Salesforce Review

flag Track contacts and manage pipeline for a streamlined sales process
  • Get a complete view of every customer

  • Accelerate deals with data and AI

  • Powerful, real-time analytics and data

  • AI-powered workflows & automation

Pros & Cons

  • Highly customizable to fit any specific business problem
  • Seamless development and implementation
  • Highly adaptable to businesses with various processes & sizes
  • Precise quota forecasting & tracking
  • Steep learning curve for new users
  • Most plans require an annual contract

Plans & Pricing

Being a CRM tool designed for everyone, Salesforce offer a wide range of pricing packages that cater to startups, sales professionals, and service providers across several industries. With well-thought-out restrictions on the plans, Salesforce offers startups enough solutions for sales and customer service at a convenient price for growth. At the same time, it gives big teams a jumbo option to supercharge sales, customer service, and marketing, all in one place.

  • Essentials: For startups to build and manage customer relationships including sales and service, all from mobile apps. Allows up to 10 users.
  • Sales Professional: Designed to help sales teams of any size to build campaigns, track positions in the sales funnel, and sustain customer relationships.
  • Service Professional: Suitable for customer service teams of any size. Monitor and handle customer queries across multiple support channels, including live chats, emails, and self-service options.
  • Marketing Cloud Account Engagement: A suite of high-powered marketing automation tools for organizations of any size to find and reach potential customers wherever they are.

Essentials
$25/mo/user
Sales Professional
$75/mo/user
Service Professional
$75/mo/user
Marketing Cloud Account
$1250/mo

Overview

Salesforce is one of the largest software companies in the world with hundreds of billions of dollars in market valuation. Founded in 1999 by former Oracle executive, Marc Benioff, Salesforce is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and known for its full-integrated CRM software. The Salesforce Customer 360 is a collection of industry-leading, AI-powered CRM products built to help businesses build and keep effective customer relationships across several platforms. With loads of integrations and partnerships, Salesforce has enabled businesses of all sizes to collect and track their customer data in one place.

Rating

  • "Price"
    7 /10
  • "Features"
    10 /10
  • "Ease of Use"
    7 /10
  • "Help and Support"
    10 /10

Features and Functionality

Being an industry leader means offering way more than average and Salesforce is doing that exceptionally well. With features that sales and marketing teams cannot do without, the company continues to set itself apart from the competition. Here are some of the top features and functionalities of the Salesforce CRM.

Contact management

With the contact management feature on Salesforce, sales professionals can know everything about each contact on their CRM system, including their history and insights on how to keep them engaged.

Also, businesses can take a deep dive into every customer’s social life with data from social media platforms. With all these hosted in the cloud, and sharable, teams can collaborate to keep customers satisfied at all times.

Opportunity management

Opportunity management lets teams track the activities of customers and prospects, figure out their relationship with competitors, identify their position on the sales funnel, and send compelling emails just at the right time.

With so many customer activities, sales teams can streamline their processes using the data provided by the opportunity management feature. When customers express interest in products, this feature lets sales professionals create instant quotes by tracking the products that are part of the deal, as well as quantity and delivery terms.

Pipeline and Forecast Management

Sales processes and pipelines can be flexible. Thanks to unpredictable customer behaviors. Salesforce allows you to manage your sales pipelines and create precise forecasts of when and which sales would be closed.

This is particularly important for growing businesses to adjust their sales strategy when the future appears bleak, as well as find ways to improve results even when things are going pretty well.

Process automation

Individual approvals can take a lot of time. With Salesforce, teams can use the process automation feature to approve requests automatically, send notifications to the right stakeholders about big deals, and automatically assign tasks to the right teammates at every stage of the sales process.

Salesforce understands that sales professionals are not developers. Also, the company recognizes that getting devs to code processes just how sales want it can be a serious challenge. So, the process automation feature was designed as a no-code solution to this challenge. Sales professionals can simply use the drag-and-drop process builder to easily automate everything.

Mobile apps

Teams can build and sustain customer relationships on the go with their mobile devices. The Salesforce mobile is available for both Android and iOS devices. With it, users can enjoy all the features offered by the company and never let a lead slip through the crack even when they are not at their desks.

Ease of Use

Despite the diverse suite of AI-powered tools available on Salesforce, thousands of users find it easy to use. According to sources, using Salesforce is not just about figuring it out. Having the CRM working for you is fun while you go through the learning curve.

Writing about learning curves, for many, the curve can be steep. However, Salesforce has organized its packages to enable new users to access the simplest and easiest tools.

As their businesses grow and need to integrate more tools into their CRM system, they can upgrade to other, more complex packages. Regardless, it’s more fun figuring it out than many might imagine.

Contacts & Users

From the onset, the contacts you collect may not be customers. However, they may have shown interest in your business and shared their information. You could turn them into paying customers by retargeting them via the information provided. The Salesforce contact management feature makes this more probable.

You can keep track of communications, log recaps for calls with each contact, send emails, propose quotes, and many more. The contact management tool makes it insanely easy to get to know your customers. By linking their emails to their social profiles, you can gain insights into your contacts’ conversations and how you can convert them.

Interestingly enough, you don’t have to do this all alone. Contact management on Salesforce is teamwork. With everything 100% cloud-based, you can share contact management responsibilities with the rest of your team without losing track of the lead owner and source.

Reporting & Integrations

With Salesforce reporting, small business owners won’t have to miss a thing. Every Salesforce user has a homepage with a dashboard that reports the status of leads (including sales, opportunities, and positions in the funnel) in real-time. You can also create separate reports and dashboards to monitor specific metrics or gain a holistic view of your business performance as well as individual customer journeys.

While reports are essential for tracking performance and gaining insights into opportunities, integrations help bring all your customer data into one single system. Salesforce integrates with thousands of third-party platforms, including WhatsApp and other Meta products, Slack, DocuSign, Dropbox, etc. For business owners having a hard time finding Salesforce integrations on their third-party apps, over 5,000 applications can be connected with Salesforce through Zapier. You can consider using that.

Customer support

As a CRM software provider, Salesforce prioritizes customer satisfaction. As such it has several open channels to receive and resolve customer issues, including access to real humans and self-service options. The standout support channels provided by Salesforce include the following.

  • Phone Support
    Speak directly with a Salesforce technical expert on the phone via 1-800-664-9073.
  • Live Online Chat
    Get past the chatbot and chat with the sales expert at Salesforce in real time by clicking on the “Let’s Chat” button on the website.
  • Email
    Shoot the support team an email when logged in by submitting a contact form from the “Get Help” icon on the top right corner of the page. The team typically responds in minutes.
  • Video Tutorials
    From the Support YouTube channel to pre-recorded webinars and expert coaching videos, Salesforce has over 500 engaging videos to help users learn.
  • Blog
    Follow effective hacks shared on the Salesforce Blog to grow your business in different areas, including marketing, sales, customer support, leadership, and more.

Final Word

With 150,000 small, mid-sized, and big businesses trusting Salesforce for their CRM needs, the company is living up to the responsibility of helping its users build and maintain good customer relationships. With a wide range of products available, Salesforce has created plans to suit teams of various sizes and purposes.

Suppose you’re running a startup with less than 10 persons on your team. In that case, Salesforce Essential allows you to optimize sales and customer relationships by deploying all the tools offered by the platform for as low as $25/mo. However, as you grow and generate more revenue, you would most probably be able to afford the other packages with more streamlined purposes.

Regardless of your team’s size or your purpose for using Salesforce, its solutions are highly customizable and certainly a good bang for your buck.

Disclosure
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Augustine_Ojeh
Augustine Ojeh
author

Augustine is a freelance writer with a focus on organizational productivity; diversity, equity & inclusion (DEI); marketing and sales; and startup ecosystems in developing economies. He plays 8-Ball Pool when stressed and Chess when anxious.

We make the best effort to present up-to-date information; however, the terms of each offer can be revised according to the service provider’s discretion. The above shall not be considered as an expert or professional advice for any matter.

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