Item: Salesforce Sales Cloud
Rating: 2
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Salesforce.com was purchased to be primarily a contact management system which would assist in onboarding new clients, managing their customer experience, processing payments, offboarding clients, and assisting with prospect follow up and conversion. We had the Pardot integration as well to help with automated follow up plans for potential clients.

Pros and Cons

Selling you on the product
Upselling you on additional products after purchase
Incentivizing you to customer purchase support packages

General Customer Support
Managing expectations of costs to roll out the platform
Simplifying the system use and integrations
Including setup in the already inflated price of the platform

Return on Investment

Salesforce.com ended up being a big financial burden with little to no ROI
In my opinion, the enforcement of Salesforce.com agreements is smothering to Small Businesses
On a 3 year contract we were able to actively use the system at 70% functionality for 15 months

Usability

We could not actively use the system for 14 months and then once it was launched, it had consistent product issues which required expensive developer support. We ended up needing to rely on many third party platforms to achieve the functionality we assumed Salesforce.com would meet. I would not recommend the system to smaller businesses at all. Also, be weary of the contract and commitment before moving forward with them.

Key Insights

Do you think Salesforce Sales Cloud delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with Salesforce Sales Cloud's feature set?

Did Salesforce Sales Cloud live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of Salesforce Sales Cloud go as expected?

Would you buy Salesforce Sales Cloud again?

Other Software Used

Asana, Kajabi, Chime CRM, kvCORE, Top Producer CRM, AdEspresso by Hootsuite, Trello, LastPass for Business, Acuity Scheduling, a Squarespace company, BombBomb, Evernote, Slack, Canva, QuickBooks Online, Follow Up Boss

Likelihood to Recommend

It took us almost 14 months to completely build out the system for use. At an annual cost of close to $25k and an additional $15k to hire a developer, this far exceeded the budget we were quoted at the beginning of the process. We opted against packing several thousand dollars more to get tech support from Salesforce.com which in turn led us to pay even more than that to have developers trouble shoot system issues for a nonfunctioning system. In our experience, the utilization of the system was also very difficult to train to our staff. In hindsight, I believe we could have purchased a prepackaged CRM for 1/100th the cost that would complete the functions we needed.

Salesforce.com Sales are Impressive...System Results are Seriously Lacking

Software Version

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce.com