Provides great visibility into pipeline.
October 26, 2012

Provides great visibility into pipeline.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review

Software Version

Social Enterprise Edition

Modules Used

  • Sales Cloud
  • Services Cloud
  • Force.com
  • Knowledge
  • Customer portal
  • Partner portal

Overall Satisfaction

  • Usability, customization, cost of ownership
  • We try to keep our implementation as vanilla as possible – customizations are lower cost of ownership, and much faster
  • Opportunity to revenue visibility gives us a much better handle on our design wins.
  • Global search
  • Salesforce out of the box is fairly inflexible – e.g. its object structures
  • Workflow out of the box is fairly limited e.g. we have quotes with multiple products, product lines – you cannot have simultaneous approval on workflow.
  • It doesn’t search across line items.
  • Reporting is fairly limited. We are not very mature in this regard. You can only join two objects.
  • Better visibility in pipeline – we know what design wins we have
  • Ability to activate a lead/resolve a lead

Product Usage

900 - Sales Cloud– 225
Partner portal - 280
Services Cloud - 91 badged employees, 303 others
2 - Information Systems Manager (60%)
One developer/admin
30% of a Business Analyst
  • Sales Cloud – track project from lead, design, opportunity, and all follow-on revenue opportunities. We can tie sample to revenue.
  • We have 2 different types of quotes – direct and through distribution. When we get the revenue transactions out of SAP we can tie opportunity.

Evaluation and Selection

SAP CRM, SAP BW (business warehouse), SAP Portal

Also, as part of service cloud migration plan to bring customer knowledge base from Moxy to SFDC.
Microsoft CRM.
With Salesforce.com, the security model mapped nicely to our territory and partner model.
In evaluating Microsoft CRM we felt there would be more complexity for development.

Implementation

It was a mixed experience (with Blue Wolf). In the initial phase of project, the project manager and Business Analysts they brought in were not up to snuff. We had a lot of churn on their team initially.

We also worked with a firm called Catapult on integration. I would rate them an 8/10.
  • Professional services company
Blue Wolf

Training

  • Online training
  • In-person training
  • Self-taught
We sent a Business Analyst to online training. They do a poll every hour.
Attended developer 2 level course – like most classes, 60% of content relevant.
We provided our own end-user training.

Configuration

We have tried to keep it as vanilla as possible.
One major piece of customization is around commissions.

Support

We have weekly status calls of any open issue.

We have been happy with the quality of our dedicated support person.
Yes - I like the responsiveness and the fact that we get a dedicated technical person.

Usability

Global search is great.

Reliability

It is very good. We have just experienced scheduled downtime.

At one point they moved one of our development instances and we got 2 months notice.

We have never had an issue with system down without prior notice.
We had one issue on performance with account view, but found it was an internal code issue.

Integration

  • SAP ERP
  • SAP Data warehouse
  • Marketo (marketing automation)
SAP ERP – accounts (2-way), quotes (1-way).
SAP Data warehouse - opportunities go to SAP business warehouse – used for lead to revenue analysis, pipeline trend analysis, split regional credit (e.g. between design + fulfillment partners), backlog.
We used Biztalk for integration to SAP. I would rate the project a 7-8/10 on the difficulty scale – it was pretty hard.

Marketo – leads from web flow into Marketo and then into Salesforce.com to determine territory, before leads dispersed to reps. Salesforce.com is a Marketo out of the box integration so it was relatively plug and play. The complexity was defining our rules and determining how we would send an update.