BISP SmartConnect CRM vs. Salesforce Agentforce Sales

In the end, I think we can always make it fit — and that’s one of the powers of Salesforce. Because of its flexibility and wide range of possibilities, you can really make it work for almost any need. The key, though, is to make thoughtful decisions upfront and plan carefully how you set it up. If you do that, you’ll end up with a truly flexible and effective system.

Incentivized

• It does a good job of routing our leads to customers, to our inside sales reps and teams.
• It does a good job of tracking all of the opportunities that we have, the contacts that we have with people related to the opportunities.
• Organizing and being able to do reports on what our sales are.

Incentivized

• I’d say the only thing that can be a bit tricky — and I know Tableau helps address this — is that sometimes we’re limited in how deep we can go with the data in terms of reporting. It would be great to have a bit more robustness within the app itself. However, we’ve figured out our workarounds, and overall, I think it’s a fantastic product — which is why I’ve been working with it for 23 years.

Incentivized

There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.

Incentivized

All in all, it's a great product that use all day, every day. It's aesthetically pleasing overall and specifically provides information in a clean, concise way. It's easy to manipulate and seems to play well with the other products I use such as Pardot, Gmelius, and our company's proprietary data system. It increases my efficieny in my admin tasks so I have more time to focus on revenue-generation and account management. It's also easy to use from everywhere where it be on a university campus, in a hotel room, one of a million Starbucks, or at home

Incentivized

All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years. Accordingly, I only recall our instance of Salesforce having one unscheduled, brief down time over 6 years. I can't remember for sure, but it may have been due to our Internet Service Provider (ISP) versus Salesforce itself. Also, Salesforce does it's best to keep customers in the loop:

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For a SaaS provider, I'd rate their performance to be one of the best. At times, reporting tends to slow down if the data set is very large, which is the case in any system. But, that's a very rare phenomenon

The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.

I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.

I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business

I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.

We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this

Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.

Based on my experience, I’ve used Odoo — it’s an open-source ERP system. It’s not exactly the same as Salesforce or Sales Cloud, but it serves a similar purpose. And I feel that Sales Cloud is better. Personally, I find it easier to use and better than what Odoo offers, especially in terms of customization and achieving business objectives. That’s where Salesforce Sales Cloud really stands out in comparison to Odoo.

Incentivized

It's very scalable as it has a ton of features (but you do need an admin who understands how to leverage these features). Because of the various features, we've also needed to host onboarding sessions with our users so that they can familiarize themselves with the platform, which isn't always super user-friendly or intuitive.

Incentivized

• It helps us achieve our objectives, especially now with Agentforce — we can get more insights to help our sellers sell more. It’s really nice because it’s almost like you can use the standard part of Salesforce to train your agents and teach your sellers how to improve their sales. So that’s really nice.

Incentivized