Crossbeam vs. Salesforce Experience Cloud

I would definitely recommend Crossbeam to others, and frequently bring it up early in conversations with potential partners as a first step in evaluating a partnership opportunity. Crossbeam allows you to easily see overlaps for current customers, prospects/target accounts, and open opportunities. Being able to quickly and easily assess the business opportunity with a partner, and find mutual customers that would benefit from a combined offering is a huge value add. The integration with Salesforce makes the tool easy to use and scalable, without needing to constantly update account lists. Being able to view the overlaps within the Crossbeam UI and easily export the lists makes the tool really easy to work with.

For well-suited, this product is great for your external clientele groups that you would not necessarily want to have a high user fee rate for. So basically general public or a group that will be authorized to come in and just do a few things here and there, but you don't necessarily want them access to all of your systems and your data points for groups that it would not be a great use for. I'd say probably your high level internal staff, they're going to be using a lot of the backend functionality automations, evaluating data, managing data, and doing custom inputs. That's just not what's intended for.

Incentivized

• Frictionless onboarding and easy to get started with new partners
• Intuitive reporting of overlapping accounts - flexibility to export to CSV
• Ability to connect with Salesforce to keep account lists dynamic, while also allowing the option to use CSV uploads

• Easy to use, just like Salesforce's other products. Many users can sit down and figure it out in no time, and with a little training become power users.
• Fast and secure - Salesforce is a leader in the cloud world so you get consistently fast results and security that is top notch in the industry.
• Accessible from anywhere - if you use cloud CMS already this is a no-brainer, but for those that do in-house CMS still, this is a major difference. Mobile access from anywhere on the planet without a VPN is something you just can't do without the cloud.

Incentivized

• Establishing sharing settings for each specific partner could be more intuitive and easy to check.
• Some of the navigation can be slightly confusing as it seems there are multiple ways to view the same information within the platform.

• Unlike other CMS platforms like Wordpress and Adobe Experience Manager, Salesforce does not provide a fully featured editor with a drag-and-drop design tool.
• Our content creators and marketing team often struggle with permissions and how to distribute content across different experience cloud sites.
• Also, there is no side-to-side comparison view for content editors to update the content easily.

Incentivized

Renewal exercise is already underway. Platform is to ubiquitous to not leverage, especially at a Fortune 50 firm

Incentivized

Strengths: - Intuitive for Salesforce Users – If you’re already working within the Salesforce ecosystem, the Salesforce CMS is easy to navigate, with a clean UI, drag-and-drop content management, and reusable assets for quick updates. - Seamless Integration – Since it connects natively with Experience Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and CRM, it allows for efficient multi-channel content distribution without needing extra third-party tools. - AI-Powered Personalization – The ability to deliver dynamic content based on user profiles and engagement data is a huge plus, making content delivery more relevant and impactful. Challenges: - Learning Curve for New Users – If you're not already familiar with Salesforce, the interface can feel overwhelming, requiring training to fully leverage all features. - Limited Customization & Workflow Automation – While it works well for structured content, advanced approval workflows and deep editorial customization are limited compared to enterprise CMS platforms like Adobe Experience Manager. - Media & Design Limitations – Salesforce CMS is not as robust for managing rich media-heavy content, which can be frustrating for teams needing more flexibility in multimedia presentation.

Incentivized

Again, since we provide and recommend solutions, I can't speak to every client's individual experience, but can offer general reflections as to keep their collaborations private, that they are satisfied with the experience. We hear a lot about how this system helps to encourage collaborations between their own business partners, customers, and internal members, and enables quality integrations with other products that help drive revenue.

Incentivized

Although support from Salesforce itself can be quite unresponsive sometimes, the community hub is incredibly helpful. The large user base of Salesforce products contribute to troubleshooting and the forums are a powerful tool for finding solutions and possible bugs and response times can be quite fast compared to your regular support channels.

Incentivized

Salesforce Experience Cloud was selected due to its tight integration with our existing Salesforce CRM platform. Customization of the portal was much, much simpler compared to Sharepoint - especially with role-based security parameters that are ultimately inherited based on attributes within the Salesforce CRM platform. Salesforce Experience Cloud was a natural fit for this customer-facing purpose.

Incentivized

• Crossbeam allows us to quickly assess opportunities with potential partners and feeds directly into prioritization for our integration and partnership strategy.
• It solves the challenge of keeping account data private that you don't want to share and enables us to easily share the information that is beneficial to both parties.

• Time savings for our customer success team - no need to continually follow up on tickets as customers have access to see status themselves
• In the future, it will also allow us to create more impactful knowledge articles that will increase self-service over ticket creation

Incentivized