June 03, 2015
Salesforce Sales Cloud: The Only Sunny Day Cloud You Need.
Online Training
10
TrustRadius
https://media.trustradius.com/product-logos/l0/pv/LVR8JXQCFPV6.PNGSalesforceSalesforce Sales Cloud: The Only Sunny Day Cloud You Need.2015-01-27T21:08:25.255ZSalesforce is currently used to track product transference from lead generation and combing(Leads),to initial POC with a physician or potential patient client(Activities), to requesting supplies(Products) that are then packaged and shipped to a physician for specimen collection and return(Opportunities w/ Stages), as well as Client Issue recording (Cases) and reporting metrics of various designs such as # calls per Service Rep, # Opps per week per Sales rep, etc. for management. We also use a map addon(InField Maps) to help the field sales team see problem areas, hot spots, cold spots, etc. as well as a few other addons such as roll-up helper and DemandTools for administrative maintenance.,Data Visibility
Position flexibility (customized page views, access, etc.)
Workflow (wf rules, validation rules, triggers, dependant picklists, etc.)
Training resources,Reporting, only three ways of sorting, can't sort by multiple tiers,
Emailing
One contact to many accounts (currently a one-to-one relationship, so physicians that practice at multiple locations must be dealt with with custom development)
Inventory management
Mobile interaction (It's usually more efficient to use the mobile app to just navigate to the full site on a phone or tablet),9,Increased employee efficiency
Increased accountability
Increased visibility on ROI (Supplies sent out vs specimen tests billed)
Better department interaction (sales with service with fulfillment with marketing with management with medical with laboratory with corporate),,60,1,Sales team needs to find leads in their areas and see what previous contact has been made
Client needs to contact a member of the Sales or Service departments for supply requests
Need to track Client interactions with both Sales and Service teams on a detailed basis,Mass email marketing, salesforce is terrible at this
Using InField maps, Salesforce has been able to keep up with nearly constant territory shifting amongst the salesteam
Using InField Maps and a snipping tool, Salesforce has allowed us to create on-demand service maps for clients,Inventory Management
ROI calculation
Use Communities to provide a HIPAA-compliant area where customers can access their patient' information,Implemented in-house,Online training
Self-taught,10,Salesforce is not easy to learn without training. It's easy TO USE, but not learn if you're wanting to do development and customizations.,Yes,9,Yes,Record creation
Pipeline monitoring
Management visibility
Data loading,Training and understanding are front-loaded
Reporting: mostly front-loaded, but sometimes related objects can't be shown on the sam report
Emailing/marketing campaigns,Yes,10,10Kyle DuggerDominant CRM leader.2013-01-15T22:27:19.689ZWe used Salesforce's Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Force.com platform. These are exceptionally well designed with inherent best practice capabilities. Here are some suggestions towards maximizing Salesforce - http://www.saascg.com/maximizing-salesforce/,I believe that Salesforce's inherent best practices are strong and the platform enables great flexibility, which can be a double-edged sword. Proper diligence must be given to your internal controls environment, especially around Quoting and linkage to your financial system.
Data analytics and snap shots. Most people used a 3rd party tool for this, like Tableau Software or GoodData.
Make it easier to track marketing campaign ROI. Campaign to lead is good. You must follow specific procedures during the Lead to Opportunity/Contact & Account conversion process to ensure campaign to opp/contact tie in.
I believe the user interface of the online help could be better organized with a cleaner user interface.
Data cleanliness (ie - duplicate leads and accounts/contacts). Most people use a 3rd party tool for this, like Cloudingo.,Tough to quantify ROI. I can tell you that Salesforce was essential for process management and visibility within our business model. We went live on Salesforce within 2 months. This included a full connection to our website, where people downloading our software would fill out a registration page, which created a lead within Salesforce. Goal was to give our sales reps efficient visibility into New Leads for prompt sales activity. It also enabled us to scale, organically AND via acquisitions.,9,9,120,3,Marketing campaign management, lead management and opportunity management in a high transaction volume, inside sales and channel environment.,,Implemented in-house
Professional services company,9,Online training
In-person training
Self-taught,8,8,Yes. I know many Salesforce Administrators who are self-taught. These people normally have a finance and/or sales operations focus.,In some cases to reassign existing leads to different sales reps based on the lead's certain supplemental actions.,Yes,9,9,10,10,Our website. 2) NetSuite. 3) A custom SQL system.,In my current role as President of SaaS Consulting Group, my team has done many integrations, including Salesforce with Doubleclick (an Internet advertising solutions company). We are also in the early stages of a Salesforce to Zuora integration.,,Private. Salesforce has such a dominant market share, that it is difficult to negotiate special terms.Rob Gottschalk2 Hats Salesforce User2014-11-08T21:37:18.458ZSFDC is used company wide as we work with it and provide consultancy to other companies to implement and use it. We use it for monitoring our leads, recording the encounters with them throughout the conversion process from lead to customer. For other companies, our customers, we help them tailoring the SFDC platform to their own needs and adding custom objects that they can integrate into the SFDC standard objects and fields, even if they are not on the traditional selling process, SFDC can be used to manage non-for-profit organizations too.
The breakthrough use of mobile technology makes apps available all the time everywhere.,Tasks and events logging including emails, phone calls and integrating with corporate email systems and Outlook connector is fantastic and gives sales team more time instead of double entry.
The new files storage management capabilities makes it easier to maintain collaboration on the same document even on the go, and maintain corporate security
Chatter capabilities as an intranet medium facilitates communication with all company staff, specially with the Chatter free licencing (up to 5000) everyone can generate leads and document findings and pass it to the sales team
Flexible reporting and the ease of creating new everyday reports and dashboards by users themselves and leave the heavy lifting to IT or service providers.,The mobile App might need more improvements regarding response and processing with limited, cluttered mobile devices with limited bandwidth and HW resources.
The platform is very easy which might encourage messing up with the existing processes, specially on the loose security entities like small business.
Dashboards is great but it might need more improvements to avail more business intelligent components,10,Lead conversion is much faster with SFDC
No loose ends on follow-ups with leads. Notifications are always active and you can set follow-up at each task or event to keep you up to the beat with your contacts and leads, so you won't break any promises
Better customer support as all agents has access to the records of the previous encounters, so they'll sound much knowledgeable and gain customer confidence that they are working with an expert,10,Implemented in-house,9,10,9Verified UserIndispensable platform.2012-11-30T21:00:12.177ZIt makes Sales, Marketing & Services Automation so much easier. The ability to customize Salesforce according to our business needs and to get that done in a shorter time-span is the key difference.,I can't think of anything. It has its tentacles spread across almost all functions in an enterprise and proves to be a very efficient tool, if used properly.
One area where they could invest more and extend the functionality would be to incorporate a completely native CPQ (Configure / Price / Quote), tool that can leverage the existing functionality of the platform.,10,No. of Opportunities converted in Salesforce
Time to market
Change Management - Release cycle time
Effort spent on changes,,400,2,CRM for Sales & Marketing (New Business Development, Account Management, Email Marketing, Campaign Management, Channel Marketing etc.), Customer Support, Professional Services Management.,10,,Professional services company
Don't know,5,Online training
Self-taught,10,Depends on the individual taking the training. Self-taught worked for me and I'll recommend that approach to individuals who can benefit from that approach.,10,No,10,10,10,9,Sage Saleslogix
BigMachines
Echosign
Netsuite
Boulderlogic
LMS,Yes,Not part of the negotiation in this company.Verified UserHeavy reporting capabilities lacking.2012-10-26T03:34:15.318ZEase of use for basic features
Customizable
Relatively simple self-service reporting
Escalations
Work flows,Heavy reporting or analysis
Act as a true development tool
Provide sub-second response times that might be required of a call center,9,Make no mistake, this software is not inexpensive. However the visibility and cross-organization communication it facilitates is more than worth the cost.
In addition, bolt on software is available that can dramatically reduce implementation and integration times while adding needed features (i.e. order processing).,10,350,Provides clear view of accounts, prospects and sales activities
Provides clear view of all client-reported issues
Provides software to support change management processes across multiple internal groups,,Professional services company,,Online training
Self-taught,7,Training was not required for most basic features.,Yes,7,8,9,9,Primarily other SaaS products. Many of which were on the Force.com platform.,Not many initially. We were able to get more favorable conditions as we grew.Verified UserBest CRM On the Market But Only When Implementation and Training Handled With Care2013-09-26T20:07:52.964ZOpen source platform, so organizations can customize applications.
Increases sales - as long as users adopt the system.,Salesforce does not support non-enterprise organizations well. That is where partner organizations can make a big difference.
Users must adopt the system for all the promises Salesforce makes to come true.
If implementation fails, the systems fails. Executives must give employees time to implement the system.
Training is key to successful implementation and adoption. This requires help from a partner organization.,8,We are growing rapidly and have increased sales by 30% this year.
We have increased our contacts and leads exponentially.,10,Sales opportunity visualization.
Sales and marketing pipeline management.
Contact management.,,Implemented in-house
Professional services company,10,Online training
In-person training
Self-taught,8,5,No, in order to really see ROI, it's important to get training from an expert. If people don't know how to use the software, they won't use it and the whole initiative fails.,No,2Verified UserExtremely configurable but too complex.2012-11-19T22:22:06.819ZSalesforce is very good at allowing businesses to model their front office business processes, particularly sales and customer service. It is an open system with an open API that makes system integrations easier. It is extremely configurable and customizable, with excellent built in reporting.,The main shortcoming of Salesforce.com is that it is fairly complex.,9,Huge efficiency gains in sales and in customer service.,200,5,Sales
Service
Software Development
Product Management,10,No,Don't know,7,Online training
In-person training
Self-taught,9,The basics are easy to learn without training, but advanced concepts, such as the sharing rules, require training.,Yes,8,8,9,9,Eloqua
Marketo
Zendesk
Our own product which is based on Force.com,NoVerified UserNot ideal for contact management.2012-11-13T22:45:07.783ZNot really designed as a contact management system (which is my specific use case). We did some custom development work to make the platform manage our specific contact management workflow. Although there are better contact management systems out there, we needed everything to be integrated into a single system. Salesforce is used for a lot more than just contact management across the organization.,Some usability issues. Although usability is generally good, there are some weaknesses: not all objects talk to each other / impossible to report on certain things.
Salesforce has abandoned core functionality development (delegated to app developers in the AppXchange) in favor of social CRM functionality which is of less interest to us.
Biggest problem by far is de-duping of names in the database. The software is incapable of recognizing that a contact already exists in the database (if, for example, the email is different). Lots of manual de-duping required.,10,8,Deal flow: Managing opportunities to leads to funded entities
Contact management: Tracking individuals as they move from one organization to another. Maintaining database of individuals with their history.,,Online training,8,Yes,,8,10,10Verified UserSwitched from MS CRM to reap benefits of SaaS.2012-11-13T22:23:34.837ZReliability / Uptime
Saas, not installed
Huge and active community
AppExchange (but search is lousy)
Platform very easy to develop on,Core product development is being ignored in favor of “social CRM” (chatter, etc).
Increasing emphasis on enterprise functionality and not SMB (where they started)
Primarily designed for sales management, not portfolio management. The workflow (account – contact etc.) is not ideal. Also would be better if there were some reverse lookup capability where if a contact is added under a new account name, the software could look up that contact to see if he already exists in system to prevent duplicates.
If ”niche” user like us (venture capital form), community is a bit less helpful since the use cases are not standard
No account management (client success) unless big client. Left hanging.,Much easier to manage deal flow
Better contact management (after Exchange integration (using external connector to do this),10,8,System of record for contact and deal flow management
Integrated directly with Exchange server to sync calendars etc.,,,Vendor implemented
Implemented in-house,6,Online training
In-person training,9,6,Yes,5,5,10,SQL Server
Fund Management S/W
LinkedIn
Exchange Server (currently underway),Verified UserGreat for opportunity tracking. Lack of trend analysis is a pain.2012-10-29T03:03:53.806ZOpportunity tracking
Contact management
Sales forecasting and lead tracking, reporting and analytics.,Trend reporting – push stuff to Excel for this. We are not using an analytics package. Salesforce.com does have some abilities now to capture trend data but it’s difficult to expose it and use through standard reporting templates. We pushed that data out into Excel.
Ability to shape itself to your forecasting methodology is limited – inflexible – you need to adopt their approach. I am now used to it, but may be problematic for a new user.,Better forecasting
Better key metric tracking (leads, opportunities)
More accurate reporting in general
Central repository for all things client oriented
Remote access
For those on legacy installed CRM apps - some considerations - the rate of innovation in SF is significant; sooner or later you have to pay the piper – your internal development costs will need to increase; the AppExchange marketplace is also valuable.
Examples of valuable recent innovation include: they have significantly improved their dash boarding; the ability to join tables/ objects; they have allowed you to start capturing trending data and export to Excel. This was the primary reason we used Cloud9 at my last company – Cloud9 captures and visualizes.,10,10,60,1,Sales
Support/customer service
Connection points into Finance – finance only uses to feed their own accounting software.,,Implemented in-house
Professional services company,8,Online training
Self-taught,8,For the most part we were self taught and everybody knew enough that, in aggregate, we could get quite a bit done. When we brought in consultants to build out deeper functionality or to speed things up, we would have them build training for the sales team that we would jointly deliver.,Salesforce.com has tremendous capabilities and some of that is accessible and usable for simple tasks such as contact management. But to use it for a growing business and have it be at the heart of your reporting systems, you will need to configure the objects, create fields, automate workflows, customize forecasting, build security levels, and configure reporting etc.,No,6,8,10,9,Box.net - file storage. When you go into opportunity record, instead of storing the contract in Salesforce.com, we store it in Box. This is a central repository for documents so you don’t have multiple versions flying around.
Marketo - marketing automation,Intacct - accounting system,,I didn’t handle final pricing.Verified UserGood product but needs strong administrator.2012-10-28T15:58:40.376ZSecurity is really good.
Configuration management works fairly well
I love the Appexchange. It is the first place to go shopping, especially if sales related.
Configurability for profiles is good.,You really need someone qualified to administrate it. While it is extremely flexible, it is not straight forward. You are really likely to want to customize it and customization requires a different skill set and level of maturity. We need both system administrators who do clicks not code configuration changes, and full blown developers. We needed someone more than a click based administrator to make changes. I’ve had to hire several developers and a dedicated administrator.
It is complex. You need to learn the model. It is very flexible and feature complete. There are certain features you can turn on that cannot turn off later if you goofed, e.g. territories.
Forecasting module – out of box it is challenging. We are looking Appexchange applications right now. We are doing a pilot with Cloud9.
Analytics is a weak spot of the product. It is difficult to use. We needed someone to write reports. You can get to basic proficiency quickly, but if you want to merge/blend data, across objects, it requires a different skill level. We also are using a data warehouse – MySQL data which interfaces to GoodData. We will end up with both. The reports we can build in SF we will to give users just one dashboard, and you don’t have a reconciliation issue.
The other difficulty, is tracking things that happen in less than one day e.g. the time between lead and first activity. That sort of time tracking is hard in Salesforce.,We have great visibility to pipeline.
We have the ability to manage accounts and opportunities.
It’s at the heart of our operations.
It is easy to integrate. You don’t have to spend on integrating to other vendors which means cost avoidance – many things available out of the box.
It gives our CFO some measure of predictability of future revenue via past bookings and current pipeline.,10,9,175,3,Sales
Marketing
Customer support - although we use Zendesk for ticketing, we look up account history in Salesforce directly. Support initiate account changes e.g. new customer information.
Finance,No,,Implemented in-house,,Online training
In-person training,8,8,Primary customization was for integration to our own product – for lead flow and to get to work with Zuora (our billing system). It required true programming in both cases.,No,5,7,9,9,Zuora - billing system
Zendesk - ticketing system
Marketo - marketing automation
Data warehouse
Box - file storage
InsideView (Appexchange package) data augmentation service. Popular among our users.
Conga (Appexchange package) – mail merge tool. I am a big fan. It enables you to create a template in Word or Excel merged with data from opportunity and will create a filled out document.
Totango (Appexchange package) – a quoting tool which replaced Drawloop for us.
Xactly (Appexchange package) - sales compensation
AppBuddy (Appexchange package) – it's like grid app. It's a good productivity saver.Verified UserProvides great visibility into pipeline.2012-10-26T16:06:36.882ZUsability, customization, cost of ownership
We try to keep our implementation as vanilla as possible – customizations are lower cost of ownership, and much faster
Opportunity to revenue visibility gives us a much better handle on our design wins.
Global search,Salesforce out of the box is fairly inflexible – e.g. its object structures
Workflow out of the box is fairly limited e.g. we have quotes with multiple products, product lines – you cannot have simultaneous approval on workflow.
It doesn’t search across line items.
Reporting is fairly limited. We are not very mature in this regard. You can only join two objects.,Better visibility in pipeline – we know what design wins we have
Ability to activate a lead/resolve a lead,10,9,900,2,Sales Cloud – track project from lead, design, opportunity, and all follow-on revenue opportunities. We can tie sample to revenue.
We have 2 different types of quotes – direct and through distribution. When we get the revenue transactions out of SAP we can tie opportunity.,,,Professional services company,,Online training
In-person training
Self-taught,8,7,We provided our own end-user training.,We have tried to keep it as vanilla as possible.
One major piece of customization is around commissions.,Yes,9,9,10,10,SAP ERP
SAP Data warehouse
Marketo (marketing automation)Verified UserAlmost perfect!2012-10-25T02:16:56.620ZWhile it is not perfect, it is so flexible. The sky is the limit, yet it is still fairly easy to use. If they don’t do it, it’s so easy to interact with APIs to get things done.
Everything on the app exchange and in the community. There are so many reasons why it is the place to be.
Innovation is consistent though not exactly what I want though.
They are always 2-3 steps ahead e.g. their acquisition of social media solutions.,They roll out features that are almost there - doesn’t quite do what I want it to do e.g doesn’t work with a specific field or object. This has always been a frustration. It seems like their stuff is more for demo purposes than to help their current users.,Visibility across the customer. While that one view is never as good as it’s made out to be, it is much better than silo’d applications
Mobile access is a benefit.,10,10,300,2,Sales & marketing: Forecasting, Pipeline management, Contact management, Sales process management, Lead qualification, Quotes and contracts, Management reporting.
The following sales processes are not run in Salesforce.com - Forecasting is mostly done in Excel work. Forecasting means different things to different people. To us, it means the process by which a rep rolls up commitment to manager, the manager then reviews and rolls-up their commitment. We have looked at a couple of 3rd party forecasting modules and haven’t found “the one”. Are considering custom development.
Customer service,,Implemented in-house,,Online training
In-person training,8,8,Yes,6,8,10,9,Cloud9 - analytics/forecasting tool
Echosign
Marketo
Boulder Logic (reference tracking system)
Big Machines
Lots of home grown/custom stuff,NetSuite - accounting system.Verified UserHighly customizable is both a plus and minus.2012-10-25T01:43:37.126ZIt is highly customizable and flexible to any business process. However, that can also be a downfall. Salesforce.com will reflect the maturity or lack of maturity in a business process. It forces a business to have a systematic, reliable, repeatable process in order to get the best metrics and use out of Salesforce. Getting the end to end process mapped out and systemized is the hardest part.
Chatter/ collaboration is great.
They are trying to be on the cutting edge of flattening out a file structure although not everyone is keen for it. It makes adopting hard.
The AppExchange – the ability to quickly install and configure a 3rd party app. This does complicate life for our developer though. The developer community is a real benefit for Salesforce as they’ll never perfect all modules.
It won’t allow you to make it fail. They protect their system. You cannot install something that will bring down the system.,Customization means that it’s hard to compare across companies. It makes M&A challenging as there's no standardization. It would be good to have exposure to customization via a visualization. They have started to do that but they only have a rough model right now. It would aid with getting a quick understanding of what's been done.
Content management - content in Salesforce.com is impossible to manage. There are so many separate modules that try to manage content that don’t talk to each other. Chatter has own structure. Content has own structure. It’s a nightmare. While they are not in the content management space, the disparate options on content uploading/ attaching are problematic. It’s something they absolutely have to fix. I know it is on their roadmap. It causes the most frustration and churn. Search doesn’t reveal all content. Chatter Free edition is good, but exposes files in Chatter only and not across the board, creating duplication. With the new Chatter roadmap, they are going to incorporate a DropBox functionality though I believe it will complicate things further. We have mistakenly tried to use their content module as a CMS, when it wasn’t intended to be.
Analytics/ trend-analysis. One of our teams uses Cloud9. The trending/analysis part built into Salesforce.com is extremely limited. We are heading towards using a data extracts onto a SQL server and Tableau.,Data flow from end to end in a customer life-cycle is a huge benefit. It is so highly dependent on having correct business processes in place to know if have right triggers in place. Your data, analytics, reports, forecasting is then right there in one system.,10,10,1000,Lead generation - we have tied Marketo into salesforce for lead qual, scoring, routing for the market development team.
Events and campaign management in marketing.
Sales lifecycle management and opportunity management
Managing price books, quoting, proposals,and contract management to an extent. Our legal team don’t use it yet, preferring a more manual approach. We also have Apttus in place for contract management.
Client (professional) services uses a combination of Salesforce.com and Clarizen.
Client Success/account management is heavily managed in Salesforce.com. Activities include account maintenance, account planning, and driving up-sells and cross-sells. However, if a client is late in bill payment, the data doesn’t manifest itself in Salesforce.com. The data resides in NetSuite but our integration is lacking. We are looking at Zuora.
We heavily use the customer portal. It’s how customers enter support cases and get routed into the organization. There is also some content stored in Salesforce.com,,Implemented in-house,,Online training
In-person training,7,7,Yes,8,9,9,Marketo
NetSuite
Clarizen (professional services automation tool)Verified UserThe best CRM available2012-10-24T21:11:17.424ZIt is the best CRM system available
It is the easiest platform to drive adoption amongst your user base
There are no gaping holes compared to other options,Whenever you need to do integrations and customizations or go hard core on reporting your investment level jumps up significantly. You can however do 80%+ with configuration vs. customization.
Over years, Salesforce.com has expanded from sales into areas like marketing and support and those areas are less mature.,Hard to quantify. Biggest savings are in headcount that would otherwise do administrative work.
I would have to have hired one or more analysts full time
We are lean in management overall as a company because we leverage our tools effectively.,10,10,70,0.33,CRM – marketing automation
Sales force automation
Content/document management
Commissions
Customers support - customers can log tickets on website through Salesforce.com
Project management cost tracking,,Vendor implemented
Implemented in-house
Professional services company,,Online training
In-person training
Self-taught,,,No,8,8,10,OpenAir - professional services automation tool from NetSuite
EloquaVerified UserExcellent support from SF Professional Services.2013-01-04T22:38:06.220ZEase of use. Excellent support from Salesforce professional services,Integration with other systems limited,Higher adoption % among users. Fewer support issues than prior CRM system.,7,7,Sales operations, marketing operations,,Professional services company,8,Online training
In-person training,7,7,Yes,8Verified User
Unspecified
Salesforce.com
2263 Ratings
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