Salesforce Sales Cloud

I have been using, recommending and adopting salesforce.com for my sales teams for ten years in several different digital technology, media and advertising organizations. I can say unequivocally that the CRM software has evolved from being a supplement and "nice to have" to a must buy and necessary and vital tool for doing business. The key to any business solutions and software product is getting the team to adopt and use it. Training and practice is essential. Its like your golf game, the more you practice the better your score or working out, no pain, no gain.

I like the social media and conversational abilities you can have with sales team; the app is excellent for quick reviews and checking on status of pending, pitches and prospects; the flexibility and customization options based o salesperson, account, deal size, industry vertical. In one organization we adopted it for internal sales data use and tracking and also incorporated product data about our partners, customers, audience metrics and analytics and distribution platform.

Depending on the level of subscription, will also vary with the amount of personalized training you receive. I would also say there needs to be more attention and customization devoted to industry verticals that contain many nuances regarding customer segments and rev streams. This includes the advertising and digital sales industries where there are multiple customer touchpoints and rev streams including agencies, direct to client, programmatic, 3rd party vendors, ad tech partners etc. I also think saleforce.com needs to develop more compatible software and training that integrates salesforce,com into other software linked to finance, accounting etc.

Salesforce is incredibly robust for automation and capturing data if you have a knowledgeable administrator at the helm of your business. Being able to create different sections (objects), fields, reports and rules in a matter of minutes makes it the best CRM I have ever used.

In Salesforce, everything is connected, which can often times cause errors or minor issues when making a simple change/addition. The software is getting better at educating users and administrators, but it lacks the full ability to debug easily.

Industry leading software
Massive community support network
High volume of add-ins and extensions
Intuitive natural user interface (lightning)
Easy reporting
Highly customizable

Some administration/development is quite complicated for newer admins
Product support, even on premier, is frustrating. Had to explain the same issue to each tier of support. Often I resolved our issue on my own.
Mobile app has been inconsistently working for both iPhone and Android for the last year or so.
Some browser based issues & Mac v. PC Java based issues.