Optimizely Content Marketing Platform vs. Salesforce Agentforce Sales

A 7 only because I think there's question marks around customization. However, I've seen very similar tools in the past where stakeholders have been skeptical, but as you get to know it and use it, you'll find actually you realize those benefits. I just think Optimizely could help its stakeholders and clients see those benefits early on versus later on. However, that's not to say it's not possible, so a 7 at this stage, but I think it's got potential in future. If you are a marketing firm who wants a centralized system for managing workflows and campaigns, it's great. It does that. However, there are better competitors fill in some of the gaps better than optimized leaders does. It could do better. I think for me, visually when I see, when I create a workflow or a campaign, I can see all the tasks associated with it and I've seen the way that our parent company uses it. It's just a list of all the tasks you see in one view. I think visually it needs improving. However, the purpose that it serves fundamentally, it's got potential, if that makes sense. It's going in the right direction, but I think competitors are doing some of it better than Optimizely is. I think they, like I was saying earlier, if they really want to realize the benefits of the product visually there needs to be some improvement. And then the controls element that I mentioned earlier as well, hopefully that answers both of your questions.

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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.

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• The CMP really is useful for us not only to manage the processes behind how we create content that we serve in different platforms like websites, landing pages, emails, social media, but it also help us as a team that is scattered around the globe to be able to be connected all the time to be able to see what we're working on, to be able to share assets as well. We are not reinventing the wheel to be able to show to other people within the organization what is happening at any given point. We use it not only for assets now, but we use it also for things like planning our webinars, planning our face-to-face events, so it truly is the heart of our marketing organization within the business.

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• 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.

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• One thing that could be improved is some of the promotions that happen in platform. For example, there's a Opal AI little bubble at the bottom right of the corner, which you can't move across the screen. So if you're trying to change the status of a step or you're trying to update a description within a step, that can be a bit challenging and as it seems to be quite an easy fix.
• I would love to see a capability in terms of having visual representation that we can share out with stakeholders that don't necessarily need access to CMP. But for that level of detail, we don't want it to go too granular, but we do want to be able to share in a quick and visual manner some of the activities that are happening so we can keep everybody in the loop without having to create different variations via different tools.

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• 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.

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The tool is over-engineered and overly complicated. It makes my job much harder and not easier. There's much simpler tools for a lot less money

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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.

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The editorial calendar is the one I check multiple times every day. It gives me a clear picture of what's in progress, what's due, and where things can be moving faster. And, there's no need to open a separate doc or ask anyone for a status update.
Also, the workflows are another super useful thing. Being able to assign specific reviewers to specific steps and know that nothing moves forward until they've acted has eliminated many repetitive processes.

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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.

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I have not experienced any prolonged outages. From time to time there will be errors but nothing that significantly slows down production

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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.

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Optimizely Content Marketing Platform's performance is generally good. Nothing that has impacted production. Page load speed doesn't typically lag longer than a few seconds. Reports take some time but not any longer than we're used to with other platforms. We have not experienced lag when integrating with other platforms

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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

The NewsCred team is very responsive and helpful with any technical issues.

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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

Training was clear and concise. It was intuitive and helped me understand how to navigate the platform. Options to dive in on each action or skip to learn about areas of regular use. Resource links available to when I had additional questions or needed more training in a specific area. Overall, the training allowed me to use the platform without interruption

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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

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 haven't yet explored the CMS or other products within the suite but we see the potential to move all of our tools to Optimizely One. I see this really helping us gain clarity in the end to end content lifecycle, and help us use our resources and bandwidth more strategically

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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.

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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.

Optimizely is generally a reliable platform for A/B testing and digital experience management. It's helpful for it's stability, flexibility, and comprehensive features, which is helpful when managing an enterprise website

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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.

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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 program has allowed us to meet our content goals more easily (e.g.: we publish X articles per month and track where each article is at).
• It's helped us improve the accuracy of our information. We have SEO, content strategists, and legal teams involved in the workflow now because it's easy to manage.

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• 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.

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