Constant Contact Advanced Automation helps users to send the right message at the right time, from Social to SMS and email to ecommerce. Multi-Channel Campaigns - Create comprehensive marketing campaigns with just a few clicks. The Campaign Builder tool can help launch a multi-channel campaign across email, social, and SMS. Pre-Built Automation Templates - Setup your automations quickly with pre-built automation templates to…
$449
per month
Salesforce Sales Cloud
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a platform for sales with a community of Sellers, Sales Leaders, and Sales Operations, who use the solution to grow sales and increase productivity. The AI CRM for Sales features data built right in, so that companies can sell faster, sell smarter and sell efficiently. Salesforce Sales Cloud is used for, and supports: Buyer Engagement Sales Engagement Enablement Sales AI Sales Analytics Team…
SharpSpring from Constant Contact is more streamlined (and cost-effective), especially for smaller businesses that don't need all the complexity and confusion of bigger options like Salesforce.
I found SharpSpring to be the easiest CRM to use. On a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being the easiest to learn and use, I'd give Salesforce a 1, SharpSpring a 5 and the others fall in between. It's customizable, it's easy to update leads, and most of all there are no quirky error …
SharpSpring has way more robust marketing automation features. The only plus for Salesforce is the ability to run a report for conversations had this week and make it easy to pull up those advertiser cards. SharpSpring has a big advantage over Salesforce as far as persona …
From my research, SharpSpring has every functionality that is needed to effectively deliver omnichannel sales and marketing solutions for most businesses. It is ahead of the market in terms of dynamic personalisation, automation, and retargeting. In terms of value for money, it …
I believe SharpSpring stacks up against Salesforce and HubSpot quite well and beats the price of them significantly. I am would definitely recommend anyone familiar with these sales and marketing automation platforms to give SharpSpring a try. I believe you will be quite …
SharpSpring has in some way more features than the top 5 solutions, but it's way easier to use, not to mention the price. SharpSpring is almost a tenth of the price and is a monthly-based payment solution. Every other star destroyer promisess a lot of features but you need to …
While I wasn't around when SharpSpring was chosen, I've worked with Salesforce for a number of years as well as various proprietary CRM services at other companies. While not as powerful as Salesforce in terms of capability/reporting/analytics, SharpSpring certainly brings a …
I find it more effective than Salesforce. Better reporting and more detailed data capturing. Also the ability to launch marketing campaigns and follow up. The reporting and emailing capability has been extremely effective.
SharpSpring is superior in price and marketing capability. Hubspot is more user friendly, though when it comes to CRM ability. However, with SharpSpring's ability to have multiple marketing e-mail campaigns going at once, tracking all of that, and being as affordable as they …
SharpSpring is comparable to Insightly, Pipedrive[,] and Zoho Assist. I'm giving the edge to SharpSpring because it's what I'm using now, it's easy to use and I like the layout, and it's easy to move leads through the sales process as well as set tasks and reminders. I much …
There are 2 tiers of marketing automation software. Highly customizable, feature rich enterprise applications, and out of the box simpler solutions for smaller businesses. SharpSpring is unique in that is offers enterprise feature sets at the small business price point.
I've selected SharpSpring because they have a more complete platform with marketing automation, social media integration, a lot of API integrations and finishing with a great sales CRM solution. All others softwares that we have at our disposal right now have only some features …
Salesforce was a lot more expensive than SharpSpring and they didn't give us the ability to white label clients. We were looking for a CRM system and we found that SharpSpring had a lot of integrations and features that are all in one. Their customer service was a lot better …
Lower cost - higher-value solution with a focus on marketing automation with core CRM capabilities. It is a simpler solution because it focuses on the essentials. They have several features that exceed the competition. Their visualizations and Ux around workflow automation, …
I think SharpSpring is overall a better option, especially for mid-size businesses. The platform is much less costly than Salesforce and depending on your contact list, can be less costly than HubSpot as well. The features are great and it allows you to grow with it as your …
Brand leadership strategist, author: Branding Like the Big Boys, principal
Chose Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM
I have run multiple compare/contrast consultation scenarios for SMB clients and SharpSpring delivers the greatest functionality for the money. We support clients on HubSpot and Salesforce as well. In very large enterprises Salesforce is often already installed or makes sense; …
Verified User
Team Lead
Chose Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM
Far better user interface and support team. It seems like those who have used both see the two as night and day. SharpSpring seems like it's the future, especially since it's not built on "old bones."
Verified User
Director
Chose Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM
Salesforce would have been a stronger CRM, perhaps. But they required the purchase of Pardot before they could provide the marketing intelligence tools we needed, and Pardot is expensive. In the end, we needed strong, scalable marketing intelligence and enough CRM capability to …
I've personally used HubSpot and Salesforce in the past. While I liked the other platforms, there were almost too many features available and that made it easy to get lost on the platforms. Salesforce, of course, is a monster of a platform that sometimes feels like you need a …
SharpSpring offers nearly all the features that the competitors do at a fraction of the price. Also, SharpSpring is far more economical than any of the competitors. However, even if price was no object, SharpSpring is more user-friendly, has a more logical interface, and has …
I wasn't involved in the decision to choose [Salesforce.com] but I know that in at least one of the organizations I worked in that chose it, the analytics and reporting functionality it provides a large sales organization are second to none. It also allows for a wide variety …
Constant Contact is excellent for small businesses wanting a simple email to their customers and leads. We've found that it's not the most robust solution for more complex funnels involved in e-commerce or information publishing. For instance, setting up specific flows based on user behavior, VIP status, and other attributes is lacking.
Salesforce Sales Cloud is an intuitive and easy-to-use platform. It is easy to customize this platform to meet the ever-changing business needs and requirements. It is easy to integrate with other platforms and offers incredible features that help businesses generate leads, automate their marketing processes, and collaborate effectively.
Their Emailers are very easy to construct and user-friendly. It takes your Newsletter and sales emails to the next level, especially with the action groups and trigger functionalities.
The life of the lead functionality allows you to see when leads get warmer, so you know when to send them what. Helps improve conversions.
Logging notes: SF makes it easy to log notes in the timeline or static notes that live in an easy-to-see spot for longevity.
Logging activities: It's easy to post a call, text, email, etc.
API data: Once connected, SF is critical to automation, such as website activity, login activity, pages visited, etc., which saves the Customer Success side time in understanding account activity.
Custom fields: you can add custom fields to really personalize your experience. We use quite a few and it's brilliant.
The landing page builder is a bit hard to use. Doesn’t have much flexibility.
Sometimes confusing between types of workflows to use. Opportunity versus visual.
If you imported contacts that weren’t formatted correctly. It is hard to delete a bull amount. Need to type DELETE for each one manually. No bull options to make changes.
We have been very impressed with all aspects of this software and the potential for it to radically change how we operate is huge! Support has been exceptional and we have discovered many extra uses for the software than originally thought. Not only will it give us benefits for our company's growth, but for our client's growth as well.
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.
This rating is coming from an administrative perspective. With so many features, workflows, dashboards, and more, there is certainly a lot going on, and even the most savvy software user can get a little overwhelmed when trying to decide how to best implement and utilize the platform to its full potential. That being said, the SharpSpring platform is well-implemented and well-organized, with most solutions being fairly intuitive, once you have a grasp of the software. It is fairly easy to learn, but difficult to master. Just like any powerful platform, however, the complexity is worth it, and once you are comfortable navigating and problem solving within SharpSpring, it becomes a great marketing and sales tool which can do virtually anything you need it to.
Salesforce has been designed on the basis of "Clicks, not code". So anyone willing to learn the Salesforce user interface (which is quite good as far as management software platforms go) is able to become a Salesforce user or even a Salesforce administrator. You don't have to know coding language to work in the Salesforce environment. Also, Salesforce has one of the best software training resources (Trailhead) that I have ever encountered. It is free to all, easy to use, and most importantly it is interactive. No scrolling through endless text in a user manual. There are hands-on modules and related videos interlaced and through it all you earn points and badges to display your level of learning.
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.
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
The support is great which really helps overcome challenges if you become stuck and the training videos are great too. Same-day replies are great and I even got some help with some CSS code on the chat. Not many organizations would do this or even respond.
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
Overall I would say to be patient and bring everyone who will be touching the platform to the onboarding sessions. The Virtual Classroom lets you onboard as quickly or slowly as you want. Sales, marketing, design, account management, get 'em all in on it. For the most part, they will be happy to use this platform. I recommend getting as many people as possible to see the SharpSpring demo.
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.
Can send content & templates to Sales to send in their reach-outs (Outlook extension)
Ad retargeting
Social listening tool
Social media scheduling
Email builder: dynamic content
Landing pages: dynamic content, rebrandable domain name
Chatbot Platform seems intuitive to use
Forms auto-complete for known visitors
Instant 2-way sync with Salesforce
Trigger automated workflows from social media
It was easy to receive demo, streamlined sales process
SharpSpring: approx. $13,000 USD per year + $2,000 USD one-time for onboarding Pardot: $32,400 USD per year + $3,000 to $5,000 USD one-time for onboarding HubSpot: $20,381 USD per year + $3,000 USD one-time for onboarding Marketo: $29,015 USD per year + $4,500 USD one-time for onboarding
At our company, we use Salesforce and HubSpot. I personally like both for different reasons. Salesforce makes it easy to generate reports, keep track of dealer and customer information, tie customers to dealers, and is easy to use. However, I like HubSpot for the marketing features. I think HubSpot has easier-to-use workflows and email creations.
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.
Salesforce Sales Cloud is highly scalable and designed to accommodate the needs of businesses of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises. It offers flexible subscription models and can easily scale up or down based on the organization's requirements. Whether a company is expanding its sales team, increasing its customer base, or adding new features and functionalities, Sales Cloud can adapt to support growth without sacrificing performance or reliability. Additionally, Salesforce's cloud-based architecture ensures that users have access to resources and capabilities as needed, making it a highly scalable solution for organizations looking to automate customer relationship management at scale.
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.
Streamlined Processes - sales and marketing are now all in the same place.
Reduced Number of Platforms/Tools - CRM/lead management, email, automation, landing pages, forms, etc are all in the same place rather than using multiple tools.
Time-saving - sales pipeline is very easy to use for sales. For marketing, we have dozens of workflows that eliminate much of our manual processes from the past.
Return on Investment - We're more focused on moving the building the business than ever before because SharpSpring has simplified so many of our business operations and we're seeing massive results!
Lead generation - Up SIGNIFICANTLY (between 3x & 4x) since setting up SharpSpring.
The inbox feature allows me to see when the customer opens my email, and hence a timely follow-up could result in a higher response rate.
The mobile app allows users to gain access to leads and customer contacts on the go, which increases sales team productivity and enhances customer conversations.
The reports of the notes on the account level are not working, which is causing manual work in the weekly report to leadership.