DirectLync vs. Salesforce Agentforce Marketing vs. ContactsFlow (formerly Shared Contacts for Gmail™)

Girls PACT receives regular compliments on its website! The audience for our website is potential donors. DirectLync nailed it! The design is clean, modern, professional, user friendly, intuitive and really represents our brand. They gave us some great coaching and guidance as we were creating and preparing content. It was a really fun project!

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I think the product, by definition, is meant for marketing — and we use it exactly for that, for running campaigns. That’s the best-suited use case for the product. I don’t think it’s really meant to be used for anything else — that’s just not how it’s designed.

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Shared Contacts for Gmail is well suited for organizations that generate and coordinate long term partnerships and that have a big remote working component as a main form or working. It is less appropriate with organizations dedicated to sales and performance based ways of working. I would recommend it for medium size organizations.

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• DirectLync is knowledgeable in their field, which saves us time (and money).
• They have a creative team onsite to answer questions promptly.
• Regularly updating products and services to better serve its customers.

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• Filter relevant content so you can priorize those that are more relevant and resolve it first
• Measure the traffic in the different social networks, as well as the response rate, average response time and other relevant metrics
• Configure automation rules to order the work of those who must interact with the customer

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• Helps manage contact lists and distribution lists.
• Eliminates the need for the use of an additional platform, like a CRM, to manage contacts.
• Makes it easier to share contacts with a targeted audience with the flexibility to be selective about who the data is being shared with.

• Girls PACT is located in Los Angeles. Newsletters are scheduled for PST, yet distributed on EST. It’s an odd glitch and may be a user error.

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• The email builder does not offer any way to catch/check bugs across different email service providers
• Creating SQL is not as easy as drag-and-drop; a lot of technical knowledge is required
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud is sold as a marketing tool, but to be honest, you need a LOT of technical IT support to run the tool
• Einstein metrics are across the board; if you have multiple audiences in one instance of Salesforce Marketing Cloud you can't segment the data.

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• I have been looking for a way to share our contacts within our organization for a while now. This process really improves how we were doing it within Google Sheets.
• My only negative is that it has taken so long for it to be functional within Google.

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As of right now we have not seen any other program that integrates as seamlessly into our Salesforce platform. We have barely scratched the surface of all the features and use cases. It would be irresponsible to make a move to another platform in the near future. We have not come up against any limitations that would prompt a need to switch

You won't find another solution that has as many features as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio. We all know Salesforce, we all know how big they are and it's not for nothing... Their tools do most of the things you want, need and even imagine. Using it is complicated, but the usability is infinite.

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Very easy to use. Mostly related to the design of the program, but also due to the layout. I find it easy to find what I am looking for. As noted in earlier comments, greater implementation of AI would probably make the program even easier to use, as sometimes finding certain functions is not entirely transparent.

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Upgrades and timing of the upgrades were communicated well and planned during off hours for our work. If we did have a campaign scheduled during that time, it would kick-off after the system was back active. There were a few unplanned system down times, but it was a rare occurrence and those times were also short in duration.

Though the make up of MA apps is not built this way today, it would be nice to see them become more real-time. The integration between Salesforce and Pardot is not a true real-time integration. If I modify something in Salesforce, those changes are not automatically reflected in Pardot immediately. There is a delay of about 15 minutes before the systems sync. This delay, although not long, is less than ideal We would love the systems to be integrated real time such that changes are propagated from one system to the other immediately.

They are really responsive and more than not solve the problem or give you insight to how you can manage the solution yourself. I do find however sometimes a long delay on the more complex issues when they need to loop in other departments. but overall a good experience with support

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The trainers at the Pardot user conference (Elevate and Connections) were very knowledgeable and presented the material well. Again, the content was targeted to more of a new user audience, and was not really relevant for folks who had been using the product for 2+ years.

Pardot's online training touches on all topics briefly and vaguely without much indepth exploration into how a final outcome could look, such as Nurturing Campaigns, Email templates, landing page templates, etc... The only true way to uncover Pardot's full capabilities is to have Front End design and coding experience. Without this key skill set, I would not recommend Pardot to another business.

From an IT perspective, once you set up the Javascript beacon and start collecting data there is a waiting game. During this time you can start labeling your site actions which can be labor intensive for a single person, but you don't really have the final end-users on the platform yet. We did a lot of training so users were experienced, but it wasn't until they had their first tasks to accomplish that they started using the system and had questions. I'd recommend setting up some immediate goals for an end-user to start segmenting for the purpose of displaying message campaigns so you can jump start end-user action.

We use Salesforce Marketing Cloud for lead management, generating reports, tracking customer and dealer information, inputting orders, and more. I prefer HubSpot for email marketing and automation because it is easier to use and the emails are designed much better. We currently use Salesforce and HubSpot, and we are very happy to have both, as they have different pros/cons.

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My company used Zendesk Sell for a while, but the profiles weren't as manageable and easy accessed as Shared Contacts [for Gmail.] It resulted easier to update the contact information within Shared Contacts [for Gmail] and maintain the contact flow, than updating in Zendesk, and then manually go into gmail and continue the conversation. As well we don't use Shared Contacts [for Gmail] alone. We do accompany it with an internal operations system, were we manage the clients profile, but the combination between the two is perfect.

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was not involved with this part but i have not heard about clompaints

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Prior to this, we had no solution and literally were doing things on paper in a world where technology is outpacing paper. Having this process optimized has made it easier for the sales and marketing people to change information. From the training perspective, it has allowed us to see holes in where we could create additional support training, so the ROI here has been a lot more than just the optimization of a process.

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• DirectLync has saved our marketing budget thousands of dollars! They have been so generous supporting the marketing needs of Girls PACT, a nonprofit organization.

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• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to more efficiently reach out to a higher number of prospects.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to nimbly communicate important messages in a timely fashion to facilitate conversion.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to track who is opening our messages so that we can stop sending to those not interested and focus on the most engaged audiences.

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• More contact with clients
• Keeping track of contact information no matter the places
• Clients like the familiarity that is created by the constant check on them

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