Item: Salesforce Lightning Platform
Rating: 9
Author: Fraser Murphy

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Salesforce Lightning is used across the entire sales department, and in marketing a little also.

We used to use the classic version of the platform but after a few kinks with lightning were ironed out we have grown to love it. The improved user interface, greater functionality, and more accessible information have greatly helped our sales.

It is, of course, a CRM that we used to track and manage accounts, contacts, and opportunities, among others.

Pros and Cons

A huge amount of data in one place that is easy to access and track.
Integrates with many other applications to enhance user experience and life. For example Gmail - all emails are tracked and stored within the appropriate contact.
Flexible reporting makes spotting trends, in our markets/segments, etc., a breeze.

It can be a little slow, but given a large amount of data this can be expected.
Some of the integrations that update themselves life can cause salesforce pages to crash. For example, if you send an email and then want to edit the same account, you will be asked to refresh the page as "changes were made".
Searching can be tricky as it doesn't allow for spelling mistakes. You have to know exactly what you are looking for which can make searching for tricky names difficult.

Return on Investment

SDRs are much more efficient in their outreach than they would otherwise be. No need to write anything down (and potentially lose it) it is all stored in Salesforce with the appropriate account.
By utilizing the reporting functionality we are able to spot patterns and trends in our work which has led to an approximately 15% increase in prospects to demo.
As accounts can easily be transferred, in the unfortunate case that a rep leaves the accounts can be easily moved over and worked smoothly, avoiding any potential losses.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot CRM

We currently use the two together, along with HubSpot sales. Salesforce is our primary CRM and where we track and manage account and contact information.
Salesforce is much more flexible and intuitive - everything is where you would expect it to be.
HubSpot reporting is difficult to use effectively, and not intuitive.
Much easier to go through tasks and contact views with salesforce also, the UI is not so user-friendly with HubSpot.

Support Rating

I have never had to use Salesforce Support - which I presume is a good thing (??).

From what I have heard from others, the staff is responsive and helpful. Any time that we have had an issue our team could not resolve themselves I belive the Salesforce team has been able to resolve the issue quite quickly.

Key Insights

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

Yes

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

Yes

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?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Salesforce Lightning Platform again?

Yes

Other Software Used

LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Evernote, Slack

Likelihood to Recommend

Excels at tracking and managing customer and prospect information. From the Sales Development Reps (SDRs) side of things, they can easily manage a large volume of accounts with tasks and views in order to manage their outreach.
As all the call and email activities are tracked it is very easy to see what is going on with a customer or prospect and understand what stage of the sales cycle they are in, or what we need to do in terms of the next steps.
SDRs can also use integrations to personalize their outreach, making them more efficient.

Salesforce Lightning - A shockingly good CRM

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