Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce.com
We utilize Salesforce across our global organization within our commercial (Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service), Supply Chain, Product Management, Agronomy and Credit teams. It is highly customized to match the specific sales process and forecasting needs of each commercial area. We utilize it to track customer issues as well as marketing events, offers and experiences. It is integrated with our backend ERP system and our front end product websites. It is an integral part to our commercial go to market strategy with our customers.
- Excellent scalability (ability to customize and use standard features)
- Outstanding support both through the company and through the large user community
- Innovation- they never stop expanding functionality
- They have some overlapping products that could allow for them to sunset older versions and relieve confusion
- They sometimes follow the B2C marketing side to willingly and B2B and other types of companies may not need the new features
- They are not inexpensive, but the breath of features should be taken advantage of for full ROI
- It has improved our customer experience as we don not have direct revenue impact in a B2B environment.
- It has improved our visibility at a management level to sales status regarding achievement to plan.
We chose Salesforce as the leader in this space as it handles all that we were looking for and was customizable enough that we could build what it did not have. Their lead only continues to grow over others with recent acquisitions and their never ending focus on expanding their platform. I drink their kool aid so not totally unbiased, but the tool delivers what we need it too and some of those requests have been highly challenging.
Salesforce Sales Cloud Feature Ratings
Using Salesforce.com
750 - Sales, Customer Service, Marketing, Product Marketing, Supply Chain, Quality,
You need to have at bare minimum a certified salesforce administrator. Then it is good to have a set of analyst to work with your business analysts, two to four is recommended and should scale to the size of your organization. Then you should have a couple of Salesforce developers, one to focus on Apex/VisualForce and one to focus on the web side (HTML5/JQuerry). Then you need a leadership person to manage the team and interact with your business leadership teams.
- Forecasting and customer facing and management level reporting
- Account Management and contact management with full rollup capability
- Digital Marketing (Email, Websites, Sales Tools, Campaign Management, Event Management, Product Management and Allocations)
- Supply Chain Management
- Customer Service Ticket Tracking and Workflow
- We created several custom applications that are specific to tracking raw material usage that is very helpful in our business
- We created several sales tools that link front end applications to back end application (product websites and sales tools)
- We have workflow for tracking sales programs to ensure none can be oversold
- Branding with our customers is greatly enhanced with a common branding effort of all customer facing documents
- Communities (customer facing portals that allow for collaboration)
- Additional Social usage and tracking with marketing cloud and Radian6
- Mobile Apps via Salesforce1 branded as our company
Salesforce Support
Pros | Cons |
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Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed Immediate help available Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
Yes - It is great offer, it allows access to tier two support and additional training and support offerings. You can access online trainings that can assist your teams in obtaining certifications.
Using Salesforce
Pros | Cons |
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Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- Account Management
- Reporting
- Custom Development
- Opportunity Management
- Advanced reporting
Yes - Very nicely