Salesforce Sales Cloud vs. Varicent

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

For the use cases we have at the bank, ICM is a perfect solution. For any bank or institution that has similar requirements, ICM would be a perfect solution. But I also think for any use case that has any sort of incentives based on Sales done, this would work amazing, as both Calculations and reports are handled by ICM very well; it's an all-in-one solution, I feel like.

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

• Flexibility - Varicent is not template based. You can implement the model specifically for your organisation.
• Scalability - Since it is not stick to templates you are able to expand the model for other domains as well.
• Reporting - Several ways of reporting are possible and each has their own benefit/purpose.
• Strong/Powerfull Calculation Engine delivering fast results/speed to insight
• User Interface is minimized to what you need and is not showing off all the functions it can "also" do
• Strong audittrail
• Appears to be almost unlimited in what you are able to create

• 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

• As [the] model gets more and more transactional data, the calculation time increases. This should/can be handled internally with better model optimization.
• Migrating from one env to other sometimes is challenging. There can be better 'Alerts' or 'Explanation' provided to handle it or at least to give a hint of the error.
• For managers viewing their rep's report, the access part can be made easier. It should be linked to Payee hierarchy and access can be done automatically.

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

Customer support from IBM is impeccable. They are quick to respond and they don't nickel and dime you for every request you make. Their goal is to ensure your success and as a user, I really feel like they listen to my concerns. That's not to say there are no problems. All software has its issues, but I don't feel like those issues fall on deaf ears.

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

Any calculations can be implemented as there are hardly any limitations on complexity. However, online real-time usability is lacking - a simple user enters, and the system calculates work in a way that it is in the browser and hence still needs overnight to be properly reflected in the batch calculations and backend tables.

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

Never went down in last 3 years that I worked with it (every hour of the day basically). That is a 10 in my book.

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

All is fast, but with API's it is sometimes slower due to the application we are pulling data from. Reports are loaded directly or within seconds and our reports are very detailed with many columns and rows.

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.

Giving a 10 would suggest there is no room for improvement. I don't feel like their support is perfect. However, I have never met another team that was more dedicated to making sure we get what we want and need.

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

The training was good in general with a nice trainer as well. But, the training could be better if it is more focussed on our process/data etc.

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

There is a learning portal with many videos about navigation, creating reports and managing your model.

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.

Test test test. Make sure that the product is calculating everyone 100% correctly. DO NOT accept a 70% pass rate as some companies would like to have you believe is acceptable. This means conducting thorough testing by providing 100% of all expected results, but it will be worth it when you know that the compensation plans are working entirely as expected.

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

In 2015, we used a scorecard containing 80 attributes in our review of Oracle, Callidus, and Xactly & Varicent. Oracle did not have true self serve capabilities- programming was heavily required, not intuitive, out of the box functionality was limited. Callidus & Xactly could not provide us a demo using our data, statements could not be sent out in bulk form, difficulty in importing/exporting to CRM. Varicent excelled in most areas and was the clear winner.

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

It is very scalable and adaptable to changing complexities of calculations and business rules under a variety of different scenarios. It does not get full points because in large data loads the time needed to calculate and import the data increases exponentially and may cause issues related to timing potentially.

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

• Compliance - with a central system used for calculation incentive payments and commissions, we are able to provide reports and data showing every detail of how payments are calculated and why they are justified. We can also identify anomalies and outliers.
• Integration with our payroll system is seamless. Except for regular pay, nothing goes to payroll without going through ICM. The process for paying incentives/bonuses/commissions is now very structured and efficient.

Incentivized