Item: Salesforce Sales Cloud
Rating: 9
Author: Nikhil George

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Salesforce Sales Cloud as our customer relationship management platform. We use it to keep track of leads, customers and past customers. Our sales team have all the information they need to evaluate prospects and leads, to nurture them, convert them and ensure appropriate handover to customer success. Other stakeholders in the company such as executives, finance, marketing and product benefit from the unified data.

Pros and Cons

Highly customisable application that organisations can tailor for their use cases.
Good integrations and powerful features for getting data on from other data sources, transforming the data and integrating it.
Stable, reliable, mature platform that promises consistent performance.

The learning curve to use Salesforce Sales Cloud is very steep.
It is a complex app that will request the assistance of external consultants to ensure it is set up correctly.
Pricing is expensive.

Return on Investment

Sales team productivity improved as the sales team easily had information and reports showing which leads or customers to focus on, giving them territory information and contact details at a glance. They spent less time wrangling spreadsheets or reporting on metrics as Salesforce Sales Cloud captured this data automatically.
Improved customer analysis and insight by allowing the consolidation of different tracks of data, calculating health scores, providing notifications about customers to provide assistance to and sharing this data across the company.
Decreased churn as our team were able to create processes for capturing churn reasons, reporting on these, identifying customers likely to churn and then acting on this data.

Scalability

Salesforce Sales Cloud will absolutely scale as an organisation grows. The trouble is deciding when an organisation is large enough to benefit from all the features in Salesforce Sales Cloud and has the resources and investment to ensure the setup and administration is done correctly. Without this investment, many features will be under-utilised or not used.

Customer Data Management

The Einstein platform has been able to drive insights around customer communications and actions required. Emails are analysed and insights provided about next actions, such as booking a meeting, sending another response or more.

Alternatives Considered

Capsule CRM

We used Capsule CRM when the business started. It was a great tool for a small business, but as our customer base and sales team grew, we wanted to glean insights quicker, manage customers better and to do so without the use of spreadsheets. Salesforce Sales Cloud with its customisable and flexible feature set provided the functionality we needed to get to the next level.

Key Insights

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

Yes

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

Yes

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

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Salesforce Sales Cloud go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Salesforce Sales Cloud again?

Yes

Other Software Used

ClickUp, Xero

Likelihood to Recommend

Salesforce Sales Cloud is suited for medium to large organisations that need to robust system for managing customers. To implement and maintain it, organisations will need assistance. It is not a platform that you can set up and leave, rather it needs constant nurturing and administration to get the most out of it. When done properly, it is worth the investment. The entire company will have the data they need to support customers and make good business decisions.

Robust CRM platform for fast scaling large to enterprise organisations

Software Version

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce Sales Cloud