Salesforce Sales Cloud vs. Salesforce Spiff

Salesforce Sales Cloud is an intuitive and easy-to-use platform. It is easy to customize this platform to meet the ever-changing business needs and requirements. It is easy to integrate with other platforms and offers incredible features that help businesses generate leads, automate their marketing processes, and collaborate effectively.

Incentivized

Spiff can serve well organizations that regularly pay OTE and performance-based incentives as it takes away the pain for users to track their OTE pay. It is also very convenient to access past reports for comparison or whatever purpose you may need it for. The build-in ticketing system also allows users to easily raise inquiries and for admins to have a single inbox for inquiries that they need to address.

Incentivized

• Logging notes: SF makes it easy to log notes in the timeline or static notes that live in an easy-to-see spot for longevity.
• Logging activities: It's easy to post a call, text, email, etc.
• API data: Once connected, SF is critical to automation, such as website activity, login activity, pages visited, etc., which saves the Customer Success side time in understanding account activity.
• Custom fields: you can add custom fields to really personalize your experience. We use quite a few and it's brilliant.

Incentivized

• It syncs with your internal systems to show how much you have sold during the current period.
• It tells you how much you should expect to get paid based on your sales.
• It keeps track of how you have performed over the course of the year and tells you when you are in accellerators.
• It also details your organizations sales rules and payout rules so that you just have one place to go for all questions commission related.

Incentivized

• Sometimes setting up the interface can be overly complex.
• Depending on what level of salesforce you are paying for, the SLA for their service team to respond can take a decent amount of time.
• Wish there was more connection between the salesforce apps like service and sales.

Incentivized

• Although reporting has been improved, it's an area that I feel could use more development (which they are doing).
• Exports are good but to make them great, being able to customize the formatting and data that shows and which data doesn't show would be a great improvement.
• The backend can be somewhat confusing with statements and obligations and which should be used when and so on, just as one example. With that being said they are very willing to teach and also just do the updates for you if needed, but if it was a little more intuitive without that help would make it better.

Incentivized

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

I enjoy using it and it is easy to see where you stand, the issue is still no live tracking, or at the very least, twice daily updates. You have the update in the morning, but I would like to see where I stand at the end of the day as well

Incentivized

Salesforce has been designed on the basis of "Clicks, not code". So anyone willing to learn the Salesforce user interface (which is quite good as far as management software platforms go) is able to become a Salesforce user or even a Salesforce administrator. You don't have to know coding language to work in the Salesforce environment. Also, Salesforce has one of the best software training resources (Trailhead) that I have ever encountered. It is free to all, easy to use, and most importantly it is interactive. No scrolling through endless text in a user manual. There are hands-on modules and related videos interlaced and through it all you earn points and badges to display your level of learning.

Incentivized

Overall, the use cases of Spiff have been helping us to address important problems when it comes to commission calculation: (1) Accuracy of the commission calculation, (2) Transparency over how the commission is calculated, (3) Automation of commission calculation, which in turn saves us significant amount of time and energy and allow us to focus more on more important tasks

Incentivized

Salesforce is always available securely from any internet-capable device anywhere in the world, UNLESS you choose to set security measures so that ONLY trusted IP ranges may access the system at certain times of the day. It's all about choice and flexibility with Salesforce products.

Incentivized

In all my time using Spiff, I only recall it being unoperational (outside the times when there is scheduled maintence. During those times, Spiff does a good job at communicating when their services will be offline and why). The times when I do get a small error, 9 times out a 10 a simple refresh of the browser will fix the issue.

Incentivized

Salesforce performance in general is excellent. "The cloud infrastructure beneath Force.com has been fine-tuned over the past 10 years. It powers nearly 100,000+ businesses running more than 185,000 applications that 3 million users count on every day."
Points per Salesforce -
1) Multitenant kernel - With a multitenant platform, each business that uses the app doesn’t have its own copy. Instead, all businesses share a single copy and then customize it for their specific needs.
2) ISO 27001 certified security - You can’t compromise when it comes to enterprise-level security. Force.com is road-tested and trusted by nearly 100,000+ companies, including many of the world’s most security-conscious organizations, such as banks and health care providers.
3) Proven reliability - 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.
4) Proven, real-time scalability - Force.com is used by many of the world's largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec. Applications can automatically scale from a few users to millions of page views, as needed.
5) Real-time query optimizer - You need fast access to your data. The Force.com query optimizer delivers under 300ms response time, at a massive scale.
6) Real-time transparent system status - You can always see real-time system performance, availability, and security information at trust.salesforce.com.
7) Real-time upgrades - Unlike traditional software platforms, our upgrades never break your customizations, code, or integrations. We upgrade the platform for you 3 to 4 times each year. As a result, you’re always on the latest version, with access to the latest features, performance, and security enhancements.
8) Real-time sandbox environments - With a single click, you can create copies of your applications, configuration, and data in separate environments for development, testing, and training.
9) Three global production data centers and disaster recovery - Force.com runs on three geographically dispersed, mirrored data centers with built-in replication, disaster recovery, a redundant network backbone, and no single points of failure

Pages load quickly, dashboards update numerous times throughout the day, and the integrations are seamless and operate without a hitch. On occasion, commissions will be delayed in calculating corrctly by a day or so, but that is quite rare. I don't find that delay to be a huge hinderance anyways.

Incentivized

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 needed my account to be set up and there seemed to be some technical issues with onboarding and a customer service rep made herself immediately available to liaison with our IT department to get me up and running. I did not expect them to tend to our request with such urgency.

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

The training was conducted by our Spiff Account Manager and they would even create recorded videos we could send to the sales team so when they log in, they would understand how to use Spiff. Account managers at Spiff are a huge reason why I like that company.

Incentivized

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.

I wasnt invovled but I heard it went smoothly!

Incentivized

At our company, we use Salesforce and HubSpot. I personally like both for different reasons. Salesforce makes it easy to generate reports, keep track of dealer and customer information, tie customers to dealers, and is easy to use. However, I like HubSpot for the marketing features. I think HubSpot has easier-to-use workflows and email creations.

Incentivized

It is a night and day difference between Sheets and Excel. The fact that it is integrated with Salesforce and calculates commission as you close deals make it super transparent and efficient when it comes to tracking your performance and commission. Spiff takes the manual work out of the equation. Reduces human error and increases collaboration.

Incentivized

Salesforce is the most widely used CRM system. Professionalism tends to increase when things go wrong for market leaders. Salesforce considers us as users because they own the market. Having all of our data in one place and all of our teams working within Salesforce. Anyone who uses Salesforce is impacted by it, even if they don't.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is highly scalable and designed to accommodate the needs of businesses of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises. It offers flexible subscription models and can easily scale up or down based on the organization's requirements. Whether a company is expanding its sales team, increasing its customer base, or adding new features and functionalities, Sales Cloud can adapt to support growth without sacrificing performance or reliability. Additionally, Salesforce's cloud-based architecture ensures that users have access to resources and capabilities as needed, making it a highly scalable solution for organizations looking to automate customer relationship management at scale.

Incentivized

We have a fairly large Enterprise sales team (200+ people and growing). Back when I first started at my organization this number was actually around 100 people. We've doubled in size since then and we have had zero problems adding these additional users.

Incentivized

Using Salesforce.com has made my daily routines more efficient and simplified the manual tasks I had to perform independently. I can now access data from any device, online or offline, and provide better guidance to my team about the forecasts provided by the built-in artificial intelligence (AI). A chat with a Salesforce support specialist would be great. The knowledge base has a community forum where Salesforce users can ask questions and learn more about the product.

• The inbox feature allows me to see when the customer opens my email, and hence a timely follow-up could result in a higher response rate.
• The mobile app allows users to gain access to leads and customer contacts on the go, which increases sales team productivity and enhances customer conversations.
• The reports of the notes on the account level are not working, which is causing manual work in the weekly report to leadership.

Incentivized

• I have to spend more time pulling separate reports to fact-check Spiff to see if there are missing opportunities.
• I pull separate reports to manually input all the spiffs and complexities. Otherwise, it'd be a nightmare.
• Any quota changes affect ICR, and when the ICR changes, it is an absolute nightmare to calculate the difference when backtracking.

Incentivized