Indispensable platform.
Updated March 13, 2015

Indispensable platform.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review

Software Version

Unlimited

Modules Used

  • Sales Cloud
  • Force.com
  • Chatter
  • Partner Portal
  • Content
  • Knowledge

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce.com

  • It makes Sales, Marketing & Services Automation so much easier. The ability to customize Salesforce according to our business needs and to get that done in a shorter time-span is the key difference.
  • I can't think of anything. It has its tentacles spread across almost all functions in an enterprise and proves to be a very efficient tool, if used properly.
  • One area where they could invest more and extend the functionality would be to incorporate a completely native CPQ (Configure / Price / Quote), tool that can leverage the existing functionality of the platform.
  • No. of Opportunities converted in Salesforce
  • Time to market
  • Change Management - Release cycle time
  • Effort spent on changes
I think SugarCRM and MSDynamics were on the shortlist. There were some sponsors within the company for those systems. But, Salesforce won the race hands down. Others were nowhere near to what Salesforce had at that time.
They are the market leaders in this space. Other companies like Oracle, SAP are trying to catch up. But Salesforce is far ahead in the race and have not stopped innovating.

When you choose to implement Salesforce, pay utmost attention to the business process and ensure if you are following best practices. Just because Data integrity is everything. Make sure you have provisions made in Salesforce to ensure clean data. Taking some time and doing it right the first time, saves a lot.

Using Salesforce.com

400 - Sales, Marketing, Support, Professional Services, Engineering, Legal & Finance
2 - Salesforce Developer/Administrator/Business Analyst
  • CRM for Sales & Marketing (New Business Development, Account Management, Email Marketing, Campaign Management, Channel Marketing etc.), Customer Support, Professional Services Management.
Salesforce is a bigger part of our ecosystem and has been the most reliable & efficient system by far.

Evaluating Salesforce.com and Competitors

We switched from Lotus notes.

Salesforce.com Implementation

I can speak about the experiences I had with the previous company. The company and the professional services firm rushed into implementation, and as a result there were tons and tons of duplicates in the system. Data migration was a mess. We had to refrain from using some of the core functionality of Salesforce until we got the data cleaned up. Without clean data, any system is useless.
  • Professional services company
  • Don't know
It was implemented before my time in this company. In the previous company, it was by a professional services company.

Salesforce.com Training

  • Online training
  • Self-taught
It gives us everything we need.
Depends on the individual taking the training. Self-taught worked for me and I'll recommend that approach to individuals who can benefit from that approach.

Configuring Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com Support

They are very prompt in reaching out to you when you file a case. Almost all the time, the person reaching out to you solves the issues. This shows how their support model is structured.
No - It's part of the service offering for the Unlimited edition plan we are in.

Using Salesforce.com

It's very user intuitive. Most of the things I learned in Salesforce , I learned by exploring the system, I had very little need for help & training.

Salesforce.com Reliability

Salesforce does a great job with their scheduled maintenance. I have not faced any downtime at all.
For a SaaS provider, I'd rate their performance to be one of the best. At times, reporting tends to slow down if the data set is very large, which is the case in any system. But, that's a very rare phenomenon.

Integrating Salesforce.com

  • Sage Saleslogix
  • BigMachines
  • Echosign
  • Netsuite
  • Boulderlogic
  • LMS
There's a considerable amount of effort that had gone into and still going into integrating some systems. But there are enough tools in the market to successfully facilitate that integration. As far as the depth of integration is concerned, the integration will address standard objects like Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities etc. and may be some custom objects in Salesforce. It's a massive project to integrate systems. But most of the challenges lies at the process level and not the technical feasibility.

Relationship with Salesforce

Not part of the negotiation in this company.