GreenRope vs. Salesforce Sales Cloud

There's no such thing as a CRM that doesn't have its complications and headaches. I have tried a lot of them and ultimately like GreenRope heads and shoulders above the rest. GreenRope is particularly suited for small to medium sized businesses who do not have the budget or need for a SalesForce install, or the engineers necessary to make other CRM software work. If you want a more sophisticated system than an email responder like MailChimp or Constant Contact, you need to have a CRM. So ask yourself what you are looking to automate in your business and then go for a solution that has the ability to scale with you. A CRM is a commitment to long term growth and automation, and you should see it as an investment -- both in cash and in time. I don't have a programmer and have managed to get a lot of functionality out of GreenRope (all DIY). And I'm always adding to it with no limits in sight.

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

• GreenRope provides a full-featured application at ALL pricing levels. You don't have to 'upgrade' to get better features - you've got them all right away. I really appreciated this!
• GreenRope doesn't charge per user (i.e., administrator of the system). Other systems require additional fees when adding administrators to your account. GreenRope makes it easy for me to get help with the CRM by adding more of my people, without adding multiple fees.
• Customer Service at GreenRope rocks! They really want to help you get started well. The training and set-up calls are fantastic. For any support issues that have come up (usually newbie questions!) I've always received a prompt response. I can't say enough about their support.
• There are many ways for me to customize my data sets, for management and segmentation of contacts, specific to my industry and business needs.
• Dashboard customization - as a visual learner, the presentation of information on my screen is important to me, and GreenRope allows me the ability to customize colours, icons, and sizes of things in my dashboard. This is helpful for my creativity and productivity.

• 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

• The project management software - while usable in its current form - can still benefit from further development. But I've noticed that they are working on it, so it seems they are aware of this area of opportunity.
• This is a little thing, but I'd like the ability to drill into specific tasks from more areas, and mark them complete quickly or make notes on them.
• I honestly don't have many suggestions. I use their ticket system to make suggestions when they occur to me, and they tend to incorporate suggestions very quickly into subsequent builds.

• 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

They have monthly renewals, so at any time you can cancel and not feel like they are holding your money. Their customer support is easy to work with. Their ticketing system to communicate with you about service issues is fantastic(which is included in the monthly fee) allows you to track issues. We use the ticketing system and add it to our website. This gives people the ability to communicate with us 24/7.

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

It takes time to learn this system. It is not going to happen over night, but once you master it it will be worth it. I am already seeing some great results, all I have to do is keep learning.

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

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

Many times I have to repeat the issue several times before the person understands correctly. There was also an instant where support was not available when help was needed, had to wait for a response and it was a business day.

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

I think there are some cheat sheets and best practises lists that could be created that would save a business a lot of time and frustration. BUT, even as it is, the frustrations and challenges disappear as things start working. I am going to be offering up a few of the tricks I have learned to the team at GreenRope to share with other users because when customers offer valuable work arounds that they find helpful to others, we accomplish a few things. The coders get an idea of things that aren't working quite as expected so they can look into fixes, other customers get benefit and we all win

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.

We chose GreenRope.com because they were the best fit. We already had a marketing email strategy with Constant Contact so choosing a CRM with those capabilities was very important when making our decision. Everything we were already doing could be in 1 place instead of needing to login to several different outlets to reach our goals and objectives. For example, email marketing (Constant Contact), website tracking (our Host), client tracking (spreadsheets), Calendars (Outlook), etc. Now we do everything, email marketing, track leads, have a work flow, track website visitors, post events and forecast all with 1 login. It's great!!

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

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.

• It has helped us from an efficiency standpoint to organize, keep track off, and communicate with our contacts.
• We have high functionality and great features for a great cost.
• People with varying levels of computer experience can use GreenRope and many of its features.

Incentivized

• It is easy for the sales team to track how well the dealers in their region are selling products.
• It is easy to generate reports and see how well sales are each month compared to past months.
• Quicker time to get products shipped to customers.

Incentivized