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Relatively easy to use and train, but support is poor.
October 15, 2012

Relatively easy to use and train, but support is poor.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review

Software Version

Enterprise

Modules Used

  • Sales Cloud
  • Services Cloud
  • Data.com
  • Chatter

Overall Satisfaction

  • I am able to pull data much better than other tools I’ve used before.
  • Easy to use and easy to train users on.
  • You can get up and running quickly – this is particularly important.
  • Ability to customize
  • We have faced some challenges with historical reports, where filters are turned off. You can filter on what a value changed to, i.e. prospect to MQL, but it is very difficult to pull the data. You have to export to Excel and de-dupe. It does give a real time view.
  • Forecasting in Salesforce.com was another downfall for us. You cannot parse out the data the way you want it to be broken out.
  • We ended up using an AppExchange app called Sales Clarity (http://sales-clarity.com) for executive management. Our SVP sales uses it for forecasting. It has strong integration appearing as just another tab in Salesforce.com. It feels like a piece of Salesforce.com and takes a couple of minutes to load. It has to pull all the data in from Salesforce.com.
  • You have to plan everything out. We had to rebuild some custom objects as they were limiting our views.
  • The basic support line is not very helpful. They are not very good at understanding problems. They refer you back to knowledge base, but generally that's where I started. Turn around times are generally not very good – 3-4 days after you place call.
  • The forecasting is crucial to us. Our board asks about it on a regular basis and having a central database is crucial.
  • Beyond that, being able to share documents and knowledge, and to have everyone have access to agreements etc.
  • Having our sales people be able to transition deals if they change territories and to easily manipulate the data has been really critical.
  • We have been through two rounds of funding and some of the data that investors request, we simply couldn’t get to otherwise.

Product Usage

60 - We have 70 licenses but 60 active users. Most of the usage is in sales and customer services.
1 - Probably 1 FTE total?

No IT resources.
There are 4-5 people that work with it. I am the main person.
There’s someone on the service side who also does call center related work
Also, a marketing person.
  • Sales
  • Customer support
  • Customer success

Evaluation and Selection

Were using Zoho before Salesforce.com 3-4 years ago.

Implementation

Building in incentives to have people use Salesforce.com it very important to help with adoption. New hires follow veterans so it is important that veterans use the system. We have to sell value the value of the system to the sales team i.e. why it matters to them. It is important to attack that right away. I have seen a little bit of what vendors like Bunchball are doing to gamify the adoption of Salesforce.com and I would like to try out one of those programs.

We are running a lot of internal training.

It is also important to have a single point of contact or a small team of experts that people can go to. I get little Salesforce.com questions all the time, but answering them helps people move forward. This is especially important for smaller companies.
  • Implemented in-house
  • Professional services company
We implemented the core of Salesforce.com in-house. For ad hoc projects, we have used professional services companies.

For example, to build Apex triggers to automate lead workflow for, we used a company called Demand Gen, who specialize in Eloqua customization but also do Salesforce.com work. We have mostly used them for projects related to Eloqua. Our experience with them was very positive. They are incredibly knowledgeable about both products. They exceeded our expectations on turnaround time and quality, however we haven’t had them do anything super complex yet.

Training

  • Self-taught
In a past company, I was a Salesforce.com trainer. I did train the trainer classes back then for a customized instance. Coming on board to this company,I’ve mostly learned as I go.

Configuration

We have built out entire sales process in Salesforce.com defining workflow from lead to closed opportunity. We have automated status changes and automatic field populations. We have used a lot of drop down dependent pick lists. We have a few custom objects and plan to add more and more.

We have done some Apex coding for triggers – used a 3rd party for that.
We have not done Visual Force customizations.
We do not have an in-house resource that can code in Apex or Visual Force.

Support

The basic support line is not very helpful and not very good at understanding problems. They often refer you back to Knowledge Base, where I started.

Turn around times are generally not very good, typically 3-4 days after you place call.
No - We have considered premium support. We just did a big renewal and it’s a matter of cost and being able to justify and we haven’t run into critical problems.

Usability

It is really easy to train users. Sales people are the hardest to train.

Reliability

It is rarely down.
It has been slowing down a little recently in last 3-4 months. We have seen a significant slow down but it may be linked to the amount of data on our side.

Integration

  • Eloqua (marketing automation)
  • Hoovers (AppExchange data augmentation service)
  • Box (AppExchange online file storage tool)
  • SalesClarity (AppExchange sales forecasting for B2B sales managers)
  • CountryComplete (AppExchange free tool to auto-complete, validate, standardize and correct your country fields)
  • Cloudingo from Symphonic Source (AppExchange de-duping tool)
  • Customer Stories (AppExchange app - to quickly find success stories, competitive wins, and sales references)
  • Adobe Echosign (AppExchange e-signature tool)
  • Xactly (AppExchange app for sales commissions/performance management - just now deploying)
  • CampaignerCRM formerly known as Landslide CRM (sales process tool)
The AppExchange apps are all native and hence simple to integrate.

We have very strong integration with Eloqua. The sales force only use Eloqua through Salesforce.com Everything ties back to Salesforce.com. The integration implementation was a little bit complicated, but our marketing director was a single point of contact and we had to do a little bit of customization on the Salesforce.com side. It maybe took a week or two to map everything and ensure alignment.