Salesforce: Implement for now and reap the benefits for several years to come
October 13, 2017
Salesforce: Implement for now and reap the benefits for several years to come
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce Platform (formerly Salesforce App Cloud)
Salesforce App Cloud is used by our marketing, sales, and senior leadership teams throughout the organization. For marketing, we use Salesforce to manage our contacts and use the tool along with Pardot to power our marketing automation and lead nurturing campaigns. For sales, we use Salesforce as our main CRM housing all of our leads, contacts, accounts, and opportunities. We utilize Salesforce reports to measure all of our sales performance for the team and individuals. Salesforce is also used to capture all of our current client data, helping us maintain our newsletter list, record organic growth with existing business, and house pertinent client information.
- Salesforce App Cloud connects with almost any other third-party tool on the market, enabling our organization to use best-of-breed solutions when it comes to ABM sales tools.
- Salesforce is constantly evolving and improving, allowing us to improve our internal processes every step of the way.
- Salesforce enabled transparency throughout our entire organization. Chatter is one of our favorite features, allowing us to communicate on deals and activity in a view that everyone can see and we can use that knowledge several years down the road.
- With such a powerful and customizable platform, Salesforce App Cloud can be difficult to configure for those new to the platform.
- My biggest frustration with Salesforce is that not all features/functionality that are in Salesforce Classic are available in Salesforce Lightning. It's very cumbersome to have to switch between each view to get things done. Data.com, for example, is only available in Salesforce Classic.
- Salesforce has a positive impact on our productivity all due to the transparency we get from the platform.
- With having Salesforce in place, we've recouped our investment for the entire year with 2-3 deals.
Salesforce is head and shoulders above any other CRM available on the market. It integrates with Gmail and almost any other third-party tool that your company plans to use, making it the most robust and integrated tool available.
Evaluating Salesforce Platform (formerly Salesforce App Cloud) and Competitors
Yes - We replaced SharpSpring CRM. We wanted to replace that tool with Salesforce, as it was not a scalable tool that was growing with our organization. It did not connect with the other systems we used and we noticed that the data integrity and organization was poor. The customer service was also subpar.
- Product Features
- Product Reputation
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Vendor Reputation
- Third-party Reviews
The single most important factor was going with a well-known tool that could help support our grow and scale up as our usage with the product gets more involved within the next few years. The flexibility and scalability of the Salesforce App Cloud was the single most important reason for us making this implementation purchase.
If we had to do it again, we would spend more time in the sales process asking questions to the rep that better align with how we intend to use the product now. We should have matched up features and functionality between the existing CRM we had and then what we would be getting with Salesforce App Cloud. We also wish we would have done an analysis of Salesforce and Pardot, since we were considering both platforms at the time.