Salesforce Agentforce Marketing vs. Showpad eOS®

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

Showpad Content works well to provide a central hub for all document hosting. The interface is simple and easy enough to use. Our sales team likes that you are able to see when a user has opened your file once it has been shared with them and how long they spent viewing it.

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

• User-Friendly. The ability to easily customize to fit your needs
• Delivering content easily and quickly, reducing cost for print, and out of date information
• Reporting. Providing the analytical function to track what content has been utilized or not utilized and become more efficient in the type of information you share
• Offline Use. The ability to be able to view content offline

Incentivized

• 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

• Not truly a limitation, but I would love it if I could customize the design a bit further within the shared spaces that I create.
• Loading large resources sometimes takes a few seconds - not particularly long and not an issue, but it is not instantaneous in some cases.

Incentivized

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

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

I have not been involved with support from Showpad so I am not entirely sure. However, we have received some emails from our help desk about an outage and it seems like it didn't last very long so I would say that it was pretty effective support to that extent.

Incentivized

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

Honestly, I have yet to see another service similar to Showpad. You might have email trackers that tell you when your clients opened up an email or which links from your email were clicked. Showpad has it all, in addition to having a hub of resources where you can easily share with your clients. The level of engagement tracking from using Showpad is next-level.

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

• 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

• It has improved sales reps in becoming audible ready on different topics via lots of practice via LearnCore.
• It has made the job more interesting by employing competitions.
• It has made our reps more polished and client facing out in the field and has reduced ramp up time on new hires.

Incentivized