Salesforce Agentforce Marketing vs. Springbot

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

If you have a small marketing team with a small budget and you use Mailchimp & Adroll, Springbot might work for you. Otherwise, there are other more robust tools out there to accomplish the same goals. They need to work on more integrations with other ESPs and retargeting providers. And they need to work on making sure the data being sent to their customers is accurate.

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

• One of the things that impressed me the most early on was their dedication to email deliverability and growing my "engaged" list of customers. Through this, they taught me the value of quality subscribers vs. quantity of subscribers, while still sharing new ways to grow my email list in a healthy and sustainable manner. For so long, my main focus was always having the biggest email list - and while that's good to have a lot of subscribers, the most important thing is to make sure they are ENGAGED with your brand. So together we've come up with fun ways to do that, and we've seen that reflected in our list growth and open rate.
• One of the other things I was looking to do when I partnered with Springbot was to increase my site traffic. The original sales rep had a few recommendations on how we could do this, and our team was most excited about their Facebook Services offering. We were paired with a Facebook expert who did a discovery call with us, and then presented a strategic plan for us to follow for the first 90 days, until we could fully optimize. Their Facebook team narrowed down my target audience and has helped strategically grow my site traffic.
• Finally, and maybe the part that I value the most, is the partnership that I've developed with Springbot. Out of the gate, there is absolutely work to do to get things set up and they don't sugar coat that. While much of the onboarding was smooth - we had a few obstacles to work through, and I'm thankful my Success Manager kept me up to date as we resolved anything that came up, and was proactive with her outreach and recommendations to get the most out of the platform. I find myself learning something new each time I chat with her, whether it be optimizations to my automations, new marketing ideas, or ways to increase engagement as I go into the holidays.
• After being with them for a year, I feel this is more than a vendor + customer relationship, and think of it as a strategic and valuable partnership.

• 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

• They don't keep any of their promises
• They don't listen

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.

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 think Springbot is pretty user-friendly overall. The only down-side is that the website is often updated, leaving the customer to hunt certain features down that are now in a different spot. So I think it would be helpful if every so often they sent an email that let customers know what changes were made and where to access everything

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.

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.

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

They only cared about referencing the user agreement to get out of any common sense discussion I tried to have. They have one goal take your money and don't care if the system is working for you or not.

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.

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.

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

We were choosing between a few different options when considering a new email marketing program. Previously we were using Constant Contact, but wanted a program that offered more. We looked into Klaviyo as well, but after comparing the two we decided to go with Springbot as they offered a wide variety of insights and had wonderful customer service.

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

• 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

• Money spent with zero return. We got nothing from this investment.