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My Salesforce review explores one of the best CRM platforms available. Despite this, it’s not the best for every business. Here, I’ll cover Salesforce’s key USPs and where I feel it falls short. I’ll also dive into its pros and cons, pricing, features, reputation, and how it compares to other top CRM services.
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What Is Salesforce?
It helps businesses manage their sales, marketing, customer service, and commerce operations from one place. Known for its high potential for scalability and deep customization, Salesforce offers a wide range of tools that allow companies to tailor workflows, automate processes, and integrate with hundreds of third-party applications via its AppExchange. In addition, Salesforce provides AI-powered insights through its Einstein AI to improve predictions and data-informed decision-making.
Salesforce CRM Pricing
Salesforce has five plans for varying needs and budgets. Here are all of them compared for a neat overview of your options:
| Starter Suite | Pro | Enterprise | Unlimited | Unlimited + | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting Price | $25/user/month | $100/user/month | $165/user/month | $330/user/month | $500/user/month |
| User Limit | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Free Trial Period | 30 days | 30 days | 30 days | 30 days | 30 days |
| Collaboration | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Lead Management | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Opportunities Management | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Lead Scoring | ❌ | ❌ | Add-on | ✅ | ✅ |
| Automation | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Team Collaboration | Chat only | Chat only | Chat only | Chat only | Chat + Slack |
| Integrations | 3,000+ | 3,000+ | 3,000+ | 3,000+ | 3,000+ |
| Support | Add-on | Add-on | Add-on | Add-on | Add-on |
Salesforce’s Key Features
Salesforce is undoubtedly one of the best Enterprise CRM platforms on the market in 2024. Here are the standout features I found during testing for this Salesforce review:
AI Functions
Salesforce’s native AI, Einstein, has to be the best thing about the platform. It doubles up as a virtual assistant and helps engage customers, providing post-purchase chat support.
For example, it can sieve through client interactions and mark deals that will have the highest impact on your business so that you can prioritize clients accordingly.
You can also ask it any question. I found it delivers surprisingly detailed (and factual) answers. For example, you can ask, “How is the inventory fill rate right now?” and it’ll tell you if it’s stable.
I also found it really handy that for a better explanation, some of the answers Salesforce Einstein gives are paired with charts or other visual aids.
In its latest May 2024 release notes, Salesforce has granted its Einstein Copilot the ability to assist you in closing deals and finding similar opportunities based on successful sales.
Reporting Tools & Dashboard
Salesforce, as you’d expect, offers incredibly powerful reporting. For example, you can create revenue reports to determine how much revenue you can expect to generate, which can help you make better financial decisions.
The forecast data will be closely followed by a chart on “closed deals”, where you can track who contributed the most to your revenue and when you saw the most profit.
You can create Tableau dashboards that offer an overview of important KPIs for your sales, marketing, IT, and finance teams, enabling ultimate cross-department collaboration.
You can also have dashboards for each department. That said, as Salesforce Customer 360 brings data, AI, and CRM together, I wasn’t surprised that it collates literally everything into one place.
Beyond this, you can create unique customer profiles with their activity feed, open opportunities/cases, and other personal details, all in one place for easy retrieval.
Sales & Marketing Features
Salesforce’s sales and marketing tools let you create automated customer journeys. From the first point of contact to follow-up emails and deal closure, every part of the process can be automated.
You can also add conditions with IF/THEN automation rules. If a lead signs up for your newsletter, for example, they’ll automatically get your welcome email. This is a must-have for lead nurturing.
Since your customer profiles are already stored in Salesforce, every email or SMS can be tailored to each lead or customer, too, helping to boost your open rates and conversions.
Team Communication
Besides collaborating on dashboards, you can connect Salesforce with Slack and create a fully-synced workstation for your team, where updates are automatic, negating the need to manually do this.
This will allow your team to create custom channels for specific purposes, add unlimited users, and share business strategies, team updates, and customer-related information.
Team members will also get real-time updates. For example, if an employee closes a deal, they’ll get a notification of deal closure and a reminder to update the forecast.
Your team will also be able to manage pipeline and CRM records in Slack. However, note that unless you’re on the Unlimited plan, you’ll need to get this as an add-on for $60/user/month.
Salesforce CRM Integrations
Beyond these, Salesforce offers multiple types of APIs, which you can connect with apps that are otherwise not available for integration. Overall, Salesforce offers ample options in this respect.
Competitors like HubSpot offer 1,000+, while Monday, for example, only offers 200+. This makes Salesforce’s 3,000+ integrations one of the most comprehensive offerings in the entire CRM industry.
Salesforce Vs Top Competitors
Salesforce is undoubtedly one of the best CRM apps, but it’s not the best solution for everyone. Here’s a quick overview of how it compares to some of the best Salesforce alternatives:
| CRM Platform | Salesforce | Monday CRM | Pipedrive | HubSpot | Act! | Oracle Netsuite |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best For | Growing Businesses | Small Businesses | Pipeline Management | Enterprise-Level Features | SMBs | Larger Businesses |
| Starting Price | $25/user/month | $12/user/month | $14user/month | $15/month | $30/user/month | Custom |
| Free Version | 30-day trial | 14-day trial | 14-day trial | Free plan | 14-day trial | 14-day trial |
| Compatibility | iOS, Android, browser | iOS, Android, browser | iOS, Android, browser | iOS, Android, browser | iOS, Android, browser | iOS, Android, browser |
| Top 3 Features | 3,000+ integrations, 24/7 phone support, AI automation | Unlimited free viewers, 200+ templates, mass email tracking | Contact mapping, world-class storage, meeting scheduler | Free tools, shared inboxes (200), 1-on-1 support | Lead relationship history + activity management, automated workflows | Post-purchase support, lead-qualifying, upselling |
Salesforce Vs Hubspot
Both are multi-functional, offering sales, CRM, and marketing tools in one place. However, the biggest advantage of using HubSpot is its free tools, unlike Salesforce, which only offers a 30-day free trial.
HubSpot’s free tools include email tracking (and scheduling) – which is why it’s one of the best CRMs for email marketing. It’s also great for lead generation, as the CRM suite includes a CMS package.
That said, if you’re after an AI-powered CRM, you’ll struggle to find a better solution than Salesforce. Salesforce Einstein offers large businesses incredible time-saving capabilities, to put it lightly.
Salesforce Vs Service Now
As the name suggests, Service Now is more of an after-sales service-focused platform. It’s meant for virtual service businesses such as online assistants and call centers, for example.
Its field service management helps your team deliver frictionless on-site customer service with improved scheduling efficiency, for example. It equips teams with everything they need to handle issues.
Salesforce focuses on sales and marketing, both of which are pre-sale activities. It lets you manage sales, marketing, IT, and customer service from a single dashboard, making life incredibly easy.
Salesforce Vs Zoho
If you’re looking for an affordable solution that’s easier to use, Zoho CRM will fit your bill. Its top-tier plan is priced at just $52/user/month – a whopping 89% less than Salesforce’s best plan.
Plus, if you want to focus on social media marketing, Zoho is great for this. It can extract social media conversations with clients and prospective leads.
That said, Salesforce offers 3,000+ integrations, and it offers more robust AI features that focus on core CRM functions like lead scoring, opportunities management, and relationship insights.
Zoho’s AI, on the other hand, focuses more on the prediction and forecasting aspects of CRM. At the end of the day, it depends on your particular needs and budget.
Salesforce CRM Customer Reviews
Salesforce is very popular — and, more importantly, very loved by most of its customers. This is evident in the vast majority of online Salesforce reviews.
For instance, on TrustRadius, it’s rated 8.5/10 based on 3,232 reviews.
Such high scores, despite the sheer number of reviews, are quite commendable. So what do people love most? Well, the diverse feature set is one key USP highlighted.
One Reddit reviewer noted, “I just started at a company that relies on [Salesforce] heavily. Think entire customer and partner management. It is an incredibly robust tool and coming from an org that didn’t use it, it is invaluable.”
Many boast about how Salesforce’s features have helped improve team productivity and to close more deals. That said, as you might expect, the cost was one factor you’ll find some complaints about.
Moreover, the learning curve is quite high compared to solutions like Monday CRM, for example. This is also a common flaw featured in some Salesforce reviews.
Overall though, there’s no doubt that Salesforce is reputable and the go-to solution for many businesses who have nothing but good to say about the platform.
How to Use Salesforce – Quick Guide
In this walkthrough, I’ll demonstrate how to set up Salesforce CRM. It’s a rather complex system to set up fully, so I’ll just run through the first few steps so you can get a feel for its interface.
Step 1: Sign up
After entering your email address at the beginning of the free trial process, you’ll have to wait for a verification process in order to actually access the platform. This took a couple of minutes and assured me that Salesforce was prioritizing my security, which is a plus for those dealing with sensitive client data.
Once you’re in, the set-up wizard will ask you a series of questions to gauge your intentions with the platform. I particularly liked that it asked me about familiar challenges as it focuses on specific pain points to inform the onboarding process.
Step 2: Import contacts
If you have a spreadsheet with your contact information, you can import it into Salesforce to save time. Most platforms accept XLS and CSV file formats, but Salesforce is only compatible with CSV.
This means your contacts must be in plain text format to be imported. You can also sync with a live contacts database to continually update Salesforce from another location.
Step 3: View contacts in Salesforce
Once you’ve imported your contacts, you can refresh the Salesforce interface and you’ll see your existing contacts populated in the database.
By using the controls in the top right corner, you can filter the contacts to only show those fitting in specific criteria. You can also use the drop-down menu in the last column to edit and delete each contact.
Step 4: Add individual contacts
If you want to add a new contact that was not included in the initial import, you can click the top right button ‘New’ to add individual new contacts. It’s pretty straightforward: You simply enter all relevant information, click ‘Save’, and then they’ll appear in your database.
Step 5: Switch views
If you’re not keen on the default Salesforce Contacts view, you can switch to a Kanban view or Split view. You have to choose how the Kanban board is organized, for me this was by contact owner, so you can see my name with all my contacts grouped underneath.
If I had a colleague, they’d have a separate card to better understand which team member is responsible for each contact.
Overall, I found Salesforce to be a little more difficult to work with than other CRMs. The onboarding is limited, and the system is not the most intuitive. That said, it’s a powerful software platform, and this demo only scratches the surface of what is possible with it. So I’d recommend signing up for the generous 30-day free trial to fully explore how you can adapt Salesforce to your own workflows.[/light_list_how_to_item]
We base our recommendations on first-hand testing. All the CRM Software products we feature, have been tested based on the following criteria:How We Review And Test CRM Software
What is Salesforce Good For?
For example, if you’re a small business, you can get the Starter Suite ($25/m) and opt for higher plans as your business grows. You’ll have a good mix of AI, sales, marketing, commerce, and service tools.
However, it’s not very budget-friendly. If you’re after a cheaper option, then Irecommend Monday CRM ($12) or Pipedrive ($14). Keep reading for a look at how these compare to Salesforce.
Verdict – Is Salesforce Worth it?
Salesforce is a value-packed, all-in-one sales, marketing, and service solution that boasts market-leading automation and AI capabilities. It all comes at a fairly high cost, though.
As such, we recommend it for larger businesses with complex customer management teams, especially as it also boasts a slightly higher learning curve.
Salesforce is the ideal platform for businesses of all sizes, but if cost and ease of use are high priorities, then we recommend checking out Monday CRM.
How We Test Best CRM Services
Our team at Techopedia has over a decade of experience in all things tech. Needless to say, every platform we feature on our site goes through a 2-3 week testing period.
Having tested numerous other CRM solutions, including Monday for our in-depth Monday CRM review, it’s easier for us to pinpoint each tool’s unique USPs and where we find it falls a bit short.
We test their interfaces (on different devices) to analyze the ease of use and functionality available on various platforms. We also take a deep dive into the features, dashboards, and analytical capabilities.
To make our reviews even more comprehensive, we also factor in user reviews on reputable sites like Trustpilot. This helps us ensure that we’re offering our readers a solid overview of the product.
How to Choose the Best CRM Provider
Here are the things you need to consider while out shopping for the best CRM provider for your business:
Deciding on a budget is vital as this will help you narrow down your options. You’ll also want to run a cost analysis to determine the value for money on offer in terms of the functionality you get with a particular plan.
Some features are reserved for higher-end plans, or they may even only be available as an add-on. Be sure to note what features are important to your business before choosing.
While it’s wise to start off with a small business-specific CRM software, the larger picture that you may eventually want to scale operations must never leave sight. So, prioritize providers that can grow with your business while keeping costs to a minimum.
Look for a CRM platform that’s easy to use with simple dashboards that have everything clearly laid out so that your team can quickly get a hang of it. For this, I’d advise making use of any free versions before committing.
A single CRM platform can’t cater to every need, which is why it should have enough integration opportunities that you can use to connect with other apps and manage everything from the same platform.
If you want a seamless experience with your CRM provider, make sure it offers robust customer support – preferably 24/7 support through multiple modes of contact such as phone, email, and live chat.
Make sure you check the fine print and ensure there are no hidden costs, like price hikes after renewal or add-on features.
FAQs
Is Salesforce really the best CRM?
Is Salesforce good for beginners?
What are the biggest complaints about Salesforce?
References
- Sales Key Performance Indicators (ESIC)
- What is the Optimal Pattern of a Customer Journey? (Harvard Business School)
