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Salesforce Lightning Platform

Salesforce Lightning Platform
Formerly Salesforce App Cloud

Overview

What is Salesforce Lightning Platform?

Salesforce Platform is designed for building and deploying scalable cloud applications with managed hardware provisioning and app stacks. It provides out-of-the-box tools and services to automate business processes, integrate with external apps, and provide responsive layouts and more.

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Recent Reviews

Life changing!

10 out of 10
May 14, 2022
Incentivized
Salesforce is one of the important and major tools we use everyday in our job. Salesforce ia very useful to us This tool makes our life …
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Money Back Guaranteed!

10 out of 10
May 10, 2022
Salesforce Lightning Platform is our main tool as a sales coordinator. We use it for many things such as communicating with our clients …
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Salesforce Lightning Review!

9 out of 10
June 15, 2021
Incentivized
We use the Salesforce Lightning Platform as a sales organization. It is only the sales department that uses this platform today. We use it …
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Lightning in a bottle!

10 out of 10
May 02, 2021
Incentivized
It was originally used by our sales department but we integrated it with other systems via an ETL and now it is used company-wide. We are …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 11 features
  • Scalability (34)
    9.7
    97%
  • Platform access control (33)
    9.6
    96%
  • Services-enabled integration (33)
    9.3
    93%
  • Ease of building user interfaces (36)
    7.8
    78%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Starter

$25.00

Cloud
Per User Per Month

Plus

$100.00

Cloud
Per User Per Month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

Salesforce Lightning Platform Overview Demo

YouTube
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Features

Platform-as-a-Service

Platform as a Service is the set of tools and services designed to make coding and deploying applications much more efficient

8.9
Avg 8.1
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Product Details

What is Salesforce Lightning Platform?

Salesforce Platform is designed for building and deploying scalable cloud applications with managed hardware provisioning and app stacks. It provides out-of-the-box tools and services to automate business processes, integrate with external apps, and provide responsive layouts and more.

With the Salesforce Platform and Heroku users can deploy, run, and manage apps written in open languages like Ruby, Java, PHP and more. Deploy code via git and Salesforce Platform automatically builds and runs the application so developers can focus on delivering engaging apps for their own users. In addition, Heroku Enterprise provides collaboration functionality, additional control features, and enterprise grade support.

With Lightning on the Salesforce Platform, developers can also quickly deliver innovative apps with an interactive UX by using reusable building blocks including maps, calendars, buttons, and number entry forms. And, with the Salesforce Lightning Design System, every developer has a how-to guide and code for building beautiful apps.

The Salesforce AppExchange is a proven ecosystem of apps, with millions of installs and thousands of customer reviews to help Salesforce users find the best match for their business. Whether developers are looking for applications to accelerate internal implementations or looking to grow their business by selling apps or components to other customers, the AppExchange can assist with that.


Salesforce Lightning Platform Integrations

Salesforce Lightning Platform Competitors

Salesforce Lightning Platform Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Salesforce Platform is designed for building and deploying scalable cloud applications with managed hardware provisioning and app stacks. It provides out-of-the-box tools and services to automate business processes, integrate with external apps, and provide responsive layouts and more.

Quickbase are common alternatives for Salesforce Lightning Platform.

Reviewers rate Scalability highest, with a score of 9.7.

The most common users of Salesforce Lightning Platform are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(648)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 36)
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Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Salesforce to keep track of our day-to-day customer engagements. Right from actioning leads that land on the SFDC platform to managing opportunities, Salesforce is crucial to our sales operation. I love the level of customization I can put into my lead/contact/opportunity views and my sales reports too. My manager knows what I'm working on based solely on the updates I make on our CRM Salesforce. I've used it before in an organisation too, along with other leading CRMs in the industry. However, after trying everything else, I can safely say that Salesforce CRM is the best that is out there. Highly recommended.
  • Managing lead lifecycle
  • Managing opportunity lifecycle
  • Sales Reports and the level of customizations available
  • Social features and dashboard
  • The interface - While it's very practical, I'd like a better UI, something on the lines of what Zoho does maybe
  • the color scheme
  • Loading of views can be laggy
  • processing speed
I have used Salesforce in an ed tech company and am now using it in an IT (Software as a Service) firm. I found Salesforce to be the right fit in both my roles - business development and sales. I believe Salesforce is ideal for enterprises with 1000+ employees and has a wide feature set that can cater to enterprise sales needs in almost any industry.

I would not however recommend Salesforce to a smaller organization as something low-cost, yet practical could be a fine fit. One can get better UI, better processing speed and an overall better experience with another CRM. The bandwidth however remains in question when it's anything else than Salesforce.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I currently work as the delivery manager for Salesforce Lightning Platform. It is currently used throughout the business for marketing, sales and customer care. there are other areas of the business who use Salesforce Lightning Platform. It allows for automation of critical business processes.
  • Email Automation
  • Reporting
  • Dashboards
  • Subscribing to more reports
Salesforce Lightning Platform is a great CRM tool which allows a single source of truth. It allows for collaboration across teams. Using the native reporting can be somewhat complicated at times so using an add on or more of an advanced reporting tool can be helpful. Salesforce Lightning Platform allows a great audit on all that takes place and allows reporting on this also.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Salesforce serves as a great way to organize your data and your data relationships. We use it primarily to organize our contacts and track leads to generate more users for our product.
  • Automation procedures
  • Auto full capabilities
  • User interface
  • Some glitches in terms of custom functionality.
  • Can be more customized for each individual user.
  • Report searching isn’t as easy as in Classic.
When viewing multiple contacts and accounts at the same time, Lightning provides a more easily interpretable interface. When trying to generate a report, or find older reports and for merging duplicates, the system in Classic was easier to navigate.
May 14, 2022

Life changing!

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Salesforce is one of the important and major tools we use everyday in our job. Salesforce ia very useful to us This tool makes our life easy and this has everything. We can check the status of our bookings here, it makes our tasks easier as we can chat and do emails here with the clients.
  • Check the status of our bookings.
  • Send and receive emails.
  • You can check your productivity.
  • Leave important notes to thw chatter box.
  • I wish we can change the background color ans more options for background designs.
  • Chat/message feature with other users within the organization.
  • Some error messages are unclear and we hope they can change the phrases and make it more understandable.
  • Sometimes it is slow but not all the time.
Salesforce is best use for businesses. I like the most with Salesforce is where you can customize some settings to make your job easier and faster. You can also check the status of your tasks, emails you sent if it has been read and received. And check your productivity everyday.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Salesforce Lightning Platform is our main tool as a sales coordinator. We use it for many things such as communicating with our clients through email, sending leads to prospects, and monitoring our sales and revenue. Using this tool helps us to compare sales and revenue from previous months to see our areas of improvement.
  • Sales and revenue computation.
  • Sending leads to prospects that helps us win the business.
  • Helps us communicates with clients.
  • It takes a while before it recognizes bounced emails.
  • We get so many notifications from a single action. Not sure if this can be modified in the settings though.
  • Error messages are sometimes unclear which makes it hard for us to identify the problem.
We use Salesforce Lightning Platform in everyday business as sales coordinators. By using this tool, we are able to send new requests to clients and communicate regarding pending proposals in real-time. This also tool holds many of our client accounts where we are able to monitor their sales and revenue.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We converted over to the Salesforce Lightning Platform from the standard cloud over the past few years- and appreciated many of the changes it brings with it. It's not across the entire organization just yet, but it does help in streamlining the Salesforce experience and make integration a little bit easier.
  • Ease of use.
  • Clean interface.
  • Good integration and sandbox.
  • Interface can be TOO simple at times.
  • Some previously available options are hard to find.
  • Specific workflows can be challenging to create.
Salesforce Lightning is definitely well suited when it comes to regular day-to-day tasks such as ticketing and sales workflows. It was a bit of a tough transition as the 'cleaner' interface can make it harder to find options/dropdowns that were more front and center in the App Cloud version.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our company leverages the tool as a primary CRM for our sales team, pre-sales team, and customer experience team. We have custom integrations and API's across another CRM and still prefer Salesforce Lightning Platform. We're able to bundle and categorize clients based on segments that are custom to our operations, and it provides us enough resources to undertake all marketing efforts, and reporting efforts down the line.
  • Categorizes contacts and companies according to custom and pre-made fields.
  • Allows for a very high detail of user permission management.
  • Simple interface that loads fast and without a hitch.
  • UX could be prettier
  • API integration support should be simpler.
Salesforce Lightning Platform is excellent for companies that need a CRM that is customizable, and efficient. It can serve for a small business, SMB, and for a large multi-million dollar corporation. It is, however, quite tiered, and might not be the most suitable option based on it's cost, especially for smaller companies.
Michael French | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Salesforce in a number of areas. I am most familiar with it in the human resources and business development sections of the company. It is used on a company wide basis in both of these areas. The main problem that this has solved is to combine mulitple process into one platform so that the information is all in one place.
  • ability to incorporate systems
  • create specific reports
  • easy work flow for process
  • displays are easy to understand
  • lots of training required
  • hard to integrate into other systems
If you have a process that is done manually using multiple systems SF is able to easily put the process on one platform. It also allows for rules to be set up that create approval flows for given process and rules that will automatically approve if certain thresholds are met in the process. The reporting is ok but I think that that is more about the quality of data that we have input into the system.
Simon Vargas | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use the Salesforce Lightning Platform as a sales organization. It is only the sales department that uses this platform today. We use it to keep track of all of our customers. Within each customer account, we can document notes, write down specific customer specifics on what products/services they are using, and any competitor information that follows. By keeping this information current, we can then set up opportunities that we believe as sales reps have a probability of closing. All of this can be tracked so management can review it in a timely manner and get a snapshot of sales performance at any time.
  • Ability to track opportunities efficiently
  • Allows you to add detailed information on competitor data
  • Provides easy follow-ups where each sales rep can provide notes specific to each customer
  • The way the quoting tool is used could be a little easier to understand
  • We build reports from time to time and the process can get tedious at times
  • Sometimes the dialer that we use to call customers does not work
To be quite honest, if we did not have Salesforce Lightning as our platform to store all of our data we would be in some serious trouble. It is well suited for storing competitor data and notes from the sales rep. I've used this now for over 4+ years. Most of the sales are staying organized. This platform allows you to do so. The more time you put into building our your pages in your territory of your customers, the more prepared you will be for your next call or in person meeting.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Salesforce Lightening Platform is used across our company by all departments to keep track of all communication in once place, that typically get lost in floods of emails. The sales department specifically uses it to track all RFPS, wins/losses, campaign statuses, revenue for our pipelines, as well as allows us to assign specific tasks to different departments through the various campaign steps.
  • Keeps all communication for campaigns in one place.
  • Minimizes the floods of emails, where communication tends to get lost.
  • Efficient tracking for RFP statuses from pre to post sale.
  • The learning curve can be challenging.
  • Design and interface often vary from company to company.
  • Pricey.
Salesforce Lightening Platform helps keep all communication for RFPS from pre to post sale all in one place, allowing for easy tracking across all departments. It's very good for large businesses that have very high volume and easily allow you to assign tasks and milestones to various departments at different stages of the campaign.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It was originally used by our sales department but we integrated it with other systems via an ETL and now it is used company-wide. We are in the process of switching to some new systems and are basing the architecture of that integration off compatibility with Salesforce Lightning Platform. Although it has many strengths, the ease with which we can connect to Salesforce Lightning Platform and sync data makes us more efficient and prevents departmental silos.
  • Allows add-ons and connectivity.
  • Training, training, training.
  • Community upvoting.
  • Seasonal updates.
  • Allows for customization and data uploading.
  • Permission layers can be redundant and time-consuming.
  • Error messages that cannot be customized are confusing for the end user.
I can only recommend the sales side as we do not currently utilize the service side, although I can tell you I have pushed for the service side to be utilized. I would like to see everything except perhaps our financials run through Salesforce, even ERP so we can add CPQ functionality to our quotes.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our entire org uses [Salesforce Lightning Platform (formerly Salesforce App Cloud)] as our sole CRM for tracking customer health, leads, contracts, and account management. It's our one stop shop CRM and is easy to use (who doesn't use Salesforce?!).

As an Enterprise Customer Success Manager, it is critical to have the Lightning version because we can more readily see what we need faster and more efficiently, and reporting is super easy to create and use. It also helps me track my MBOs which I am measured on internally.
  • Reporting
  • CRM
  • Contracts
  • Health status
  • Can be cumbersome: takes multiple clicks to get where you need to go
  • Lightning is slower than original Salesforce, and it is very noticeable
  • The UI change means sometimes I can't find what I need, so I have to switch back to the Classic version to find it
Well Suited
Customer Success roles for tracking customer health, customer usage, contracts, internal account management (child and parent orgs)
Customer Success roles for tracking MBOs

Less Suited
It's slow, takes forever to load, literally forever its atrocious
If you're used to the older UI you don't always know where to go for certain things

Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our team based account management utilized Salesforce Lightning to manage cases and display different windows of information at once. It is used by our team as well as our support team. It is the base of all of our work as we work almost exclusively out of cases.
  • Effective case management.
  • N/A - Lightning is worse than our previous solution, Service Cloud.
  • Very slow and clunky.
  • Lack of customization.
  • Not visually appealing.
I would recommend Salesforce Classic or Salesforce Service Cloud, but I do not like Lightning at all. I understand what the aim is, but for our team it just fell flat. It is extremely slow and cumbersome, lacks the robust customization that we previously had in Salesforce, and it doesn't look good either.
Joseph Lemos | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Salesforce Lightning Platform is our primary CRM and is used by all of our sales staff from lead generation through delivery of product. It is relatively easy to sync back and forth with our ERP system because of the ability to create custom modules. I've also added non sales data to the app so that I can use the report module to share information across departments. The security layers make it simple to keep information compartmentalized.
  • The customization options are great. I can add whatever modules I want and relate them together.
  • The security features make it easy to know who can see what.
  • Workflows allow for automating of many tasks, including emails, field updates, etc.
  • The reporting module is weak compared to the rest. Essentially no customization at all.
  • Some of the default modules - Opportunity Contacts - for example, have almost customization options, meaning I had to build my own module and work around it.
  • I would like more oversight into how and when users are working in the system.
Well suited / Poorly suited - really two sides of the same coin
  1. Company has management that will be willing to work in the system. Sometimes people are reluctant to learn something new.
  2. In house IT with developer skills. This is critical unless you either want to change your business to match Salesforce, or pay consultants a lot of money.
  3. Existing systems can be integrated, but you need that knowledge and access as well. Running Salesforce with connecting it will create a need for double data entry, If you have a locked down legacy system, you will have difficulty sharing data.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Salesforce [Lightning Platform (formerly Salesforce App Cloud)] is used as our system of record for all customer interactions. We keep information about accounts, opportunities, contacts, and much more.
  • It's a great way to organize your interations
  • With custom reports, you can drill into the data
  • It would be great if you didn't need a customer outreach tool in addition, but instead could email or call directly from SFDC.
I understand that it is one of the more expensive CRMs. It wouldn't make sense to have for a small company with only a few customers. For SAAS companies with lots of customers, this is a great option!
Shanna Baty | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use the Salesforce Lightning Platform (formerly Salesforce App Cloud) in every department of our Company. Our call center uses it to complete legal intakes and qualify potential clients for different areas of law that we practice. If they are eligible (for one or more areas of practice), we create matters that we use to follow their cases through from start to finish. Our disability department has several sub-departments who use it for various reasons. Case management follows cases through from filing through getting awarded by SSA. Medical records use it to order, catalog, and store records. We have a personal injury and mass tort department that also uses it for case management. This keeps all records organized because we use "record types" to know which area of law each record applies to. There's also a taskbar and timeline so you can visually see where our clients are in their filing process and what tasks or steps need to be taken to move the case along.
  • Organizing records by type
  • Keeping notes organized
  • Following up on tasks and assigning/completing new tasks
  • Creating documents
  • Referring out clients to other law offices for areas that we don't practice
  • Managing case costs and expenses
  • Scheduling for hearings
  • More document friendly (we had to integrate box)
  • Stronger integration with five9 for documentation purposes
  • Adding call counters and automatic call logs
  • Dashboards updating in real-time
Salesforce Lightning Platform (formerly Salesforce App Cloud) has been fantastic when it comes to organizing and managing files and notes/documents. Its status bar in records gives you a visual idea of where your cases are and what steps need to be taken to move them along. The dashboard and reporting make it easy to know our case count, how many cases we accept/reject for any given time period if we have referred cases out AND who we have referred them out. It also makes keeping track of case cost very easy to manage.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SLP as the backbone of our entire sales cycle. All other programs that different teams use are fully integrated with SF thereby providing a seamless experience across the organization.
We are able to track the progress of accounts, contacts, and leads from the marketing stage/nurturing right through to after sales service.
  • Integrates with other programs I use.
  • Stores info in a coherent manner.
  • Could work on more integrations possibly LinkedIn.
  • Sometimes mapping is not seamless and there are glitches.
Well suited to track an opportunity from inception across the entire sales process until closure and after sales.
Less suited for specific parts of the sales cycle, e.g. marketing and sales dev.
February 27, 2020

Welcome to Salesforce

Jonathan Justin Lewis | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Salesforce is the premiere CRM in use. The Lightning platform allows other apps to merge with SFDC and keep it as your single source of truth while expanding your company's capabilities with every external app on the market. This is the most capable sales platform on the planet and you will pay dearly for the privilege to use it. It is worth every dollar.
  • Integrations to extend Salesforce's capabilities.
  • Connects Salesforce back to where you do your work.
  • Converting from SFDC classic to Lightning takes some adjustment.
  • Some custom apps may not work in the old system.
For all large sales-based companies it is "the" platform. The cost and expertise needed to run and maintain the system goes up as you scale but you need at least a dedicated admin/developer just to run it. Once you start with customisations then you already need a team, or really expensive-to-use outside consultants. In a small 70-person company we probably spent one million dollars over 5 years on implementation and licensing. Once you get bigger the complexity goes up.

I would not suggest it for nonprofits and early stage companies, but once you start to systemise your sales process and need to track leads-to ops and sales and renewals, get off of spreadsheets and get a real system.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Salesforce Lightning has been a tool covering a lot of problems. The highest of those priorities is tracking sales opportunities from the first time we engage to if we win the opportunity as a new client or not. This includes many attributes such as possible revenue, needed resources, etc. The second part of the tool we use the most is a repository of sorts, everything from the contract to meeting notes, to passwords and more.
  • Contract repository
  • Meeting notes and action items
  • Mobile version is lacking a tad
  • Slight learning curve
If you're an agency and need an all in one CRM that will track all sales, contacts and the results of those this is a great choice. Not only can it do all that and more, it can help support those wins after the sale on a day to day basis.
Sarah Meerschaert | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We're using Salesforce as a CRM. Our customer success teams have ticketing systems and integration with other tools like JIRA. We keep track of projects there, contact persons, and industry details. It works well as a snapshot of information for employees who may not know a customer well. We also track customer specific development in cases here. And we take full advantage of the dashboard functionality and reports. We have several reports that are used on a daily basis by upper management to track sales progress, customer support efforts, and overall success of business lines. It's a good tool for pulling together complex information across the divisions of our company. We've had success building out functionality in the platform over time.
  • Customer Profiles
  • Linking to other applications
  • Reports
  • Saving your session
  • Easy to share pages
  • Intuitive design
Salesforce is a great tool for companies looking to collect data about their relationships with customers. It also scales well as your company grows. But it's not always easy to set up or use. You're going to need to keep your asks simple and you may want to consult with an expert to ensure you're setting up your custom instance in a way that you can modify over time.
December 05, 2019

Best CRM for your buck

Alexa Terry | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Salesforce Lightning Platform is being used by the entire organization. The sales team, customer success, CEO, and marketing all use SFLP. We keep track of potential clients coming through the pipeline, current clients, as well as accounts we're going after and prospecting. It's where we track revenue, deals we've won, and categorize clients by vertical information.
  • It keeps track of all open opportunities.
  • It keeps track of all closed won opportunities.
  • We can track reasons why opportunities were lost.
  • Keeps track of who owns different accounts within Salesforce Lightning.
  • It can be a bit buggy at times, like randomly not letting you save or making you refresh the page or do the same action, and then it will save.
  • Bugs really are the main issue here. Otherwise it's great with reporting!
It's great for keeping track of leads your pursuing, accounts you own and want to go after, and opportunities in the pipeline to close. It lets you track how much they'll pay, upload contracts for the entire organization to see, suspected close date as well as where they are in the pipeline (these stages can be set by your organization for whatever makes sense, and how many steps to close you'll need). That's on the sales side. The marketing team uses it for data collection and what type of clients we're working with, why people have churned or closed lost (never won opportunities) as well as the Client success team for similar reasons (churn).
Matthew Bernstein | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Salesforce Lightning Platform is used across several verticals of my organization, including sales, sales operations, sales excellence, sales administration, marketing, operations, and customer support. It is used most importantly by the sales reps, account executives, and account managers, who use the tools available to accurately manage their pipelines and forecast upcoming deals.
  • Reporting dashboards.
  • Pipeline management.
  • Contact records.
  • Not entirely user-friendly and intuitive.
  • Sometimes glitchy when inputting a pending opportunity entry.
  • Synching with 3rd party applications is often glitchy.
Salesforce Lightning Platform is best suited for an organization in which the sales cycle is extended over a lengthy period of time. This is due to the fact that oftentimes, a potential deal can get lost throughout the sales cycle, in which case managing an accurate pipeline becomes difficult. Being able to follow the progress of a deal is vital information for forecasting revenue.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Salesforce Lightning is used by our Sales Development, Account Executive, Account Management, and other Managerial teams. It allows us to organize all leads and accounts in one space. This gives full insight into all conversations had with the client from the moment they are a prospect until the very end (though hopefully there is no end once they are a client). In a business where turn over happens relatively frequently, it keeps our Sales Development Representatives in the loop so that they can continue engaging clients thoughtfully even if the previous SDR has left or been promoted. It also allows for easy communication between Customer Success associates and Account Executives on the off chance that any issues arise.
  • Organization.
  • Analytics.
  • Ease of use.
  • Integrating marketing initiatives.
  • Creating specific search reports.
  • Customization of fields.
It is well suited for larger companies. My company has over 10,000 business clients and tenfold of that, minimum, in the pipeline for outreach. If your business is just starting out then Salesforce Lightning may not be the right fit for you, as there will be a lot of information that may not be worth the cost of the platform. There needs to be someone dedicated to customizing the platform for your needs, which may be an unwise use of funds for the smaller startups.
Kristin Sours | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Currently, we use Salesforce across our entire organization but it's most heavily used in Client Support and Sales. For our client support team, Salesforce is crucial for keeping track of our client base, we store all their info, activities, emails, webinar attendance, etc. We also use cases to monitor our clients batch screenings/production and opportunities for renewals. Sales uses all of these components too but they heavily use leads to track all prospective clients that come in through webinars, flash classes, conferences and so on. My favorite thing that Salesforce does is allows us to easily report and track our quarterly and yearly progress to see if we are meeting our goals or not.
  • Reports and dashboards - I can build my own reports very easily to see upcoming renewals, first-year clients and so on. Then, I can create my own custom dashboard to track my favorite reports.
  • Opportunities and quotes - when I first started here we didn't use Opportunities for tracking renewals and upgrades. Now, it's easy to see what I'm working on and when ready I just add the products to a quote and it sends it to our billing for really fast invoice creation. It used to take me hours to do this and now it's seconds.
  • I love using activities - it keeps me organized and up to date on all my accounts that I manage. Plus, I can create future tasks so I don't forget to reach out.
  • I can send mass emails to any group of clients and I can create nice email templates with "placeholders" which allow me to use the first name of the main point of contact across hundreds of organizations. Again, this saves me lots of time.
  • With Lightning, the calendar is seriously lacking functionality. With Classic, I could schedule events across multiple people in my organization (something I have to do quite often). We cannot do this with Lightning and it's a big shortcoming. It caused such an issue for us that we stopped using events in SF and moved completely to Google Calendar for all work events.
  • Calendar and email sync with Google - again, this worked fine with Classic and then when we switched to Lightning it didn't.
  • Technical and client support - it's been frustrating dealing with support here. I've either had things messed up or just not resolved and a lot of times it takes a very long time to look into a small issue. It has made me reluctant to reach out again.
I think any large organization that has a sales and/or client support department would be well suited for using Salesforce. In terms of CRMs, it's user-friendly, customizable and ready to use "out of the box." I would recommend anyone using Salesforce for the first time to do plenty of training and/or do trail heads (SF's online training) because there are a lot of features that you might not use but it will make your life easier. Plus, it's better to use it right the first time, as opposed to having to clean up stuff down the road. I've found that non-profits aren't as well suited with SF but this isn't from personal experience.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Salesforce Lightning is used by our entire organization. This is key in managing clients and accounts in an environment where all employees are able to view account status and additional details regarding an account as multiple individuals tend to work in an account. All data is stored in the platform and is great to access on the go as well.
  • Customization views based on your role at the organization (i.e. sales console).
  • Seamless reporting within the platform.
  • The functionality of being able to link out to other platforms we use straight from a record.
  • The Lightning view tends to take far longer to load than classic.
  • Getting up to speed on Salesforce language can be difficult. There are resources out there to assist.
  • Managing events in Lightning seems to be more difficult than classic.
I enjoy being able to customize the view type in Salesforce Lightning. I use the 'Sales Console' view which allows me to have multiple tables open at once when working with many different accounts in a day. This also allows me to see all of the important data at a quick glance as opposed to having to scroll through pages of data.
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