Salesforce Lightning Platform vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud

We use Salesforce Lightning Platform in everyday business as sales coordinators. By using this tool, we are able to send new requests to clients and communicate regarding pending proposals in real-time. This also tool holds many of our client accounts where we are able to monitor their sales and revenue.

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

• Reporting and Dashboards are thorough and can show a wealth of important data to inform and scale processes. It's helpful in a high volume sales cycle to be able to quickly identify weak points in performance and productivity so that adjustments can be made.
• Highly customizable. We are able to customize just about everything which allows us to track very specific things and in theory create better efficiency.
• Parent/Child account hierarchy exists which is helpful.
• Contact records can be associated with multiple accounts and opportunities. This, in theory, should minimize duplicates and mismanagement of contacts.
• Console helps a lot with data nesting. Having a fairly comprehensive look at an account without searching through various tabs and sections speeds up an otherwise cumbersome platform.

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

• Can be cumbersome: takes multiple clicks to get where you need to go
• Lightning is slower than original Salesforce, and it is very noticeable
• The UI change means sometimes I can't find what I need, so I have to switch back to the Classic version to find it

Incentivized

• The email builder does not offer any way to catch/check bugs across different email service providers
• Creating SQL is not as easy as drag-and-drop; a lot of technical knowledge is required
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud is sold as a marketing tool, but to be honest, you need a LOT of technical IT support to run the tool
• Einstein metrics are across the board; if you have multiple audiences in one instance of Salesforce Marketing Cloud you can't segment the data.

Incentivized

As of right now we have not seen any other program that integrates as seamlessly into our Salesforce platform. We have barely scratched the surface of all the features and use cases. It would be irresponsible to make a move to another platform in the near future. We have not come up against any limitations that would prompt a need to switch

UI can be quite complex, but the more that is required will bring more complexity. Can handle complexity and variety very well, but makes ground-level views harder when not knowing full extent of functionality. Finding new functionalities can be difficult to pinpoint on some pages

Incentivized

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

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.

Salesforce's support is top-notch. They have subject-matter experts that are accessible at all times to address needs as they come up. They let you know in advance when there are system updates and enhancements so that you are prepared for upcoming changes. I've never had an issue that wasn't addressed immediately when reaching out for support.

Incentivized

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

The trainers at the Pardot user conference (Elevate and Connections) were very knowledgeable and presented the material well. Again, the content was targeted to more of a new user audience, and was not really relevant for folks who had been using the product for 2+ years.

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.

We were previously using an older version prior to it becoming Salesforce Lightning Platform so we were well adverse on the advantages of using a CRM, to begin with. It made sense to convert to Salesforce Lightning Platform after we were given a free trial of the platform. Certain reps were chosen to experiment with it and from there a decision was made to move forward. We've been customers ever since.

Incentivized

I think that all of the marketing platforms I have evaluated and used in the past serve different markets and purposes. Salesforce Marketing Cloud was more palatable to our team because of our existing tech stack where we had Salesforce CRM already deployed and in use. Compared to Marketo and Hubspot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a bit dated in terms of the UI/UX and the overall experience but still meets the needs of our organization. Mailchimp, however, isn't even playing in the same arena and is meant for small organizations and companies that don't have a need for a full fledged offering that SFMC brings to the table.

Incentivized

was not involved with this part but i have not heard about clompaints

Incentivized

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

• Better visibility of Accounts and Contacts interactions makes it easier to maintain during employee transitions.
• Tracking of current jobs and relating them to past jobs is very useful.
• More efficient use of Sales Reps time.
• Sales Managers have good visibility into how their people are working.

Incentivized

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to more efficiently reach out to a higher number of prospects.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to nimbly communicate important messages in a timely fashion to facilitate conversion.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to track who is opening our messages so that we can stop sending to those not interested and focus on the most engaged audiences.

Incentivized