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The best CRM available
Updated December 02, 2022

The best CRM available

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Enterprise Edition

Modules Used

  • Sales Cloud

Overall Satisfaction

  • It 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.
The switching costs are too high.

Product Usage

70 - Sales, marketing, services
0.33 - 5% of an IT director
5% of manager in support group
5% of a person in marketing
10-20% of my time

In total, 1/3 FTE on administration, set-up, configuration.
We don't have a Business Analyst or Salesforce.com developer
  • 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

Evaluation and Selection

Implemented in 2005, not sure if anything before.

Implementation

No idea - before my time at this company.

I do recommend you go broad on the number of users as will help drive adoption.
  • Vendor implemented
  • Implemented in-house
  • Professional services company
We also used a professional services company to do some work, but they didn’t get great feedback.

Training

  • Online training
  • In-person training
  • Self-taught
You can pay $3k for in classroom training – it is possible to get discounts

It costa $1k to attend dreamforce where they have pretty good training
Online training is free and are good resources – self guided, high quality, good for novice to intermediate users

Support

I haven’t had great experiences with calling customer support.

The Salesforce user community is however pretty good. You can find answers to what you are looking for. I can find the answer on the general web via a Google search and by looking in the actual Salesforce.com customer community. I generally just search the Web.
No - Support level depends on what you pay for. You have different tiers you can buy. When you pay for premier support, you get a dedicated help line with much shorter SLAs. We are not paying for premier support.

Usability

There are some inconsistencies between different objects.

The reporting engine is weak, you still have to export data to process in Excel. We use demand tools for marketing analytics on top and use SQLServer for trend analysis.

Release strategy/feature set in different areas is not consistent. For example, the work flow for accounts is good but the workflow for forecasting has not been released yet. Their product development strategy is a balance between where they want to do market development/ innovation and where customers are pushing them to catch-up. Their large global 20 customers push them in a lot of the catch-up areas. The catch-up features are generally good but not great. One example is reporting functionality which allows you to do joins between tables. Opportunity quoting is another area where they caught up. It was developed as an afterthought and it doesn’t compare to Siebel.

Reliability

Very good – almost 100%. With their latest release mechanism, really no downtime.

Integration

  • OpenAir - professional services automation tool from NetSuite
  • Eloqua
Open Air – one way data push for project status, opportunities

Eloqua - pretty good integration – nothing fancy