Item: Salesforce CMS
Rating: 5
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Using Salesforce as a CRM to manage leads and opportunities. For my team, we use it to manage our current pipeline, the leads coming through interested in our product and ensure we aren't letting leads fall through the cracks. Since there are several sales teams in our organization, we use Salesforce as a way to manage who's doing what across the organization.

Pros and Cons

Manages conflicts between sales teams.
Keeps track of call/contact history.
One place for all sorts of information.

Salesforce takes forever to load a page.
Lot of awkwardness when updating records. It won't let updates be made if something changed on the back-end while you were working on a record.
Easier way to review and develop reports.

Return on Investment

It helps us to keep track of any potential conflicts between sales organizations.
It allows us to have robust reporting for every sales team and the overall organization.
It gives us a solid platform for our day-to-day work rather than using multiple software.

Alternatives Considered

SalesLoft, Drift and Talkdesk

Salesforce is the connecting tissue between all these other softwares. Each of them connects to Salesforce and allows us to use the other platforms' main features while keeping everything in Salesforce, specifically contact information and history. It's automated for the most part so we aren't spending a lot of time manually updating records and tracking conversations. Every little minute counts at work so having these automations allows me to focus on the bread-and-butter of my work.

Key Insights

Do you think Salesforce CMS delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Salesforce CMS's feature set?

Yes

Did Salesforce CMS live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Salesforce CMS go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Salesforce CMS again?

Yes

Other Software Used

SalesLoft, Drift, Talkdesk, Zoom

Usability

It's super awkward if you aren't familiar with it. I have several years' experience in both my organization's salesforce as well as others and there are still things that trip me up. I think Salesforce can get to a point where it's TOO bloated with all this information, all these integrations, what-have-you, that it can be difficult to find what you need in a timely manner or it creates a hiccup in workflows that you then have to work around. On the other hand, once these issues are identified, there is the possibility to manipulate Salesforce into creating automated workarounds. So, at least it allows for that.

I think it's an issue of having so many options for bolt-ons that you start to lose perspective and functionality. You tend to lose focus on usability for users.

Support Rating

I've never really had to contact support. It's at the point where we have people in the organization that are our specific go-to inhouse support teams for Salesforce. Again, that goes back to what I said about there being a point where just too much is added to Salesforce that you have to hire someone to be the go-to person of Salesforce. There is only so much their support team can do for you. I wouldn't expect Salesforce Support to have any sort of understanding of the weird issues I deal with!

Likelihood to Recommend

Salesforce is the big dog in the CRM industry. It's used almost everywhere so it's easy to pick up and use wherever you might go. So training on the system is really easy. Oftentimes, it's just a matter of learning how an organization uses it to their means.

I think for a smaller company, there are probably more affordable, more maneuverable options. However, larger companies can benefit from the number of customizations and integrations Salesforce allows for.

The best around, but too many integrations can create a monster of a CMS

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce CMS