Salesforce Agentforce Sales vs. Skylead vs. Surfe

In the end, I think we can always make it fit — and that’s one of the powers of Salesforce. Because of its flexibility and wide range of possibilities, you can really make it work for almost any need. The key, though, is to make thoughtful decisions upfront and plan carefully how you set it up. If you do that, you’ll end up with a truly flexible and effective system.

Incentivized

There are many LinkedIn automation products available, from Chrome extensions to desktop applications, to cloud-based apps like Skylead, and I've used many of them. Skylead stands apart with a simple, intuitive interface that is easy for my clients to use, is very economical compared to others, and is focused on continual improvement and customer service.

Incentivized

Surfe is really a great help/support for our marketing and data team. It saves plenty of time and manual work. We are totally happy with the product and also setup was done in 5 Min.

• It does a good job of routing our leads to customers, to our inside sales reps and teams.
• It does a good job of tracking all of the opportunities that we have, the contacts that we have with people related to the opportunities.
• Organizing and being able to do reports on what our sales are.

Incentivized

• Convenient message inbox for responding to new leads.
• Ability to integrate with CRMs and other 3rd party software for more automation.
• Smart Sequences that use conditional logic to send LinkedIn messages as well as emails.
• Customer service is very responsive and super helpful. They are a pleasure to work with.
• Skylead is constantly improving and adding/updating features based on actual users' input via a feature request forum.

Incentivized

• Easy to set up in both directions
• Getting account data out of LinkedIn
• Searching for Contact options, i.e. E-Mail and phone
• Getting Company Data out of LinkedIn

• I’d say the only thing that can be a bit tricky — and I know Tableau helps address this — is that sometimes we’re limited in how deep we can go with the data in terms of reporting. It would be great to have a bit more robustness within the app itself. However, we’ve figured out our workarounds, and overall, I think it’s a fantastic product — which is why I’ve been working with it for 23 years.

Incentivized

• It would be nice to be able to add steps to a sequence in an existing campaign
• The user hierarchy is a little confusing, in terms of placing my end-user clients under my master account—a little unintuitive
• Similar to above, it would be nice to have an additional level of user access, for scenarios in which I have a client with multiple salespeople on the platform, each with their own login (as it is now, with access only to their own account), but also have a companywide admin account for a sales manager who has access to all of their accounts with one login (I think they are working on this feature).

Incentivized

• After installing the Chrome Plugin, LinkedIn is a bit slower than before
• Pricing is okay, but import from Sales Navigator should be included in the Basic Package

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

All in all, it's a great product that use all day, every day. It's aesthetically pleasing overall and specifically provides information in a clean, concise way. It's easy to manipulate and seems to play well with the other products I use such as Pardot, Gmelius, and our company's proprietary data system. It increases my efficieny in my admin tasks so I have more time to focus on revenue-generation and account management. It's also easy to use from everywhere where it be on a university campus, in a hotel room, one of a million Starbucks, or at home

Incentivized

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. Accordingly, I only recall our instance of Salesforce having one unscheduled, brief down time over 6 years. I can't remember for sure, but it may have been due to our Internet Service Provider (ISP) versus Salesforce itself. Also, Salesforce does it's best to keep customers in the loop:

Trust.salesforce.com is the salesforce.com community's home for real-time information on system performance and security. On this site you'll find:

Live and historical data on system performance
Up-to-the minute information on planned maintenance
Phishing, malicious software and social engineering threats
Best security practices for your organization
Information on how we safeguard your data

For a SaaS provider, I'd rate their performance to be one of the best. At times, reporting tends to slow down if the data set is very large, which is the case in any system. But, that's a very rare phenomenon

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.

Based on my experience, I’ve used Odoo — it’s an open-source ERP system. It’s not exactly the same as Salesforce or Sales Cloud, but it serves a similar purpose. And I feel that Sales Cloud is better. Personally, I find it easier to use and better than what Odoo offers, especially in terms of customization and achieving business objectives. That’s where Salesforce Sales Cloud really stands out in comparison to Odoo.

Incentivized

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

• It helps us achieve our objectives, especially now with Agentforce — we can get more insights to help our sellers sell more. It’s really nice because it’s almost like you can use the standard part of Salesforce to train your agents and teach your sellers how to improve their sales. So that’s really nice.

Incentivized

• Saves time in research
• Getting data and helping to build a database out of a paid platform