Marketing Cloud is an AI-powered, cloud-based digital marketing platform within the Salesforce Customer 360 ecosystem. Marketers can segment their audience, deliver personalized messages, track campaign performance, engage leads and accounts, and optimize strategies based on real-time insights.
$1,250
per month per installation
Salesforce Revenue Cloud
Score 8.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Salesforce Revenue Cloud (formerly Salesforce CPQ or SteelBrick) is built and delivered on the Salesforce Platform and Salesforce1 Mobile App which enables users to create accurate sales quotes quickly and submit error-free orders on the fly from any device.
Pardot is a VERY flexible tool. Most have thought of it as a very adolescent tool, but it holds its own against Marketo in the VAST majority of areas. You DON'T need a near full-time developer to keep it working (unlike Marketo). Act-on was limited in what it could do, HubSpot …
Salesforce CPQ [(formerly SteelBrick)] seamlessly integrates with Salesforce allowing us to have less integrations to manage. Releases don't break a connection causing delays in the sales process.
We selected SteelBrick over Apttus mainly because it is a Salesforce product and we felt that long term it would be better integrated to Sales Cloud, which is important to us because we are a longtime Salesforce user.
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.
What I like best is the ease of use to be able to track all opportunities and quotes in my daily sales tracker I also like the fact that you can reorganize the view for your opportunities. For instance, it is very similar to a spreadsheet where you can filter them by date, dollar amount, name, and several other ways. I found this to be less appropriate when we have to do multiple roles while assigning one task to multiple users. Column resizing within the Quote Line Editor is not supported in the Salesforce mobile app.
Salesforce CPQ easily maps to standard and custom fields within the opportunity in SFDC, allowing you to avoid time spent duplicating effort or copying and pasting deal criteria.
Salesforce CPQ connects directly to pre-determined price book, making it very easy to provide a proposal based on standard cost and/or add discounts to standard cost and reflect those reductions on the order form as appropriate.
Salesforce CPQ provides the ability for administrators to configure workflows for approval based on certain discount %'s on the standard cost, offering a quick and easy way to route automatically through the organization for approval.
Our Salesforce is very messy, which tells me it's not super easy to clean up.
I always have a really hard time removing a contacts from an account - it seems like you can't simply remove the relationship so we have lots of people named DO NOT CONTACT or things of that nature.
Sometimes when saving it doesn't seem like things actually save.
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
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.
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
There have been some issues with multi-year pricing of certain products and services which we have been assured will be resolved but I guess are still underway, the support team apart from this has not been needed much and in the rare scenarios, it has been needed the resolutions of conflicts has been prompt and quick, so the overall support would have my high regards for being so helpful and customer-oriented so as to assure good performance of their toolset and customer satisfaction.
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.
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.
There is no comparison to a fully functional instance of CPQ. Nothing comes close due to the amount of customization and ease of use that CPQ offers once it's fully built out. Other solutions may be easier to build or administer, but for the users and business needs, CPQ is the best solution possible.
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.
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.
Salesforce CPQ has helped a lot with overall visibility to the quote to order process. Reps have more insight into the business and the business has more insight into Sales Rep interactions. This makes troubleshooting issues much easier.
Our reporting capabilities have improved immensely. The ability to easily create fields allows you to capture new data points very easily.
Communication in Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce, in general, is a big improvement for our business. The ability to have a chatter feed on any object is very helpful. This can also be used for feed tracking to give some basic change management controls/history.
