Salesforce CRM Review For 2025
Salesforce CRM Plans & Pricing
Salesforce Comparison
Expert Review
Pros
Cons
Salesforce CRM's Offerings
With several products to offer, I discovered that Salesforce has a pretty complicated pricing system.
However, it offers inclusive CRM packages that are designed to serve small and mid-sized businesses. Some of these small business packages can also accommodate teams of any size. This makes it a good option for startups and scaling companies.
Starter Suite – At $25/user/month, this plan includes email marketing, sales automation, customer service tools, and a storefront builder, making it ideal for small businesses.
Pro Suite – At $100/user/month, it adds real-time chat, advanced automation, sales forecasting, and AppExchange access, perfect for growing teams needing more customization.
Enterprise – At $165/user/month, this plan offers advanced reporting, opportunity scoring, approval processes, and API access, ideal for large teams needing deep customization.
Unlimited – At $330/user/month, it includes AI-driven insights, sales engagement, full sandbox, and 24/7 support, perfect for enterprises with complex workflows.
You can test the waters with a 30-day free trial. The features offered in each package are highlighted below.
Customer Support
Salesforce has a vast repertoire of self-service materials for users to understand and use its products seamlessly. However, it offers responsive human-to-human support channels that cater to the needs of users from all walks of life and in various physical locations.
I tested them out and found that weekday support is far better than weekends. Given how massive Salesforce is, I expected 24/7 live support, but outside business hours, you’re mostly stuck with automated responses.
Live Chat
I found the “Let’s Chat” button on almost every page of the Salesforce website. Clicking it instantly connected me—but not to a human. I had to go through their chatbot first, which asked a series of questions before allowing me to speak with a support agent.
When I tested the chat outside work hours, the bot tried to get my contact info and promised that someone would call me back. To my surprise, they actually did call back, which was a nice touch.
While I usually avoid sharing my phone number with support teams, the chatbot was smart and persuasive in guiding me to request a callback.
Phone Support
Salesforce has an active phone line that every customer can use to reach an expert. Furthermore, the company caters to people with hearing and speaking impairments. So, you are sure to get world-class customer service regardless.
Putting a call through to support experts at Salesforce was really easy. Given that I was overseas when writing this report, I had to reach them with a phone number different from the one displayed on their website. I got connected with support almost immediately, although I had to go through the pre-programmed answering machine first.
The expert that spoke to me had a very clear accent, with well-articulated responses to my questions, and his explanations were quite lucid. I’d give him a ‘thumbs-up’ for his professionalism.
It’s worth mentioning that Salesforce has a call-back request form in case you were trying to reach out to the support team outside their official work hours. Well, the chatbot did trick me into requesting a callback, as I explained above.
Support Tickets
In place of direct email support, Salesforce has a ticketing system for customer queries. In my brief time working as a support specialist for a tech company, ticketing systems often opens up your query for the next available support rep to handle.
With Salesforce, an instant message was sent to my email acknowledging their receipt of my query. However, I never heard back from them for several hours. At the time of writing this sentence, I am yet to get any response beyond the autogenerated notification of receipt. It’s been 10 hours since I submitted my query.
Features & Functionality
General Features
The Salesforce CRM software is a giant in the field, with features that automate and predict, leveraging AI, to help you build your pipeline and increase conversions.
Below is a list of the main features, which I will discuss further.
- Flow builder
- Salesforce engage
- Einstein AI
- Account and contact management
- Salesforce forecasting
- Opportunity management
- Customizable reports
- Mobile app
- Appexchange integration
- Collaborative tools
- Territory management
- Email marketing
- Lead management
- Service cloud integration
- Commerce cloud
Homepage
Flow Builder
Setting up automation and workflow on CRM tools may require some level of imaginative thinking. However, with Salesforce Flow Builder, you don’t have to think too hard. It’s a visual workflow builder that lets you create automation for every stage of the customer journey. With the Flow Builder, you can create an automated pathway that puts your entire sales process on autopilot.
Salesforce Engage
This is a powerful tool for tracking your customers’ engagement with your brand and marketing efforts. With Salesforce Engage, you get to set up alerts and notifications for when customers open your emails, respond or engage with your social media updates, click a tracked link in any of your marketing assets, and much more.
Einstein AI
Salesforce’s Einstein AI provides predictive analytics, lead scoring, and automated insights to help you make smarter, data-driven decisions. By analyzing patterns in your sales, marketing, and service data, Einstein AI identifies high-priority leads, forecasts outcomes, and recommends actions to close deals faster. This feature ensures your team focuses on the right opportunities, ultimately increasing efficiency and driving revenue growth.
Account and Contact Management
CRM tools are storage houses for contacts and customer accounts. Salesforce account and contact management feature allow you to store, access, and organize every customer detail including communication history, key contact information, advertising behaviors, and interaction history. With this feature, Salesforce lets you gain a holistic view of every customer on your contact list.
Salesforce Forecasting
The forecasting feature on Salesforce is designed to help business leaders create a predictive analysis of potential deals. This informs leaders about the areas to focus their investments. While forecasts are never 100% accurate, Salesforce offers a pretty decent degree of accuracy to help ensure that business leaders are moving in the right direction.
Opportunity Management
Customer data acquisition can be a pretty clumsy process. Often, the amount of information you have on a contact, the better your chances of closing a deal with them. The Salesforce Opportunity Management feature lets you keep track of every contact as they progress through the different stages of the sales process. This feature lets track these contacts based on their level of data completion and how close you’re to land them as clients.
Customizable Reports
With Salesforce’s customizable reports, you can generate tailored insights that align with your business goals. These reports allow you to track key performance metrics, monitor team progress, and identify trends in real-time. By giving you a clear view of your data, this feature empowers better decision-making and helps you stay ahead of market demands.
Mobile App
Salesforce’s mobile app ensures you can manage tasks, update pipelines, and access critical customer data from anywhere. The app’s intuitive interface keeps you connected to your team and customers, enabling real-time updates and decision-making on the go. This feature boosts productivity and ensures seamless operations, even when you’re away from your desk.
AppExchange Integration
Salesforce’s AppExchange provides access to thousands of apps and integrations, ranging from accounting to project management. These tools expand Salesforce’s functionality, allowing you to tailor the platform to your business needs. By centralizing all essential processes, AppExchange helps you streamline workflows and improve operational efficiency.
Collaborative Tools
Salesforce offers real-time collaboration tools, including Slack integration, to ensure seamless communication among team members. Whether you’re sharing updates, tracking deal progress, or brainstorming strategies, these tools foster teamwork and improve coordination. This feature enhances productivity and ensures everyone is aligned on business goals.
Territory Management
Territory management in Salesforce allows you to allocate and manage sales territories effectively. By assigning territories to reps based on criteria such as geography, industry, or deal size, you can optimize resource allocation and improve sales performance. This feature ensures fair workload distribution and maximizes your team’s potential to close deals.
Email Marketing
Salesforce’s email marketing tools allow you to automate email campaigns, personalize content, and track engagement metrics like opens, clicks, and conversions. By leveraging detailed analytics, you can refine your email strategies to better connect with your audience and drive higher engagement. This feature helps businesses save time, nurture leads effectively, and maintain consistent communication with customers.
Sales
Lead Management
Salesforce’s lead management feature helps you capture, assign, and track leads through every stage of the sales pipeline. With tools to prioritize leads and monitor their progress, you can ensure timely follow-ups and maximize conversion opportunities. This feature streamlines lead handling, improving sales efficiency and increasing the likelihood of closing deals.
Service Cloud Integration
Salesforce Service Cloud provides advanced tools for managing customer service cases and resolving issues quickly. Integrated with the CRM, this feature ensures seamless collaboration between sales and support teams, allowing them to deliver consistent and exceptional customer experiences. Reducing resolution times and enhancing service quality strengthen customer relationships and loyalty.
Commerce Cloud
Salesforce Commerce Cloud enables you to manage e-commerce operations, from product catalogs and online sales to personalized customer experiences. With tools to analyze buying behavior and optimize customer journeys, this feature helps businesses provide seamless shopping experiences across all channels. It supports scalability, enhances brand loyalty, and drives revenue growth.
Automation
Automation
The automation options on Salesforce are limitless. You can automate virtually everything and have your entire sales process on autopilot. From email marketing to social medial posting, lead scoring, sales stage progression, customer service, task creation and assigning, and so much more. Salesforce has prebuilt workflow templates that you can pick up and customize just how you want them by using the simple Flow Builder.
Customizable Reports
Salesforce’s customizable reports automate the generation of real-time insights, enabling you to track performance metrics, monitor trends, and identify opportunities for growth. By providing tailored data views that align with your business needs, this feature ensures you have instant access to actionable intelligence, saving time and enhancing decision-making. With automated updates, you can stay ahead of changes and respond proactively to market dynamics.
Einstein AI
Einstein AI automates insights and recommendations across sales, marketing, and customer service, empowering teams to make data-driven decisions with ease.
Performance:
Salesforce is a high-performance CRM software, specially built for enterprise companies. However, its Essentials package is designed to help startups and small businesses have a bite of the high performance that it offers.
Speed
Salesforce is fast. From syncing data with third-party apps to uploading files and importing contact lists, everything on Salesforce happen almost instantly.
From my previous video on importing contacts in the Ease of Use section of this review, you will see how seamless importing a contact can be on Salesforce. Keep in mind, though, that my csv file of 49 contacts was imported and made available on my contact list within 1 minute after I clicked the “Import” button. That was super quick.
Ease Of Use:
Salesforce comes with a slight learning curve, but once I got past the initial setup, I found the interface intuitive and easy to navigate. The platform offers powerful tools, and while it might seem overwhelming at first, getting started is surprisingly simple.
Setup
When I tested Salesforce’s setup process, it was quick and hassle-free. It’s a three-step sign-up: I entered my email and personal details, received a 6-digit one-time code, and then customized my dashboard. That’s it—I was fully set up and ready to explore the CRM. No complicated installations or long-winded verifications.
Audience building and segmenting
Adding contacts was straightforward when I tested it. I could manually enter details or import a spreadsheet or CSV file to speed things up.
Importing was especially seamless—I went to the “Contacts” tab, selected “Import”, and followed the on-screen prompts. The process was fast and efficient, even with larger contact lists. If you’re switching from another CRM, this makes the transition much smoother.
Automation
Salesforce has set the standard for CRM automation, and after testing it, I can see why. The platform offers tons of automation options, from workflow rules to process builders, making it easy to automate repetitive tasks.
I set up workflow rules to trigger specific actions, like sending follow-up emails or assigning leads based on their activity. I also tried creating a sales funnel flow, which automatically moves leads through different sales stages based on their behavior and timeline. It took a little trial and error, but once I got the hang of it, it saved me a ton of time.
Uniqueness:
Salesforce is an industry-leading CRM software with a myriad of features and app integrations designed for businesses of all sizes and kind to collect, track and qualify leads, close paying customers, and maintain a lasting relationship with these customers. Its opportunity management feature lets you know when you’re losing a lead and which competitors are winning that lead over. Businesses have never had this much control over their sales and service processes before Salesforce.
Verdict:
If you’re particular about intuitive user interfaces, Salesforce might not be the best choice for you. However, it offers features and functionalities that you can’t find anywhere else. So, if that’s something you can trade for eye-pleasing UI, Salesforce would be an exceptional tool to add to your business.
Catering to both startups and scaling businesses, Salesforce is built with all businesses in mind. So, you can jump on the Essentials for only $25/mo and upgrade to other plans as your team grows. Overall, it is an excellent tool. And by simply using it, you could save yourself from needing several other marketing and sales tools.
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