Great at organizing sales process.
October 24, 2012

Great at organizing sales process.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review

Software Version

Enterprise

Modules Used

  • Sales Cloud

Overall Satisfaction

  • Salesforce is great at organizing sales process, tracking and reporting.
  • It helps us to understand the health of our business, and the direction of our focus.
  • We can keep track of all our customers, prospects, and partners, in relation to their company as well as their employees.
  • We can track our sales transactions, and build compensation plans off the data presented.
  • Salesforce does not handle trending well. The only option to track data and how it changes over time is through Analytics Snapshots, which is a grossly under invested piece of the application. It is too clunky to use, and doesn’t hold up well over time as the organization changes and evolves its data structure. Salesforce is a great snapshot tool in terms of reporting, so we regularly export snapshot data and store in Excel for trending analysis.
  • Salesforce.com is our database of record, and the business would have great difficulty operating without it.
  • It contributes to faster conversion, more efficient time management for employees, higher deal sizes correlated through greater focus on what is at stake, and greater insights as to what is working and what is not.

Product Usage

30 - Sales, Marketing, Client Ops, and executive teams
2 - 2 main Salesforce admins in house.
  • Sales force automation
  • Lead tracking

Evaluation and Selection

Did not switch - Salesforce.com was our company's first CRM.

Implementation

There’s some things you just have to learn as you go along

Plan your organizational use before you start building, and minimum requirements as well. The admin should pre-load in an account set, and the less you can put on individual reps to populate the database, the better.

Training

Many years of experience is how I was trained, collaborating with other users at companies to teach me most of what I know. Lots of testing and trial by error, and lots of digging into the community resources.

Configuration

Every business is different, and Salesforce’s ability to customize is one of its biggest selling points

Support

We have standard support, which is decent. I’d give it a 5. There are much more useful resources in the community for troubleshooting over using direct customer support.
No - I have used premier support in previous jobs, and found it was OK, but often you end up playing phone tag with support reps.

Reliability

It has been down before, but not frequently.

Integration

  • Wufoo - landing page tool
  • Mailchimp - email marketing
Both were incredibly easy.

Vendor Relationship

Think long term, as you likely won’t be leaving Salesforce.com once you start. Get a deal based on how you think your company will grow into the application.

Salesforce has been acquiring companies frequently, and sometimes they will try and upsell you on their new vendor partners. Be sure and do your research with these before agreeing to anything. Lots of these (Data.com, Radian 6) have competitors that are as good and worth looking at as well, and integrate just as easily.