Heap vs. Salesforce Agentforce Marketing

Heap is well suited for 1. Capture customer journey with session replay 2. Identify customer behaviour and improve overall customer experience 3. Frequent and quick implementations and modifications 4. Comparative analysis for historical marketing insights Heap is not so well suited, if the aim is to capture only analytics data without any goals to improve upon customer experience / targeting appropriate users based on data tracking.

Incentivized

I rated this a seven because I love Salesforce, and it is excellent on the sales side. However, the marketing side has some pros and cons. It is terrific for keeping track of lead, customer, and dealer information, but it is not easy to automate workflows, integrate other software, or create well-designed emails. It is also straightforward to generate reports, which is very helpful in keeping track of lead progression to better market those leads and turn them into customers.

Incentivized

• The Auto Capture function does indeed save quite a bit of time, and being able to build new reports off historical data is really valuable.
• Interface is really intuitive and user-friendly. Much easier to pick up and use than GA.
• Building reports out on the fly is really quick and easy, allowing you to give right into all kinds of analyses.
• The Event Definition screen is really useful, giving a quick glance at the most used events, which you then decide to turn into conversions or goals if you want.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• I think Heap can improve its onboarding; I would love to see some info that is helpful for someone who isn't in Heap every single day.
• Sharing dashboards can be tricky, it feels like a huge learning curve that I already have forgotten how to do.

Incentivized

• Automation studio is very hard to use. We need to create a Data extension with all required fields before we can run SQL. So it takes a lot of time.
• Query Studio is much easier to use but it often gives an error while running the same SQL in Automation Studio works fine.
• We were not able to set up SMS messages as SFMC is not supporting MMS which is a big problem.

Incentivized

Heap helps me understand key data points without fussing with the formatting of a dashboard. It gives me the benefit of data analyzation without the fuss of the formatting - as well as the ease of sharing data collected with my colleagues

Incentivized

We are happy with Pardot. It has made our jobs easier and installed some reporting functions that have increased our ROI with the company. We have worked hard to set-up the functions in Pardot and it has taken time, but paid off.

Sometimes, Heap has issues reconciling similar selectors, and I have not found the manual tagging system to be the most intuitive, especially when best practices are not used when designing the front-end infrastructure. Even so, it helps that the data is unmodified, and all analytics are done through an interfaced layer, so damage and confusion [are] not permanent.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I've never run into any issues with Heap's availability, Heap is always there when I need it. I haven't run into any issues like application errors or unplanned outages during my 2+ years of using Heap. Each and every time I log in to Heap I have a completely functional experience

Incentivized

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.

On a scale from 1-10, Heap loads pages fairly quickly. The only time I experience delays is when I am loading a graph with perhaps too many events or filters on the page. But in terms of creating or searching for events or viewing reports, I don't ever experience a lag.

Incentivized

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.

Heap support has allowed us to troubleshoot and test a lot of different items. Their support team is always helpful and friendly, even when we come to them with the most complicated questions. I think this greatly improves the value proposition of the product because their support team is knowledgable and friendly.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Training program is not very well established. There is very little documentations. More often than not it's in-person training. I wish there were more video tutorials so that somebody can learn the system quickly. Their documentation is very much like an RFP. Long and very technichal. They should definitly improve on this area.

Incentivized

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.

The implementation was smooth and easy. The Heap team helped us with implementation and it went great! Within a few weeks, we were fully up and running and utilizing the platform to its full capability. This is an additional thing that has made this platform so great and we couldn't recommend it enough.

Incentivized

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.

Heap is better because its easy to use, easy to install. With Heap you just add a snippet of tracking code to your header, instead of having to instrument each event like you do with other tools.

Incentivized

The only other product we’re currently evaluating is on the Veeva side — Veeva Campaign. It’s a relatively new product that Veeva has released; it’s only been about six or seven months since it went into general availability. So time will tell whether it can compete with Salesforce Marketing Cloud or not.

Incentivized

The most challenging part of using Heap in a growing organization is the naming and structure in which reports and dashboards are organized. I work within the marketing department and our Heap leader internally works within the IT/Product department, which makes it challenging because we often don't speak the same language, so the learning curve has been steep without any specific use-case examples to leverage online.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• It has helped us make decisions on what products to scope for our MVP based on the usage data.
• It's allowed us to measure success with our beta product.
• It's helped us view our conversion rates in an easy and usable manner.

Incentivized

• We have been able to create mature lead generation opportunities using Salesforce Marketing Cloud in conjunction with CRM.
• We have had to spend much more in technical support
• We have been able to save on costs of daily maintenance emails through automation.

Incentivized