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Almost perfect!
October 25, 2012

Almost perfect!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review

Modules Used

  • Sales Cloud
  • Chatter
  • Customer portal
  • Partner portal

Overall Satisfaction

  • While it is not perfect, it is so flexible. The sky is the limit, yet it is still fairly easy to use. If they don’t do it, it’s so easy to interact with APIs to get things done.
  • Everything on the app exchange and in the community. There are so many reasons why it is the place to be.
  • Innovation is consistent though not exactly what I want though.
  • They are always 2-3 steps ahead e.g. their acquisition of social media solutions.
  • They roll out features that are almost there - doesn’t quite do what I want it to do e.g doesn’t work with a specific field or object. This has always been a frustration. It seems like their stuff is more for demo purposes than to help their current users.
  • Visibility across the customer. While that one view is never as good as it’s made out to be, it is much better than silo’d applications
  • Mobile access is a benefit.
You really need internally trained people. A new implementation needs business analysts, consultants and a lot of involvement from the business owners. There’s so much that you can use, you need someone to hold you back too and think about how smart it is to do it. This should be the role that a business analyst or consultant plays. This was a problem for us with our services implementation. We just built stuff and didn’t think hard enough about what was required.

Product Usage

300 - Whole company outside of functions like HR, R&D.
2 - We have c. 2 FTEs in IT, but no dedicated person. With this capacity it is very hard to get things done.
  • Sales & marketing: Forecasting, Pipeline management, Contact management, Sales process management, Lead qualification, Quotes and contracts, Management reporting.
  • The following sales processes are not run in Salesforce.com - Forecasting is mostly done in Excel work. Forecasting means different things to different people. To us, it means the process by which a rep rolls up commitment to manager, the manager then reviews and rolls-up their commitment. We have looked at a couple of 3rd party forecasting modules and haven’t found “the one”. Are considering custom development.
  • Customer service

Evaluation and Selection

It was our original CRM.

Implementation

You really need internally trained people. A new implementation needs business analysts, consultants and a lot of involvement from the business owners. There’s so much that you can use, you need someone to hold you back too and think about how smart it is to do it. This should be the role that a business analyst or consultant plays. This was a problem for us with our services implementation. We just built stuff and didn’t think hard enough about what was required.

For a new, smaller company, you need a Salesforce.com expert but they can be a really good administrator in the business function versus a business analyst in IT. It is probably smart to have a business analyst if you can afford that role.
  • Implemented in-house

Training

  • Online training
  • In-person training
It felt like they were teaching to a test. I would have liked more hands-on and less principles of security – memorize for test.
Not bad, but pretty basic if you've made a lot of customizations.

Support

When I used it earlier on, I didn’t like it – SLAs were too long.
Yes - Before we were premier support there was a 2 day SLA. We ended up getting to first level support who wouldn’t read the question or understand it, and then would escalate to tier 2 which would take another 2 days, and we eventually gave up.

Usability

It is easy to use for the most part, but there’s so much customizability that it gets confusing, especially on the administrator side e.g. managing permissions. There are so many overlapping ways that you can do things. I would not rather have less choice, but the flexibility does affect usability. Some permissions are super broad, some super granular.

Reliability

Integration

  • Cloud9 - analytics/forecasting tool
  • Echosign
  • Marketo
  • Boulder Logic (reference tracking system)
  • Big Machines
  • Lots of home grown/custom stuff
Cloud9, Echosign and Marketo were plug-ins
  • NetSuite - accounting system.