Pardot's automation platform, you can literally save hours' worth of work as contact/prospect data can sync in nearly realtime, depending on the rules you've set up. If all this sounds perplexing, don't worry too much, as Salesforce has an amazing onboarding team that will work with your designated admin staff to utilize most of the software package from nearly any education/experience level.

There are some frustrating limitations with reporting in Pardot, and sometimes SalesForce integration with plug-ins can be a bit of a hassle if they weren't set up during the initial onboarding, but overall these are speedbumps at worst and don't detract from the overall experience enough to really worry about.

We have used Salesforce for years and when it used Classic we mostly liked how fast it was to use the system, create custom modules, add records etc. It helps us track our open opportunities, wins, funnel by rep and all your standard CRM functions you can get anywhere.

When they switched to Lightning the performance took a nose dive and is crazy slow. Our main issue though is that we only have 8 users, which to Salesforce is of course small and therefore you get zero support. When we signed up we asked to pay in CAD but were told that's only for larger companies and that we have to pay in USD. They said credit card is fine, so for the first 2 years we paid with credit card no problem, and even got $300 in points every 6 months due to the high amount of the service as we have Enterprise edition. When we got our last invoice 4 months ago, I went to pay it and was unable to. I called in and was told Salesforce doesn't accept credit cards anymore, and to "simply" mail them a cheque. I said fine, but what is the total in CAD since I can't write a cheque in USD as we are in Canada. They said sorry that's not possible it has to be USD. So now any time I need to pay our bill I have to go to the bank, wait in line, do a bank draft, and pay a $30 bank fee to send them their wire transfer.

When contacting their billing team or sales, no one ever replies even when I open a case. I literally have had to tweet them my case number every single time before they respond. We have had 5 different account managers in 3 years as they seem to have high turn over. When you email them they ignore you, but if you email them again and say you're looking at upgrading your plan or buying another user, they reply immediately of course.

Easy integration with DocuSign and Outlook. Easy to log interactions. You can pull so many custom reports, and control permissions of who may see and edit them. Permission structure is pretty granular, which I know many orgs prefer. The dashboard is nice we should have used it more. You can control stages and what is triggered/required at each level of the sales process. Lightening is better than the old version, trust. There's a ton of features I could cover but those are the ones that stand out most. The chatter is handy and you can tag other users to see/attend what is needed nearly anywhere in the process.

Most likely due to our initial implementation, pulling reports is sooooo tedious. Salesforce sales cloud doesn't seem to work well for dual product verticals with shared customers. I wish they would have just set up a separate implementation for the second vertical because sharing contacts, division of account ownership, etc got very messy not to mention trying to pull reports. I recommend you have SF Architect help who knows the system inside out! The plugin for Outlook was a bit glitchy sometimes.

SalesForce I believe drives our clients sales and track each and every sales person's goals and bookings. As a tech support engineer one of my responsibilities is to support SalesForce users with any issues that occur. As a front end user, features that i like about SalesForce is the ability to enter a specific booking, tracking the revenue of that booking and all bookings entered by a salesperson, easy to edit changes of any existing group, an announcement page that lets me displays the messages that i enter them, and so much more. Moreover, one of the main features that i like about SalesForce is the customizeable dashboard; once logged into SalesForce , the tool's dashboard gives me a detailed view of how a specific hotel's revenue is performing, and also provides detailed summaries of a customer's data and other relevant statistics.

One of the biggest downside of SalesForce is the password expiration duration; as a salesperson i keep having to entered a new password every 30-45 days or so, I wish there was an option to extend the duration of the password expiration. I know it is a security protocol within the system itself to recreate a new password for any user after 30-45 days.