Item: Salesforce Lightning Platform
Rating: 9
Author: Jonathan Justin Lewis

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Return on Investment

Expensive.
Added flexibility, control, connectivity.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Dynamics 365 (formerly Microsoft Dynamics CRM) and Zoho CRM

Salesforce is the premeire product. Period. The others are cheaper and less capable, they may fulfill your organisation's needs but you will always be looking at Salesforce with wishful eyes. If you are a company that needs to bootstrap then spend the time to evaluate your options. If you are a growing company with plenty of funding it is best to provide your sales team with the best platform you can afford because switching out CRM's is second in complexity to swapping out an ERP.

Support Rating

I have always found support helpful and able to address our issues. Salesforce is responsive and has handled any issues that I have had including helping find the root causes from third-party applications and connections. They also assist in complicated SSO issues and have trailhead which is a massive resource for free internal training.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of Salesforce Lightning Platform go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Salesforce Lightning Platform again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Microsoft Office 365, Zendesk, Box

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Welcome to Salesforce

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