CIsion Communications Cloud is used for identifying key media and influencers, connecting with audiences, monitoring traditional and social media, and analyzing outcomes.
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Foundry ABM
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Foundry ABM is an account based marketing platform that creates campaigns for ads, web personalization, and sales. Foundry’s proprietary database complements an organization’s first party data to provide the best data to reach, engage, and convert more stakeholders in target accounts.
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Agentforce Sales
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Salesforce' Agentforce Sales (formerly Salesforce Sales Cloud) is the company's flagship CRM platform. The AI CRM for Sales features data built right in.
I was using Vocus and then switched to Cision PR for the ease of use. Since the two platforms have merged the intuitiveness and user friendliness has only improved. Radian6 is not for media list building since the influencer section is very clunky. It's better suited for …
As someone on the sales side, I don't know much about these tools' differences. However, I have had a very good experience with Triblio. It seems like it is more robust, and we can gain more information about our website visitors. I believe we picked them because of this reason.
Triblio stacked up very well against their competitors. The pricing is in the ballpark as other solutions, but their ability to cross platforms and expand beyond just one area of specialty is why we chose them. Other solutions may excel in one area, but Triblio performs well …
Honestly, Triblio has the same capabilities as all of the other platforms that I have explored. With their addition of Orchestration that is rolling out, they actually will be pulling ahead of the competition allowing for multi-step automated campaigns. With the ease of use, …
We choose Triblio for [its] overall combination of tools and pricing. Prelytix has very good intent features, it is very easy to add and monitor keywords, and website activity. However, they have a lack of orchestration capabilities and integrations. The reporting is …
We have not fully evaluated Demandbase, but it is a serious competitor to Triblio and I've heard references that it's a very powerful platform as well. It seems Demandbase has recently unbundled their previously very expensive platform to compete with market entrants like …
For a small start-up, the cost-benefit to add lift to press releases [and] particular milestone accomplishments is definitely there with the Cision [Communications] Cloud. Much of what we do, by necessity, is done internally without the benefit of outsourced press folks, so the Cision [Communications] Cloud ease of use and reporting is very important.
I think it's good for companies who have a built out marketing program. I know our marketing team knows the software very well. As someone on the sales side, I struggle to understand some concepts. However they have a great support team and they help with reports that make things very easy to understand.
Obviously, for any business, there are two main areas to focus on — the sales path and the service path. Sales Cloud wouldn’t be suited for a company that’s primarily into support services. For those kinds of companies, Salesforce has a different product — Service Cloud. So, for anyone in the support or service space, Sales Cloud isn’t the right fit.
Their upgraded press release templates and ability [to] pull in an entire, completed release makes the [process] faster and easier, and allows for more graphics, such as company mastheads, [are done well].
The media tracking offers the ability to find relevant placements across the entire country.
The journalist database streamlines the process of finding relevant reporters to directly connect [to] on news releases that are relevant to their beats.
The process of setting up, creating, and distributing a release is seamless, easy to use, and not labor-intensive.
The customizations - We have an organization that operates differently from most companies, so we’ve had to implement quite a few customizations — and Salesforce allows us to do that quite quickly. Most of the time, delays come from dependencies on other internal parties rather than the system itself.
From my perspective as a consultant, one of the biggest advantages is that everything is in Salesforce — all the details, all in one place. The ability to customize it easily is a big plus; there’s really a lot you can do with it.
In the media influencer database, the classic Cision allowed us to do a zip code radius search to really drill down to the neighborhood level. That's because we do localized media advisories and press releases for events at neighborhood schools. One part of a big city like Chicago really doesn't care what's happening in another part of Chicago that's too far away. The zip code radius search was a feature in the classic Cision but not with the current Cision Communications Cloud. We've asked for this to be restored several times, but nothing's happened. In fact, we were told to use DMA — which actually goes wider in a search (bigger than a city), not more narrow as needed. This reflects a basic misunderstanding of what we need.
Another missing feature involves a merge field when sending out an email press release through Cision. This is the "select insert field" button in the upper right that's used to personalize a release with the media contact's name and other information. This is key for localization of the release. Many media outlets won't run a release unless it's local. While "county" is a feature in the influencer database when putting together a media list in Cision, "county" is not available to insert into a press release as a merge field. Counties are important because this is how many newspapers and health departments are organized and identify themselves. I've asked for this to be implemented, to no avail. As a workaround, we've had to use "contact city" or "outlet city."
After refining a media list in Cision using filters, I've had to download the list and take it offline to see the big picture, screen for duplicates, etc. While there is a button on the bottom left intended to help with this, it doesn't do the trick. That's because there may be multiple contacts with the same email address. In addition, one media contact may represent numerous media outlets, so this same contact could show up several times. It would be nice to have a better way to see the whole list online and eliminate both duplicates as well as those who previously opted out.
The ability to separate budgets by dept. currently, you have one pot of money but can set limits based on campaigns. This is fine for a single user but gets messy with multiple users.
Campaigns with multiple steps, I do hear this is in the works.
It would be nice if each area did not open a new tab, navigating pages within the same page would be nice.
We still need to include the production part. We started using Salesforce to sell the seeds — our inventory is in SAP — and from there we handle sales and track the process of planting, harvesting, selling, and then collecting payments. But we don’t yet manage the earlier production processes, like production planning. We handle allocation, but not full production planning, and that’s an area where we still have room for improvement.
While I am happy with the product performance overall, TrendKite's recent merger with Cision is cause for concern. When we first signed on with TrendKite, I spoke with several users and the best response I received was that the company was a startup and we could expect there to be hiccups along the way as the company grew and the platform got more robust. That has certainly been the case. However, now that they have merged with Cision — a company that has grown too fast, has not focused on improving its product and has poor customer service — I have concerns that TrendKite will lose some of the qualities that have made it a great company and great product to work with.
We continue to have a good experience with Triblio, and they continue to deliver value for our money. If they would do a better job with analytics, then it'd be easier for me to tie campaign activities to the bottom line.
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.
The flexibility and customization of Cision Communications Cloud (TrendKite)* is among its most important features. Changing the dashboards, using keywords in the saved searches to pull out the best stories and the integration with marketing automation tools gives me confidence that I will able to continue using this tool well into the future. The future implementation and integration of the media contact database will complete the suite, making list management and email marketing programs much smoother. *This review was written before Cision acquired TrendKite. TrendKite is now part of Cision Communications Cloud.
The Triblio platform makes it easy for non-technical users to get around and figure out what we need relatively quickly. Of course, a basic training or tutorial is needed initially for you to know where everything is. We paid for managed services which is great since we have an account director who can operate the platform better than any outsider can, and she can also give us recommendations on best practices.
Because I think it could be easier. We have different standards today since we’re used to interacting with consumer apps like Starbucks, where all you do is scan your card. Then, when you use Sales Cloud, there are still a lot of manual inputs. So my mission with AI is really about figuring out how to make that easier.
The platform has always been available, and the occasional system updates aside, there have been no downtime issues with Triblio. The platform has always been available when I needed it, and campaigns were launched timely
Salesforce is always available securely from any internet-capable device anywhere in the world, UNLESS you choose to set security measures so that ONLY trusted IP ranges may access the system at certain times of the day. It's all about choice and flexibility with Salesforce products.
Generally, Cision performs well day to day, but it's got some annoying bugs that slow down usage/require user workarounds which is inefficient. More seriously, a few months ago, as a result of a major system upgrade, certain critical functionality was not working and I was unable to use the service for more than a day when I had time-sensitive work to execute
Triblio pages, campaign performances, and platforms have not slowed us down at all. If anything, Triblio has enhanced how we engage with our target accounts. There has been no speed performance issues, or lag due to system limitations. Triblio tracking on our site has not slowed our page performances significantly, so there has been on effect on speed
Salesforce performance in general is excellent. "The cloud infrastructure beneath Force.com has been fine-tuned over the past 10 years. It powers nearly 100,000+ businesses running more than 185,000 applications that 3 million users count on every day." Points per Salesforce - 1) Multitenant kernel - With a multitenant platform, each business that uses the app doesn’t have its own copy. Instead, all businesses share a single copy and then customize it for their specific needs. 2) ISO 27001 certified security - You can’t compromise when it comes to enterprise-level security. Force.com is road-tested and trusted by nearly 100,000+ companies, including many of the world’s most security-conscious organizations, such as banks and health care providers. 3) Proven reliability - 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. 4) Proven, real-time scalability - Force.com is used by many of the world's largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec. Applications can automatically scale from a few users to millions of page views, as needed. 5) Real-time query optimizer - You need fast access to your data. The Force.com query optimizer delivers under 300ms response time, at a massive scale. 6) Real-time transparent system status - You can always see real-time system performance, availability, and security information at trust.salesforce.com. 7) Real-time upgrades - Unlike traditional software platforms, our upgrades never break your customizations, code, or integrations. We upgrade the platform for you 3 to 4 times each year. As a result, you’re always on the latest version, with access to the latest features, performance, and security enhancements. 8) Real-time sandbox environments - With a single click, you can create copies of your applications, configuration, and data in separate environments for development, testing, and training. 9) Three global production data centers and disaster recovery - Force.com runs on three geographically dispersed, mirrored data centers with built-in replication, disaster recovery, a redundant network backbone, and no single points of failure
For Cision TrendKite in particilar, support always responded, but it was sometimes slow. For some of our booleans and search queries, we would need help refining and excluding terms/phrases that weren't relevant to our client or campaign. This sometimes took 1-2 days just to get a response back, which sometimes was too late when a last-minute report was due. This was only with the support staff, not necessarily our customer success manager or sales rep.
Triblio makes it possible for a small SaaS company without a lot of manpower to implement ABM strategies to help compete in a world where the sales motion is now very different - requiring more targeted messaging and education before prospects are willing to engage with a salesperson. We believe that as we continue to spin up our ABM strategies, Triblio is helping us be in the right place and at the right time for the right audience for a reasonable CPC.
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
The online training sessions available for the Cision Communications Cloud are helpful and informative. There's more than one option - initially, I signed up for the live webinar classes on basic functions and that is what I recommend other new users do as well. If I have specific questions or something I want to learn more about, I can search the online database and find article or online training videos to get the information I need.
We had our Account management team online to provide training to the marketing team, ADR team, and the AE team, which was helpful as each team had their own sets of questions and needs from the platform. Having the Triblio experts on the call and knowing that they are available for questions later on was reassuring to everyone in the trainings.
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
Definitely have a dedicated technical team work on the implementation full time with the Triblio team. There are requirements on both ends of the pipe that needs to be done. It is much easier to have both teams work together full time as opposed to part time duty; it would take much longer than doing it all in one shot.
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.
It's a similar product. I think Meltwater sells itself as being a bit more niche, but I have not found many significant differences between Meltwater and Cision. Meltwater's sales process is a very high pressure and their prices are inflated.
Terminus appears to be the cheapest on the surface but with the least amount of capabilities, clunky (lots of manual stuff they have to do on the back end to launch your campaign), very low CTR due to the DSP they use (TradeDesk) which also carries a media upcharge. Terminus also cannot figure out their analytics - they are out of whack across various screens in the tool. 6sense is expensive and very limiting (you get X of this, and Y of that - nothing is unlimited, feels like being nickeled and dimed). A very pushy sales team, you are under pressure to book the next meeting or to provide a date when you will sign. The tool appears to have nice capabilities but it is the people, at the end of the day, you will be working with - and I got concerns with that experience. Metadata - nice sales team, low/no pressure to buy. The demo of their platform also looks like it has interesting capabilities. The team appears to be very small, the communications from the salesperson were random and I had to take the lead asking for the next call to see more. This is concerning when it comes to supporting - will they have enough people to support their customer base if they drag their feet in the sales process? None of these tools had ANYTHING EVEN CLOSE to Triblio's orchestration capabilities, so none of them were strong competitors.
So I've evaluated, implemented Microsoft Dynamics in the past. I've used Oracle CRM solutions. I've used Daylight, which is a very niche CRM system the last couple of years. And I've evaluated a variety from Legacy Microsoft Ones to Zoho and Sugar when making implementation decisions at other companies. But usually I've gone with Salesforce. I'd say it's better than most. The only one that I generally prefer, and last time I chose an implementation from scratch, I did Microsoft Dynamics. And the reason is for small mid-size organization, Microsoft Dynamics, if you already have Microsoft Office products, it's much better integrated to all of the Excel, Word, OneNote, Outlook email than what you get from Salesforce. And so that's the only one that if someone's a Microsoft organization and small sized company, it'll save a lot of integration things, a lot of security, a lot of login and access and IT management by just sticking within the Microsoft ecosystem. But outside of that, if you don't use Microsoft or if you're a large organization or have other needs that you want, Salesforce I'd say is better than all of the other CRM offerings out there. It's the easiest to use and the most robust and the most vendors and products for the ecosystem.
Salesforce is the most widely used CRM system. Professionalism tends to increase when things go wrong for market leaders. Salesforce considers us as users because they own the market. Having all of our data in one place and all of our teams working within Salesforce. Anyone who uses Salesforce is impacted by it, even if they don't.
The Triblio platform works fairly reliably since we have implemented it into our instance. There are the occasionally wishes that they have more functionalities, but those are feature requests which can be accommodated in future product enhancements. In terms of flexibility and scalability, we chose Triblio since we wanted to scale our ABM efforts, so that was a big part of our consideration.
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.
Using Salesforce.com has made my daily routines more efficient and simplified the manual tasks I had to perform independently. I can now access data from any device, online or offline, and provide better guidance to my team about the forecasts provided by the built-in artificial intelligence (AI). A chat with a Salesforce support specialist would be great. The knowledge base has a community forum where Salesforce users can ask questions and learn more about the product.
Triblio is extremely powerful in terms of increasing conversion rates and we've tripled conversion rates using their targeted modals versus less targeted approaches with less sophisticated products, such as HelloBar.
Though it is hard to quantify, Triblio has increased the speed to market with which we can introduce targeted promotions. Campaigns can be spun up with Triblio in less than one day.
There have been no negative impacts to ROI from Triblio.
It allows me to keep a close eye on all of my performance metrics through the Dashboard Reporting, ie what my sales pipeline looks like, how much it's changed in the last 60 days, new opportunities created in the last 7 days, # of emails sent for the week, etc. The ease of the design and output make it really easy to check my progress throughout the day to find where I have holes and am falling short on my personal and work goals. It's resulted in greater transparency with my Mgmt Team and shorter 1-on-1 mtgs with my boss as he can see exactly where I am at all times (to be fair, I'm a senior sales rep, so he pretty much lets me do my job completely unfettered), but it does prove that I am continually producing which recently resulted in a raise I didn't even ask for.
The SF repository is so detailed that I don't have to spend tons of time finding frequently used websites attached to a client or see what all interactions with the company look like. Even though I don't use SF for my bulk emails and email sequences, SF provides me with an email to use in the bcc of these emails which links everything back to SF. I find that extremely helpful. This really impacts my efficiency and I can honestly say that once I started using all the functionality of data management, it saved me about 20% of my time/week that I could then allocate towards other revenue-generating tasks like prospecting and account management. The more time I have for those, the better. My year-over-year on accounts 1 year and older just grew by 17% this last year.
