Salesforce Sales Cloud Reviews

Pros

It significantly enhances sales pipeline by optimizing lead management and conversion rates. Convert more prospects into customers by effectively nurturing leads, streamlining sales processes, and gaining valuable insights into customer behavior.

Cons

Implementation is quite complex and resource-intensive, often presenting challenges for smaller businesses or those lacking dedicated IT support.

Pros

What I appreciate the most about Salesforce Sales Cloud is its comprehensive functionality that integrates seamlessly with various departments. The CRM is incredibly customizable, allowing my team to tailor workflows and reports to meet specific business needs. The automation features have significantly reduced manual work, and the detailed analytics offer valuable insights into customer behavior and sales trends.

Cons

One challenge I’ve encountered is the steep learning curve. While Salesforce is highly capable, it can be overwhelming for new users, and the onboarding process requires a fair amount of time and training. Additionally, some of the advanced features can be a bit costly, especially for smaller businesses.

Pros

I helps to keeps everything organized in one place. It’s super easy to use, and the automation features save a ton of time. Plus, the reports are awesome for making quick decisions. Overall, it’s a really handy tool for managing sales

Cons

It can be a bit overwhelming at first. There are so many features and options that it takes some time to get used to everything. Also, it can get pricey, especially for smaller businesses

Pros

Comprehensive lead and opportunity management
Robust sales forecasting and analytics
Customizable dashboards and reports
Mobile accessibility for on-the-go sales tracking
Seamless integration with other tools
Advanced automation and AI features

Cons

The platform can be expensive, especially for small businesses.
Customization options, while powerful, can be overwhelming for new users.
Some users report that the system can be slow at times, particularly with large datasets.
The extensive feature set may require significant training for full utilization.

Pros

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a very organized platform that makes it easy to see what projects are being completed and prioritize things that need immediate action.

Cons

When running reports and needing to see the total of monetary value items, there is a difficulty in determining if this can be done within the report itself or if in needs to be completed on the dashboard. This is confusing in itself but also leads to difficulty when going between a PC unit and a mobile phone or iPad app version.

Pros

It is a good CRM where everything can be organized by leads and opportunities. I like that it is easy to keep track of everything that is customer related and it allows you to integrate with another different tools for quoting.

Cons

Since it is all in one, sometimes the interface it is not user-friendly and it can take a while to find what you are looking for.

Pros

The ability to manage my sales pipline ane my prospect pipeline to keep track of all my client book of business and all the information about my book of business which is worth 5.9 million dollars of business

Cons

I really dont see what I like least about Salesforce

Pros

Everything is in one place - the ability to understand customer or prospect status without jumping between multiple systems. A great alignment tool between different stakeholders in the customer acquisition journey process

Cons

In rare cases, you need to integrate with another complex system.

Pros

Sales force is one of the integral function I have witnessed in my decades of career. I used it in a capacity of report, DI and research level with the sales team.
I found it very equipped and well functioned tool
It comes with inbuild AI that learns your pattern of activities and keep you updated on the upcoming changes. This saves a lot of manual hour with perfect output.

Cons

This is very expensive to have. It costs per seat and its non transferable.
Another thing I would say is changes. They are not very pro to changes or customization

Pros

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) platform designed to support the sales process from lead generation to closing deals. It is widely adopted across various industries due to its robust features, scalability, and the ability to customize to meet specific business needs.

Cons

The platform's extensive features can be overwhelming and require significant time and resources to implement and manage effectively.

Pros

What I like most about this product is that my team and company was looking for a product in order to ease the customization of widgets and components, automate tasks for users that were tedious and time-consuming, and streamline the process of customer's feedback to the customer support team to the implementation and design team. Salesforce was able to offer solutions in order to solve all those problems, all while allowing us to customize various apps and dashboards in order to meet our customers' and business needs.

Cons

What I liked least about the software is the documentation and learning curve that came with incorporating and implementing using Salesforce. I was part of the team analyzing if Salesforce was right for my business, and documentation about customizing styling and allowing different users to have different roles within your corporate account were difficult things to find. After speaking with several people who work at Salesforce and swiping through pages and pages of online material, we were able to play around and find what works best for us. Definitely incorporate the learning curve into your business plan if you plan to use Salesforce.

Alternatives Considered

Dynamics 365

Reasons for Choosing Salesforce Sales Cloud

The main reason my company was looking for a switch was for more ability to customize while keeping the price low that we paid for the solution.

Switched From

Dynamics 365

Reasons for Switching to Salesforce Sales Cloud

Both of the other products we looked at had terrible customer service, were costly, and did not allow for the customization and wide breadth of options we were looking for. The learning curve for those were much greater and we didn't get more out of them for our business needs.

Pros

The non-profit organization that I work for, Interfaith Caregivers has been using Salesforce for a year. I'm so glad that we decided on this system because I have used it previously in other places of work. One of the reasons why we went with Salesforce was to manage a marketing/fundraiser campaign that we have every year. We were able to store our donor and board members and create a campaign just for them to use as a communication tool and to begin the fundraiser campaign for our annual gala. It was also very easy and much needed to track donor and fundraiser payments for the gala. We are able to store multiple templates which consist of donor thank you letters in the template field. This is a very helpful feature!

Cons

It is hard for me to dislike Salesforce. I appreciate the fact that we were able to get the nonprofit discount. Also we were able to use the 10 free licenses since we have 10 employees!

I would say the only thing is that I look forward to seeing how Salesforce will continue to grow and evolve and offer other packages to improve the CRM experience. Currently I have not ran into any problems.

Pros

I like that it integrates well with the overall Salesforce CRM

Cons

We are a SME and are implementing Salesforce through all aspects of core business, it is a big investment in the future of our business. We would have thought that if an issue arrives that Salesforce as the global leaders in CRM would have the mechanisms to be looked after instead of pretending to not hear us (we spend a lot of time with calls, emails, and follow up calls and emails). The account managers are great people but lack the capacity to escalate things swiftly with management for a response, and it seems aren’t properly trained in the offering of Marketing Cloud. It feels as though our case gets lost in a big company with a disconnected hierarchy similar to governmental departments in the ’80’s.

Alternatives Considered

Sprout, Later and Hootsuite

Reasons for Choosing Salesforce Sales Cloud

Lack of customer service, functionality, software bugs, too expensive.

Switched From

Hootsuite

Reasons for Switching to Salesforce Sales Cloud

We loved the idea to have all apps under one software umbrella and missed the fact that it is a very expensive app ($750/mth) with little functionality 4 social media connectors.

Pros

Most people believe SF to be a CRM and while that is true, it's much more than that. It's a platform that leverages the technology of the CRM and is so easily customized that it can manage your entire business. This is the next generation of technology for every business need.

Cons

While the capabilities are nearly endless, not everything is offered out of the box. SF offers a lot of different products and has an extensive community of 3rd party app providers that allow for additional functionality that can be installed. Some of these products are free while others are paid beyond the initial licensing purchase through SF.

Alternatives Considered

Dynamics 365

Switched From

Dynamics 365

Reasons for Switching to Salesforce Sales Cloud

The features that SF offers and the ease of customization make it the leader.

Pros

I love that it has given our non-profit a space to grow into. Too often, non-profits find themselves barred by limits placed on the number of Contacts being retained. Most pricing is based around this figure which is tiresome when you are looking to gain momentum without having to have constant upgrades. Salesforce is massive and delivers in what it says it will do.

Cons

It is challenging to learn. I would have appreciated options for non-profit teams to have discount pricing on trainings with use. This would have provided for shared trust in the CRM, rather than knowledge given to a few who then became internal advocates for the system.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

Zoho CRM, Dynamics 365 and HubSpot CRM

Reasons for Switching to Salesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce leads the CRM industry, of course, so it's usually a companies first choice when acquiring a CRM. It integrates with almost everything, has a nebulous laundry list of functionalities and customizations, there's super valuable free resources available from AppExchange to Trailhead and more, and so on.

Pros

Integrating, once we set up our system and what we were going to use it for, this did a world of good keeping us organised. We were only a business of 4 when we started and knew fairly early on relationships with local businesses were key to us staying open, after an incredibly helpful and informative call with sales force it made things so easy to set up. I didn’t know how much CRM in a software at the time would help but after taking the chance and settling into it with the team it because a great tool to use, especially after we hired staff that were more knowledgeable about the software themselves. Managing our business accounts with sales force is the best thing we did.

Cons

It’s expensive and getting started we worried about whether we would be able to afford it long term but it pays for itself.

Pros

Sales Cloud is immensely customisable. Out of the box it has solid features but the ease at which someone can learn how to customise the system, all the way to building custom objects and flows is incredibly valuable. It's super easy to use as well

Cons

It has some really daft issues, like sorting line items in a Quote needs a free appexchange program and even that's unreliable (with some users seeing different ordering). It also has very limited Quote template customisation, so you're pretty much forced to pay for a plugin like Conga Composer. It's very expensive and although there's lots of bolt-ons, it's all at increased cost.

Alternatives Considered

Zoho CRM

Reasons for Choosing Salesforce Sales Cloud

Prospect was coming to end of life and the SaaS equivalent was not good enough

Switched From

Prospect CRM

Pros

I enjoy how Salesforce Sales cloud shows me the status of every deal in progress. Potentially lucrative transactions can be monitored and sorted by me. I can enter work and then generate unique reports.

Cons

It ended up costing our company a lot of money. that was the main cause for alarm. However, it had excellent functionality. Data entry can be a burden at times.

Pros

Packs a punch in features that can be turned on and turned off as needed when business trends and sales needs change. Worth the price as a stand-alone sales CRM and sales tool for a small business with just a handful of reps while at the same time being equally effective as a platform for a company with 1000+ sales people that want integration between multiple departments. Excellent security against both outside and inside threats and manipulation. User definition fields so numerous that it allows for unique user roles for every employee on the system if desired.

Cons

Like most software tools, sf.com has a learning curve and there will be some in the company that are resistant to the change. If those people are not pushed and required to use the system completely it detracts from the overall benefit of the software.
The software is more expensive than its competitors - many times significantly more expensive. Also the packages start at the price for 5 users so if you are a small business with yourself and two employees, you will pay for 5 users even though you may only need 2 or 3 users.

Pros

Salesforce Classic is just a great CRM, plain and simple. It is complex for people who are new to the system, though the learning curve plateaus around a year or so. As with most tools out there, of course there are going to be issues with dirty and sometimes unreliable data, but this is typically a product of years and years of improper setup combined with administrative turnover and poor processes. I am unsure of any tools out there that could remotely compete with the robust functionality of Salesforce, though I think they are well aware of this which makes them slightly less innovative and supportive of current customers (because they know we have no better alternatives to turn to).

Cons

The transition to Lightning has been tough, and I am dreading the day they finally sunset Classic. The dashboard functionality is the only element I have found to have improved with Lightning, while everything else has become increasingly slow, difficult to navigate and overly visual. For a CRM, I would argue that most admins care less about the visual aspects of reporting and more about speed and efficiency in getting things done. The "Setup" in Lightning has changed the most out of all, and is particularly frustrating considering this is where most admins live all day. I have not seen one true improvement from Lightning, and feel like this is a cheap ploy to make the tool appear to be more functional and "fresh" for new users. Yes, the visual benefits might be desirable for a Sales user who only needs to view certain elements of the site, but for admins it is truly painful, and I wish they would keep Classic around as an option.

Pros

A platform that offers sales management, customer service, marketing automation and partner relationship management. It is a c cloud-based CRM solution, Salesforce gives you anywhere, anytime, access to your business data, even from mobile devices. This platform helped us streamline our process and logged our conversation with each of our clients/candidates keeping track of the discussion history and knowing where we left at. It has a good contact management system that allows the users to store a lot more information like account/client details, addresses, other available information which allows a good account info overview. The Dashboard is customizable and can fit to what their client needs and requires for the specific process. It's an easy to navigate software especially for those who had been into cloud-based platform before.

Cons

The complexity of its features sometimes are not being exhausted/maximized by small-scale businesses and could get overwhelming at times. Pricing may be a bit high for a small company especially if they want something that is more customizable. For our team, it took us a while to navigate the platform fully and think of was on how to customize the platform based on our needs. Knowing what is already available for us and what can be considered for the future is something that we get to deep dive over the course of months and a lot of collaboration and dicussion with the team. Reporting issues might be a bit hard in terms of knowing who is responsbile for certain technical glitch if its Salesforce folks themselves or some app that links to it.

Pros

It's a very complex and versatile piece of software, there's a lot to like about it:

- it can be used for Sales and Service
- it is cloud-based and can be used by teams scattered around the whole world
- it can be customised to suit all business types, from selling companies to clinics etc.
- it has a very rich marketplace, if you did not find what you were after baked in, you will probably find it in the AppExchange
- it has a lot of integrations, e.g. email, CTI
- it is cross-platform, you can use it on phones, tablets, MacOS, iOS, Android, Windows, Linux
- it is very secure and has a very granular security options
- you have access to all your data, you can export raw data anytime you need it for security and migration purposes
- it has an insane deal of automation, you can apply a lot of automatic jobs, workflows, processes that will automate your daily tasks, allowing you to focus on the most important tasks for your business cutting down on the admin for the regular users

Cons

- first of all, it is quite expensive, on the other hand, building and using an in-house CRM can be even more expensive, before purchasing, however, make sure if you need all the bells and whistles, as you might just as well get a competitor's CRM that will suit your needs and will be cheaper
- complexity has its price, to configure all of this, you will need a bunch of well trained certified and experienced admins, employing incompetent admins will expose your business to unnecessary downtimes
- competent and experienced admins, on the other hand, are also very expensive and not necessarily easy to find
- Salesforce can be very fragile to changes, making a small change can sometimes cause a chain reaction immobilizing your business, every change has to be thoroughly tested in Sandboxes

Before deciding to use Salesforce I recommend doing a research to make sure your business will benefit from Salesforce's features. It is a great tool and can really help your business provided there is a good justification. Otherwise, you might be better off with something simpler.

Pros

What truly sets Salesforce Sales Cloud apart for me is its unparalleled customizability and integration capabilities. The platform's flexibility allows businesses to tailor it to their specific needs, ensuring that it can evolve alongside the company. With its vast ecosystem of applications available through the Salesforce AppExchange, the ability to integrate with other tools and systems is virtually limitless. This ecosystem empowers businesses to create a fully integrated sales process, enhancing efficiency and productivity. The platform's robust analytics and reporting tools have also been a game-changer, providing deep insights into sales metrics and customer data, which in turn drive informed decision-making and strategy refinement.

Cons

On the flip side, Salesforce Sales Cloud's steep learning curve and complexity can be its Achilles' heel, particularly for smaller teams or businesses without a dedicated Salesforce administrator. The very features that make it so powerful—its vast customizability and extensive functionalities—can also make it daunting for new users to navigate and master. Additionally, the cost can be prohibitive for smaller businesses, with pricing that can quickly escalate as additional features and customizations are added. It requires a significant investment, not just in terms of money, but also time and resources to truly leverage its full potential.

Pros

I suppose if I were a President of Sales for North America Region for a multinational corporation, maybe I would want to use Salesforce. At some point, I will bet it is more secure than other CRMs, I just can't see that mattering very much to a small business. At some point, I would imagine that I would want to be able to show a board of directors all of the "helpful" information that can be tracked via this CRM. I just can't see any of that mattering on the level of directly managing sales reps, or even managing their managers.

If your sales department costs you millions of dollars in operating costs, then this kind of expenditure is probably justified for security and data.

Cons

I truly see no reason to track all of the things this software tracks. It is tedious. Entering even a single new prospect is so time consuming and takes so much training to learn to do, that I can literally train someone to sell and watch them sign a new client before a rep has learned how to properly enter leads and track a pipeline in Salesforce.

I've worked at a corporation that used Salesforce, as well as a small business. In both cases the employer spent so much on their CRM that it incentivized the employers to run weekly meetings with reps about the number of entries into the CRM that they made. Let that sink in. The job the reps are hired to perform has now become one of data entry rather than sales. In both companies, the minute the manager left the room, reps explained to me how to fake entries in order to keep those numbers up. "I like to log around 90 calls before noon, then take a break so no one gets suspicious." -This is an actual quote from an inside sales rep I trained with at a corporation who used Salesforce.

Now, one could argue that was poor management, and not a poor CRM. It's true that Salesforce does what it says it does. You can generate some very detailed reports about your team or individual reps. You can store a ton of information. At some point though, it does too much. It asks too much. It changes the very nature of the sales rep's job into one of satisfying CRM requirements to justify one's job rather than selling.

It is, despite it's bells and whistles and presumably unmatched development budget, still not as intuitive as other CRMs. I would rather train a rep on their CRM in an hour and get them into the field or on the phone to talk to prospects than train them for a week on the CRM before they talk to a soul. In the time I'd spend training them and answering questions, I could generate my own more detailed reports if they were truly necessary. I assure you, they are not.