Data.com (discontinued) vs. Oracle Sales vs. Salesforce Agentforce Sales

There are many scenarios that make data.com well suited, but most specifically, it works very well when looking for contacts within a certain zip code. You can sort and find information about these contacts and pay by points. This helps because you are able to pick and choose which you want to pay for.

Incentivized

Excellent as a customer relationship management tool, sales forecasting, building better sales plan for the entire deal lifecycle using critical and complex data, a 360-degree comprehensive view of vendors, partners, customers. Ensuring high standards and consistency is maintained in pricing so that quotes are competitive for prospective customers. At the end of the day, this is an excellent tool for selling and closing deals while being able to access needed information in one place.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Data.com is a great way to find out accurate revenue and employee numbers for companies across various industries.
• Data.com's filtering capabilities allow our team to quickly find the ideal prospects to reach out to.
• Data.com, being owned by Salesforce, allows for a seamless integration into our CRM. This saves us an incredible amount of time and ensures data accuracy.

Incentivized

• Easy to sell products[.]
• Build customers and make customer hub[.]
• Tracking the sales cycle from marketing to sell the product[.]
• Build Reports and Anayltics related to opportunities, leads, and service requests[.]
• Getting customers issues after and before selling[.]
• High ability to integrate with Oracles other products and 3rd products using Rest and Soap APIs[.]
• Restrict users using RBAC role based access[.]

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Some contacts can be old. Perhaps they could consider validating some that are older than 5 years.
• They don't always detect duplicate companies. For example, I've added the same company twice before, I don't understand how they allow that, or prevent others from adding duplicates. It doesn't happen very often,, only occasionally.
• Sometimes data.com will "autocorrect" a job title incorrectly. For example, entering "Director of People & Culture" will autocorrect it to "Director of peopleandculture" If you don't catch it, it looks pretty bad for the next person who wants to view the contact.

Incentivized

• I would like to see more integration with other CRMs such as Salesforce.
• We have each business unit built into Salesforce and it can track the amount of gross profit that flows through our Oracle database. It then further it trickles to each sales rep and what they've closed during their time at the company. These figures are not always accurate.
• It be difficult navigating to accounts and drilling down into each specific customer to understand details.

Incentivized

• 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.

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

Very intuitive to use and I've never had any confusion with features. Anyone can create an account and use the platform simply by adding a contact or company into the database to earn points. It's a great option if you don't have budget for lists or pay services. It is easy to use and anyone can benefit from it.

Incentivized

Overall our organization has completely moved to Oracle CX Sales and now is able to utilize the latest technology backed by AI to provide a much better experience to customers and saving money at the same time. So it's a Win-Win situation. I believe there is a slight learning curve to derive [the] full value out of this but once you are there, you can delight your customers.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Some of the more complex customer reports we have created are slow to run at times.

Incentivized

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

Whenever I've had a question their support has responded pretty quickly and gives me exactly what I am looking for. I have not had any technical issues so I can't speak to issues there, but as far as general questions from a free user they have impressed me with how quickly they get back to me and the thoroughness of their answers.

Incentivized

The support the Oracle team gives is generally very good. They are patient, willing to help, and their training methods are collaborative and inclusive. They have conducted multiple support sessions and it’s always been a great user experience. The stellar team [is] always on hand to lend support when the right time comes and their helpdesk is always on hand to help.

Incentivized

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

Excellent online training material. On-demand always helps to access anytime, anywhere. Also, it is essential that in this day and age, video tutorials with actual product screenshots make the learning more useful and fun at the same time. Certifications help test knowledge gained during these tutorial sessions. This was a blessing for fresh users.

Incentivized

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

If you have never used a CRM program is is hard to know exactly what you need. We had lots of changes during implementation and even more afterward once the users started working in it everyday. Also the partner we used didn't inform us about Allotments and not being able to Batch delete custom objects (you can now in recent releases). There were so many unknowns, that if I had it to do over, I would educate myself more and ask more questions of the partner that we used for implementation.

Incentivized

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.

Adobe Workfront may not be the direct competitor of Data.com, but for the services I was using, Workfront looked a little better when it comes to the user interface. But Data.com definitely had more powerful features & better integration capabilities. Also, it was easier to play around with the customer journey in Data.com as compared to other tools I have used in the past.

Incentivized

As compared to other CRM, this happens to be one of the best and most affordable as there are some cons, but the pros are great, and I have seen an increase in sales by using this platform. It works great for the sales process from start to end, like lead generation to closure.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

When we purchased this system it was one of the more expensive options in the market. However, with an adjustment in service and a relative price structure, this has become a lot more cost-effective over the past few years. It’s now more of a middle-ranking in the pricing structure and I would definitely say this is value for money.

Incentivized

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.

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

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.

• The positive impact is gaining more direct contact information for hiring managers.
• Another positive factor is that it is completely free. You gain points for contact information when you add contact information.
• Since it is a free resource, there are no real negative impacts.

Incentivized

• We can very easily pull up a customer's order and provide any detail they need. The time this saves compared to manually tracking customer orders and accounts is incredible.
• Knowing exactly who is contacting customer service and what their orders status is before answering the calls makes the customer service reps job much easier than before.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized