Salesforce Platform Reviews

Pros

Ease of use: Salesforce is easy to use and offers an intuitive interface that allows users to navigate the system easily.Customisation: Salesforce provides advanced customisation, allowing companies to create CRM solutions tailored to their specific needs.Mobility: Salesforce offers robust mobile capabilities, allowing users to access their CRM from anywhere.Collaboration: Salesforce enables users to collaborate effectively in real time, allowing teams to work together to solve problemsReporting and analytics: Salesforce offers powerful reporting and analytics capabilities that allow companies to track and analyse the performance of their businessIntegration: Salesforce can be integrated with many other enterprise systems, allowing companies to use Salesforce with other applications they already use

Cons

Cost: Salesforce can be expensive for small businesses or startups, especially for advanced features such as supply chain management and production management.Complexity: The Salesforce platform can be complex to use and set up, requiring extensive training for users. This can also lead to additional costs for the business.

Pros

The key aspect of Salesforce that I like most is that it makes it easy for various departments to know and track the status of opportunities and projects through various stages of development. We can also keep track of every contact both on the client side and production side. We can monitor all of the projects they are connected to, rates, and ratings.

Cons

The only negative aspect of the platform is the cost. It can be restrictive for smaller projects and when I need to add more users/managers. I need to double check if budgets can handle more ongoing costs with the addition of new clients and projects.

Alternatives Considered

Google Workspace and HubSpot CRM

Reasons for Switching to Salesforce Platform

Salesforce how the customization that we needed to thrive.

Pros

easy to use,
can stay in touch with my partners and clients on a regular basis

Cons

no cons i can think of at this moment. I depend on salesforce on a daily basis.

Pros

Salesforce is the backbone of our company. It is tied into everything and used by every team. It is incredibly customizable and it seems they have a way to do almost anything you need. We use it for Sales, Support, Marketing, and product feature usage. We have it hooked into other apps and other saas products. This is the product that will scale with your business and can support a company at any stage of growth. There are a ton of integrations out of the box (on their salesforce exchange) and their APIs allow savvy developers to build custom integrations that aren't available.

Cons

When the company initially implemented it, they tried to "wing it" and it was a complete mess. You really need someone who knows what they are doing to setup, administer, and maintain the software. It is also expensive. We got grandfathered into some great pricing, but if we weren't, we're not sure we would be able to continue to use SFDC as we grow. SFDC also loves to gobble up other apps and brand them with the SFDC name. So they have become a jack of all trades - however, some of the things you can't do are surprising (just go check out their community page for all of the list of enhancements that haven't been implemented). For example, we use cases for our help desk, but there is a lot of functionality missing compared to a best in breed help desk software like ZenDesk. Support is terrible here by the way. They really push you toward self-service or community based service. You're lucky if you ever get a response.

Pros

I love how they have turned a database program into an interactive place where companies can create a singular source of truth surrounding every aspect of business operations.

Cons

Some limitations are common sense additions that have been neglected in favor of flashy, new features. Reporting is limited and has many issues, one of which is they barely support it currently with little/no improvements while pushing users towards their Analytics Add-On - which has many improvements that were requested on Reports.

Alternatives Considered

Odoo and HubSpot Sales Hub

Pros

You can add your own custom fields and organize them how you want.

Cons

Difficult to find the proper path from lead to opportunity to account. Contacts can be saved on accounts, but aren't automatically applied to opportunities forcing me several clicks to simply add a new person first to the account and then back to the opportunity to see the contact. Changes to your payment plan to reduce accounts are very difficult forcing you to request changes 3 months in advance for them to take effect. However, they have no problem increasing the plan same-day when we need to add new accounts.

Pros

Easy to use, great reporting and trackability.

Cons

The drag and drop feature is touchy when it comes to building reports and editing the field order in the filter section.

Pros

Customization is priceless. It can be done at all level and be done for what a person or what a department requires which makes it versatile.

Cons

With much customization, sometimes it is hard to get something fixed or changed.

Pros

It integrates with everything and can push data through other filters easily.

Cons

It looks old and cumbersome. It's so 2008

Pros

The Vendors response to our customized request.

Cons

How things are prioritized when changes are requested.

Pros

"Accidental Admin" is a concept that Salesforce uses to emphasize how anyone can pick up and learn to configure Salesforce as an admin. The configuration style (clicks, not code) leads to a low skill floor needed to start using Salesforce. Advanced users, developers, etc. have the flexibility to customize the system to a high degree as well.

Cons

The neglect. Salesforce regularly neglects key pieces of core CRM functionality, some for more than 10 years, while either ignoring the cries for help by its userbase, or promising to fix it - only to let 10 years go by with no update. Just browse around on the success.salesforce.com Idea Exchange and you'll see what I mean. I get that Salesforce puts emphasis on the fact that the system is highly configurable by a dedicated developer, but when key features and functionality are either half-implemented or abandoned altogether in favor of more money-making initiatives (like their half-baked AI platform), it gets to be extremely concerning and offputting. Sometimes they combine the two and continue to sell a half-baked product, which has already been abandoned and they KNOW it.
Want an example? Try to find any documentation on Salesforce Inbox. At my company, we have been fighting with Salesforce support for MONTHS trying to get any semblance of an answer about how we can use Inbox or where we can find documentation, or if we can even pay a professional services team to help us. Finally after months, they have made it clear that Salesforce Inbox is abandonware. Yet they are still promoting and selling it. That is shady and corrupt.

Pros

I love the extendability of Salesforce with their modules. It is high on security, it is high on privacy, and there is a module available for pretty much anything that you can think about. Right from basic CRM to collaboration tools to development interfaces to deployment management to publishing is well

Cons

I think the UI for Salesforce requires a much needed revamp. There has been a good effort with the "Lightning" interface for Salesforce, however given the nature of the platform it becomes tedious for users to keep entering information at every step of the time, and their work flow management is not as straight forward to set up. However once it is set up they are they work exactly as decide

Pros

Salesforce is a blank slate. But that's a good thing! It can be completely customizable to your unique business requirements. Aside from customization, Salesforce out-of-the-box has great standard fields and functionality to manage and track leads, contacts, opportunities and accounts.

Cons

Salesforce is almost too smart. There is so much you can do with it, and if not implemented correctly, you may run into some hiccups. For example, my company grew and continued to grow but we did not scale our Salesforce platform to meet our ever-changing needs. This left us with some issues that are now being smoothed out.

Pros

Salesforce takes the lead for CRMS. It can do everything from lead and contact management to deal tracking to streamline processes. It has so many options for storing data and it allows for so much customization. I wouldn't recommend any other CRM, even you are starting small, because this is the best CRM to grow with. It can adapt to any need and most softwares can integrate with it. It will cost you far more to cut corners with a CRM in the long wrong, so you might as well use the best.

Cons

Salesforce is a beast, and some people find it hard to learn. I don't think that, but I understand that given all the capabilities, it's important to know how to use Salesforce and to have established practices for your team.

Pros

The search feature is good, it pulls everything associated with what you are looking for.

Cons

Sometimes there are serious delays. The program will need to reset and what ever you just did does not save. The email link does not carry over the information from the email. It will log the email with the title but will not transfer the body of the email into Lightening. Not sure if this is specific to my job's version or not.

Certain aspects of the program convert back to the original Salesforce Classic look

Pros

Salesforce is one of the best software available today. It stores a lot of data and it's very safe to use so you don't have to worry about anything happening to your data! Also, it is cross-platform which means you can use it on your mobile, tablets, etc. Another thing I like about this software is that if you are a non-profit organization, Salesforce gives you the first ten licenses for free!

Cons

The price is the main aspect of Salesforce that I find objectionable. Because it is fairly expensive and every additional license that you get only drives up the price, you should probably consult a more knowledgeable person before making a purchase. Another thing that I dislike is that they often replace their management. Imagine getting to know your manager well and then having him unexpectedly replaced. It's awful.

Pros

Salesforce is one of the best known cloud based CRM that can be tailor-made to hasten sales, computerize the jobs and tasks, fetch real-time customer data, extract insights , manage leads and prospects, tracking commissions, estimate sales and enhance business efficiency by creating robust workflows.

Cons

It is quite expensive. We have a large sales team, diversified product and prospect base and had a fairly complex need so we spent out the money but it can be extremely unaffordable for small business and start ups. Moreover the customer care at Salesforce needs to be a little more polite and knowledgeable rather than rude and uninformed.

Pros

Customization and a broad feature set make Salesforce a real asset for our business. We have been able to integrate many other essential products, write custom code, build workflows, customize fields and objects and do pretty much everything that we have wanted to do.

Cons

The main con of Salesforce is that, for a company with "sales" in the name, they do very little to help you with actual sales practices out of the box. They don't have great sales funnel, marketing or other templates. Of course, all of this is definitely possible, but it requires previous experience and iteration upon iteration to get it right.

Pros

the thing that i like the most is that you can edit almost ANYTHING! You can adjust the plataform for your particular needs.

You can track your customer the entire jorney and create different status.

It's a great sales plataform (duh! salesforce)

Cons

If you don't know a thing about code or interface or anything related with technology, it's going to be very hard for you at the moment of customize your Salesforce.

You will need the help of Salesforce to create all the things you will nedd for your business. If you don't customize, you will not be able to make the most of it.

It is not very helpful with marketing, so... you will have to make a pulgin with another plataform (for example mailchimp)

Pros

Access around the world, integration with gmail (although that needs a few fixes).

Cons

We find Salesforce to be a great tool to manage our database and to store information about contact with our clients and prospects, but there are so many moving fields and different views, that it can be difficult to align across multiple sales people in multiple countries. We're also frustrated that we cannot assign multiple email addresses to a contact or lead, which has ramifications for our marketing team. We sometimes wish there was a simpler more pared down version of Salesforce, that streamlined the information exactly how we need or want it.

Pros

None. I spent 2 years building the software to meet the specifications, however every time they update their software, there are glitches in what I built. Unless you have a team of 10 people working full time to integrate this software into your business, avoid it like the plague.

Cons

They promised the world and it is so obvious their sales team is on huge commissions. They did not even deliver a tenth of what they promised.

Pros

Easy to use / updates quickly - room for several dashboards - everything under one system . Easy to edit

Cons

It takes a lot of steps to change or update dashboard . Limited amount of dashboards . So we have to rearrange dashboard when implementing new procedures

Pros

Salesforce has a vast array of tools to use. Some of what my team uses is the e-mail to ticket functionality (very nice, a user can just send an e-mail and a ticket gets created), workflows, and we have a lot of custom Apex code for the workflows.

Cons

As with any large software, there's a learning curve there, and some organizations use Salesforce for only a few things, while others use most of its features. The main issues are ones that you'll encounter on any Web Application, it's just the give and take of having it be a web application versus a desktop application (less maintenance as a web app, but at times slower or more restrictions).

Pros

Wow-what can't it do? It's become our source record for all of our processes. Just know that there are many additional costs you'll want to consider to make this work.

Cons

First of all, they keep raising the prices on our user licenses. The product is so embedded in all that we do and are and with a lack of comparable products to move to, we feel like we are trapped and forced into paying the new prices every year. Feels like a little bit of a bait and switch to me.

Pros

Lots of resources to help you get started with this platform. All of the prebuilt components are documented well in the Salesforce documentation, and it is extremely easy to get started with developing. Trailhead is extremely helpful in introducing the concepts that are important to developing for the Lightning Platform, so it is not hard to know where to go next in your learning journey. The other benefit is that it is extremely popular and there is a lack of qualified developers, so the barrier to entry through learning about the Lightning Platform is lower than it is with other technologies.

Cons

There is a relatively steep learning curve because it is VERY opinionated. In addition to learning the Lightning framework, there are many other pieces that you will be required to learn. Apex and SLDS are two examples of that. You won't be proficient in Lightning Platform development unless you have all of the pieces.