Powerful but complex – best for larger teams

I’ve administered Salesforce for 3 years across two different companies. It’s undeniably powerful, but that power comes with complexity that smaller organizations may find difficult to manage.

At my current company (180 sales reps), Salesforce handles our complexity beautifully. We have 12 different sales processes across 4 business units, and the platform accommodates all of them. The custom objects and fields let us track industry-specific data points that generic CRMs couldn’t handle.

The reporting and dashboard capabilities are best-in-class. I can build executive-level views that show real-time pipeline health, forecast accuracy, and team performance without needing a data analyst. However, building these reports requires significant training – expect to spend 40+ hours learning the report builder.

My biggest frustration is the AppExchange ecosystem. While there are thousands of apps, quality varies dramatically. We’ve tried 5 different plugins for one specific need before finding one that worked reliably. Salesforce’s native integrations are excellent, but third-party apps require careful vetting.