We use the Salesforce Lightning Platform as a sales organization. It is only the sales department that uses this platform today. We use it to keep track of all of our customers. Within each customer account, we can document notes, write down specific customer specifics on what products/services they are using, and any competitor information that follows. By keeping this information current, we can then set up opportunities that we believe as sales reps have a probability of closing. All of this can be tracked so management can review it in a timely manner and get a snapshot of sales performance at any time.
Pros
Ability to track opportunities efficiently
Allows you to add detailed information on competitor data
Provides easy follow-ups where each sales rep can provide notes specific to each customer
Cons
The way the quoting tool is used could be a little easier to understand
We build reports from time to time and the process can get tedious at times
Sometimes the dialer that we use to call customers does not work
Likelihood to Recommend
To be quite honest, if we did not have Salesforce Lightning as our platform to store all of our data we would be in some serious trouble. It is well suited for storing competitor data and notes from the sales rep. I've used this now for over 4+ years. Most of the sales are staying organized. This platform allows you to do so. The more time you put into building our your pages in your territory of your customers, the more prepared you will be for your next call or in person meeting.
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
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.
Cons
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.
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.
We are using it for some of our custom development and deployment of code to our Salesforce organizations. As we are moving from the Ant Migration tool, this has allowed us to move some of our code solutions to a app based model and allows us to modularize our customization.
Pros
Works like an app environment
Allows us to use third-party apps alongside our custom apps
Allows us to share our apps with other organizations that we work with
Cons
There are limits to how the apps can be developed that require some creative thinking/workarounds
You are still constrained with standard Salesforce features
It can be slow to correct if you have issues with a release, as you have to wait and go through the SFDC lifecycle
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are familiar with Salesforce then App Cloud is a great solution for you to install solutions that fit your needs or to build a custom solution. Salesforce App Cloud excels in the variety and the ease of installation of the apps that it has available to the majority of users.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (Consumer Goods company, 10,001+ employees)
