QuotaPath vs. Salesforce Sales Cloud

Well suited for getting your sales team visibility on their efforts, it’s great for showing how and why commissions payout as they do with each deal. Adjustments can also be made very quickly on the backend if needed. It’s straightforward and quick to set up and doesn’t require much training, which is very good for smaller-end businesses and sales forces. It doesn’t work well with more nuanced deals that may age multiple pay points or for larger sales forces, and some custom CRMs will have trouble or be incompatible.

Incentivized

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

• We don’t have to calculate commissions in Excel anymore! It takes a fraction of the time it used to calculate commissions. Saves about 1-2 days on month end close. I like that it is easy for me and reps to drill down and see the calculations of their payouts. Reps can see calcs all month long instead of having to wait until the end of the month, so acts as a motivator. Sales managers can manage their direct reports better.
• When I first started using QP, I was not thrilled with the quota attainment reporting for dollars, percent, and team management. I’m glad that they added leaderboards and are working on better reporting. I like the UX and UI of the whole software.
• I like being able to export the following easily to Excel – resolved payouts for all payouts, payouts by rep, and Ledger (ASC 606) info.
• Admins can request that reps acknowledge their plans through QP, which helps with compliance and ensures we are in agreement with calculations. I like that they are adding a docusign feature.
• You can easily adjust earnings if a correction is needed, even after the month is closed. Just make sure you reverse from the end of the process (i.e. undo in ledger, undo the resolved payout, delete the unresolved payout, un-approve the deal).

• 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

• More workspace roles with the ability to customize what each user is able to do. Currently, there's only member and team manager. The team manager currently has too much power and we want to remove some of the things they're able to do like approve deals.
• When you sync a deal from the CRM, you can override the earnings but you cannot override the field value you're syncing over. It would be great if that was possible.
• When you want to exclude a deal, you have to go in the filters and add a rule to exclude the ID. It would be better if there's an option to reject deals in certain paths as an approver.

Incentivized

• 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

I don't have buying decision but we have input on the software or solutions we use and this has been a game changer to review our commissions. Quota Path makes it very easy to ensure we are on target. Saves us a lot of time compared to using spreadsheets

Incentivized

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

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

I ran into some issues with setting up an MRR earning path. Their customer service team was readily available to assist, provide guidance and get their hands on our setup, which made getting this up and running much easier. Also (shame on me), I missed a couple of calls with my CSM, Daniel, but he never got frustrated with my absence. In fact, he was always able to reschedule and was flexible with my schedule — when we were able to connect, he was a major, major help.

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

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.

Xactly Incent was very difficult to configure. And UI wasn't very friendly. Spiff and CaptivateIQ had a good UI but the learning and coding required was going to be too much for the short window of time before implementation was due. QuotaPath was able to build our comp plans in less than a month so we could focus on the necessary configuration of data in Salesforce.

Incentivized

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.

• Reduce commission calculations from a full day to minutes
• Provides both managers and reps with insight into their earnings
• Highly flexible plan structuring that allowed us to pay based on our objectives
• While saving money on the elimination of manual commission processing (+/12c days per year) I believe the real payback has been the way it has helped us to better incentivize and motivate our reps

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