What is Salesforce Sales Cloud?
The Salesforce CRM solution is available only for software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployment. In addition, this Salesforce app provides a technology stack that covers database and security as well as workflow and user interfaces.
What do you like best about Salesforce Sales Cloud?
Salesforce Sales Cloud has been essential for our Sales and Marketing team to track manage and analyze our sales pipeline. The adoption has been significantly higher than other tools used in past. Competition is no where near to the ease of using this solution for our CRM goals.
Only way to track the myriad of people your sales/CS team are interacting with daily. Once reports are built to your satisfaction, gaining insights is incredibly easy and efficient. I do love that it integrates out with so many tools that we’re using already so that we can rely on SFDC as a single source of truth.
Sales Cloud was already top notch in the market but they updated the package to include HVS and Einstein components which is PHENOMENAL. It makes so much more sense and the pricing finally reflects the full capability without nickeling and diming the customer.
To increase sales and manage sales in one single screen within reports and dashboards, I recommend the sales cloud. It helps to increase sales and the sales team can manage all things on a single screen with all customers.
It’s an extremely extensible development platform where customers are able to do most configurations for the more environments with clicks without coding and is supported by an amazing educational platform, Trailhead, so most changes are done without a significant learning curve. I’m constantly able to leverage the innovative enhancements that are delivered 3 times per year as part of the major upgrades and enjoy working with the tool even on my spare time.
The flexibility! You set up the system based on your revenue org’s workflows. The layout pages are completely customizable, for example you can add widgets for ZoomInfo and LinkedIn/Sales Navigator. We use both list views to import lead/contact records into Outreach and reports for visibility. The mobile app is also great for viewing dashboards and performance when you’re on the go.
What do you dislike about Salesforce Sales Cloud?
Quite a lot of 3rd Party integration and development for some simpler aspect of CRM. Hard to maintain and keep things up to date with 3rd party integrations and constant worry of security dealing with confidential and critical data being parsed to 3rd party integration apps.
Sometimes it can look a little messy. More info isn’t always better info if you can’t consume it all. It would be great if there was more apparent self serve resources for creating reports etc for reps to be more self sufficient in getting the data they need from the platform.
Before the pricing. I wish they would have different versions for smaller businesses but its just Sales Cloud. The new additions help like I said above. Though I find it very odd HVS doesn’t include click to call functionality and that set up is different…
There is no bridge between the quote and the order object. Because of that, we have to create an order separately, but the order has a relation with the contract. Also, have to allow cpq in the developer edition for practice purposes.
The user experience really depends on the expertise and professionalism of the implementation teams – without significant customizations, the navigation is not entirely intuitive for novice users of the lightning platform and requires training.
Furthermore, the user licenses tend to be on an expensive side compared to the other CRM products and as a result is costing company like ours millions. This said, the benefits of the platform outweigh the costs so at this point it’s worth it.
It’s a bummer you can’t update task and event reports inline the way you can with other report types. But our team uses a separate product called ScratchPad to help reps update their meetings, opportunities, accounts, and quickly search for information while using other websites (since it has a Chrome extension).
What problems is Salesforce Sales Cloud solving and how is that benefiting you?
Allows us to analyze our sales teams pipeline and revenue recognition process with setting up milestones and historical trends of critical fields. The details like aging and time to complete an opportunity allow us to manage our pipeline accordingly and provide resources to the teams. Also allows us to see a clients journey from Lead to Contract.
Task management. Multi-line business collaboration. Data quality monitoring. Sales pipeline and customer life cycle management. Accelerates completion of tasks due to crisp UI and organization. Automatic activity tracking so our sales people can do what they do best: sale! No more spending hours logging activiy completed. Great pre-built dahsboards and reports that can be edited for a fast starting point. Amazing support and walk throughs on Trailhead. Complete the trail and anyone can be a basic Salesforce admin.
I’m able to use it in 5 lines of business in my current organization and manage live production environments for over 1200 users with just a handful of developers and admins.
It’s a bummer you can’t update task and event reports inline the way you can with other report types. But our team uses a separate product called ScratchPad to help reps update their meetings, opportunities, accounts, and quickly search for information while using other websites (since it has a Chrome extension).
Pros
Cons
- “In terms of investment value and return of the investment, Salesforce right now is pretty good on the Western markets where the price of the employees is pretty high.”
- “You need to pay for the license per user per month. For example, you need to pay $100 per user. If you have 200 users using your Salesforce, that would be multiplied by a hundred, that’s $20,000 per month and a quarter million per year.”
- “It is a premium product, so it is not the cheapest solution. I think if it’s implemented well, and you’re getting the soft cost benefits, the efficiencies, it’s justified. But not if you’re looking at just apples for apples as a subscription, without the complexity that you can achieve. It can deal with complex business requirements. Some other CRMs can’t. But you certainly pay, so it’s a premium-charged solution. It’s one of the more expensive ones.”
- “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.”
- “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.”