Item: Salesforce Lightning Platform
Rating: 3
Author: Rhiannon Thompson

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Salesforce Lightning is used by several departments at our company including Inside Sales, Enterprise Sales, Customer Success, and rarely Support. It is used by Sales Development Representatives and Account Executives to manage pipeline and communication during the sales process. It is used by Customer Success primarily as a reference for communication during the sales process and as a record of communication during the full life cycle of a customer.

Pros and Cons

Reporting and Dashboards are thorough and can show a wealth of important data to inform and scale processes. It's helpful in a high volume sales cycle to be able to quickly identify weak points in performance and productivity so that adjustments can be made.
Highly customizable. We are able to customize just about everything which allows us to track very specific things and in theory create better efficiency.
Parent/Child account hierarchy exists which is helpful.
Contact records can be associated with multiple accounts and opportunities. This, in theory, should minimize duplicates and mismanagement of contacts.
Console helps a lot with data nesting. Having a fairly comprehensive look at an account without searching through various tabs and sections speeds up an otherwise cumbersome platform.

There are very few aspects of this platform that are intuitive and user-friendly. Very rarely can information be found where you'd expect it and several pages with a thousand clicks are required to get just about anything done. It is very, very time-consuming! For a high volume, very short sales cycle this platform absolutely makes no sense. It is designed for something much more complex and concrete. Salesforce Lightning is completely impractical when contact information, opportunity details, notes, account owners, and so much more changes on a daily basis.
I mentioned it's great that contact records can be associated with multiple accounts but that also leads to all accounts for which the contact is associated being flagged as 'Duplicate'. Perhaps this is something that can be adjusted and customized at our company but so far it seems to be incredibly frustrating. The duplicate flagging seems to be all or nothing. Identical accounts are somehow not flagged while accounts that don't have a single detail in common are. A child account is flagged as the duplicate of a parent account. It's an untrustworthy process that leads to more work and poor data management. Hopefully, this can be addressed.
Activity logging is also very untrustworthy. Again, this may be something that is not set up properly at our company but makes for double the workload. When calls and emails do not log properly it leads to redundant and unnecessary communication between colleagues and customers alike or worse, wasted time spent on digging up the correspondence from another source such as Gmail or the Talkdesk website. Chatter and notes disappearing or not saving is equally problematic.
Very glitchy. Often times records will have to be entered twice because they did not save the first time. Pages need to be refreshed often. Tools sometimes just don't work. We receive error messages to 'contact your administrator' so often it's scary.
This ties into activities not logging but syncing with other platforms are often unreliable. Sometimes the Salesforce extension for Gmail works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes Talkdesk syncs with Salesforce connector, sometimes it doesn't.

Return on Investment

This has dramatically reduced efficiency across multiple teams resulting in lower ROI.
It's hard to put a number on but poor ease of use has resulting in a big hit to employee morale and company culture.

Alternatives Considered

Close and ChurnZero

Close and Salesforce are two very different beasts. Close is much more user friendly but lacks the ability to serve complex infrastructures and hierarchies provided by Salesforce. Close is much simpler and faster--great for high volume but will not provide you with rich, powerful analytics. Support with Close was much more responsive and outages/errors much less likely.

Support Rating

I am not an administrator so there may very well be outstanding Support and I am just not privy to it. On a user level it's hard to gauge the effectiveness and responsiveness of Support because nearly everything has to go through an administrator.

Key Insights

Do you think Salesforce Lightning Platform delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with Salesforce Lightning Platform's feature set?

Did Salesforce Lightning Platform live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Salesforce Lightning Platform go as expected?

Would you buy Salesforce Lightning Platform again?

Other Software Used

ChurnZero, Calendly, Talkdesk

Likelihood to Recommend

I can very easily see Salesforce being a valuable tool for more complex and longer sales cycles. If you're interacting with multiple contacts, departments, and tiers within a company this will give you the organization and powerful analytics you need. If you are working with the same contacts and accounts for long periods of time (sales cycles of several months or more) it might also be a good fit. Be ready to invest heavily is implementation and training from the very beginning. It is a complex tool that requires A LOT of thoughtful, careful, and thorough planning to be implemented successfully.

It is not well suited to industries that change rapidly, where your contacts might be completely different today than they were last week or the business you were working with has closed. It does not make sense for a company who's sales goals rely very much on the volume of contract value. You will simply spend too much time on data entry that will, in the end, be unreliable.

Challenging implementation. Glitchy software.

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce Lightning Platform (formerly Salesforce App Cloud)