Microsoft BI (MSBI) vs. Salesloft

Microsoft BI is well suited for Stream analytics, easy data integration, report creation and UI/UX designs (limited but what all available are great ones) Microsoft BI may be less appropriate for handling huge number of datasets and difficult queries. It may also be difficult for a company with heavy data.

I find it to be the best resource for scheduling calls with clients. Specifically when the call includes multiple people using Salesloft, it's so simple and easy to use to send open times to client and then to be able to send active links to the client where with one click the calendar invite shows up on my calendar? it's the best most efficient tool I have in my toolbelt at the moment. When it comes to logging, it's also simple but I wish I could add a contact to SL from the Microsoft integration.

Incentivized

• Comparatively easy to use compared to other data analytics solutions, collaborating with other colleagues on data work is simple.
• Using Visual Studio for database, ETL, reporting, and analytics development save time and money.
• Transfer of data from one application to another via Excel and comparison of data attributes between applications
• Dashboard functionality, as well as Python support, are available, allowing you to add additional charts and graphs.

Incentivized

• Salesloft enables us to outreach at scale.
• Salesloft helps us identify our warmest, most buyer ready prospects to streamline our outreach.
• Salesloft helps us to identify quickly areas to course correct and provides the necessary data to do that.
• Salesloft also surfaces data around outreach so we can ensure we are targeting our team with sensible KPIs that connect to our business goals.

Incentivized

• The race to perfect gathering of Non-Traditional datasets is on-going; with Microsoft arguably not the leader of the pack in this category.
• Licensing options for PowerBI visualizations may be a factor. I.e. if you need to implement B2C PowerBI visualizations, the cost is considerably high especially for startups.
• Some clients are still resistant putting their data on the cloud, which restricts lots of functionality to Power BI.

Incentivized

• Would be nice to have custom reporting available. Coming from Salesforce, the included canned reports are useful but I like to roll my sleeves up and build exactly what I want.
• Conversations will record meetings booked via MSTeams but requires the BDR/SDR to hit record. Other solutions (e.g. Chorus.ai) join as a participant and don't require a user hitting the "record" button. We have to change our flow to make this work and it is a bit clunky.

Microsoft BI is fundamental to our suite of BI applications. That being said, Northcraft Analytics is focused on delighting our customers, so if the underlying factors of our decision change, we would choose to re-write our BI applications on a different stack. Luckily, mathematics are the fundamental IP of our technology... and is portable across all BI platforms for the foreseeable future.

SalesLoft is absolutely VITAL to our daily operations. We could not function without it or a program like it. Speaking as a Sales Person who has had to operate without a product like this, the difference is night and day. The ability to stay organized, automate tasks, easily log activities and notes, review calls, and coach team members is an absolute gamechanger.

Incentivized

The Microsoft BI tools have great usability for both developers and end users alike. For developers familiar with Visual Studio, there is little learning curve. For those not, the single Visual Studio IDE means not having to learn separate tools for each component. For end-users, the web interface for SSRS is simple to navigate with intuitive controls. For ad-hoc analysis, Excel can connect directly to SSAS and provide a pivot table like experience which is familiar to many users. For database development, there is beginning to be some confusion, as there are now three tool choices (VS, SSMS, Azure Data Studio) for developers. I would like to see Azure Data Studio become the superset of SSMS and eventually supplant it.

Incentivized

Drift was extremely easy for both our demand gen team and SDR to jump right into. It was feature rich and purpose-built for marketers—it was remarkably easy to connect our marketing automation, CRM, and more to the platform and get everything to work together. Now the ability to create digital experiences and conversation landing pages is democratized—empowering our team to do better work and provide better prospect/customer experience.

The product has been reliable.

The availability is pretty good, we do sometimes have errors or delays in syncing activities but nothing that has been too detrimental to our workflow. Most recently we had an issue with Lofting through Outlook due to a change in security token that took a few weeks to resolve but it is fixed now.

Incentivized

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) can drag at times. We created two report servers and placed them under an F5 load balancer. This configuration has worked well. We have seen sluggish performance at times due to the Windows Firewall.

Yes timely and easy to use. The only delays we have are when we run our big month sales blitz and activities take some time to sync to the reporting as well as SalesForce

Incentivized

While support from Microsoft isn't necessarily always best of breed, you're also not paying the price for premium support that you would on other platforms. The strength of the stack is in the ecosystem that surrounds it. In contrast to other products, there are hundreds, even thousands of bloggers that post daily as well as vibrant user communities that surround the tool. I've had much better luck finding help with SQL Server related issues than I have with any other product, but that help doesn't always come directly from Microsoft.

The support team was very responsive but at the end of the day they took a long time to fix our issue. The issue did get fixed, though, so that is what matters. Very nice people who are there to help in any way they can.

This training was more directed toward what the product was capable of rather than actual programming.

I have used on-line training from Microsoft and from Pragmatic Works. I would recommend Pragmatic Works as the best way to get up to speed quickly, and then use the Microsoft on-line training to deep dive into specific features that you need to get depth with.

We had some virtual training with our CSM which was very well constructed. It took some time to get into the full swing of things but with a few weeks of hands on experience I was feeling confidant. The SL team was always available to answer questions or jump an a call to walk us through stuff. I also used the Customer Help Center for a few self guided learnings on how to use specific features related to reporting and team management.

Incentivized

We are a consulting firm and as such our best resources are always billing on client projects. Our internal implementation has weaknesses, but that's true for any company like ours. My rating is based on the product's ease of implementation.

must invest time and effort in define the best way to integration with Salesforce in order to get data visualization

Incentivized

We have used the built in ConnectWise Manager reports and custom reports. The reports provide static data. PowerBI shows us live data we can drill down into and easily adjust parameters. It's much more useful than a static PDF report.

Incentivized

Salesloft blows outreach out of the water in all aspects. One of the biggest issues I had was their unwillingness to listen to customer feedback. I had requested several small changes to be made when I had previously used the platform that unfortunately fell onto deff ears. I am much happier using Salesloft and the positive results I've experienced are a direct result of that.

Incentivized

The scalability was pretty good, we started with 4 or 5 users on one team and scaled into 30+ members across 3 teams

Incentivized

• As a SaaS provider we see being able to provide self-service BI to our client users as a competitive advantage. In fact the MSSQL enabled BI is a contributing factor to many winning RFPs we have done for prospective client organisations.
• However MSSQL BI requires extensive knowledge and skills to design and develop data warehouses & data models as a foundation to support business analysts and users to interrogate data effectively and efficiently. Often times we find having strong in-house MSSQL expertise is a bless.

Incentivized

• I have been with a company that was using Salesloft, but moved to a competitor. I can't say it was exactly the competitors fault, as a lot of other internal changes were happening, (hence leaving the system that was working well), but we had the worst sales year in company history that year. Reps who consistently performed at or above quota were suddenly struggling to keep their pipelines in order, and the middle of the pack reps were going on PiPs and being let go.
• Is it the dialer, or the leadership? You decide.
• But the leadership also changed the dialer - so maybe it's both?

Incentivized