Great contact management for sales and marketing.

Salesforce is very willing to work directly with their customers and to suggest best of breed, qualified third party consulting companies to assist in initial implementation or enhancements. Try to keep the platform as native as possible and try to choose third party apps that use as much native functionality as possible. This will ensure better response times and fewer errors.

Salesforce continues to improve the capabilities of it's platform through Apex and Visualforce as well as broaden its standard offering.

Check your Consultants out before they start an implementation project. Be sure they have actually done at least several successful implementations in the areas you are asking them to implement. Check references for their strengths and weaknesses. Clearly define the scope of the project and hold regular weekly meetings to make sure both sides are adhering to that scope.

We utilized a Train-the-Trainer model and then our Internal Training organization took over. Salesforce has excellent on-line training and many certified business partners who offer training and certification.

Premier Support at Salesforce starts at Tier 2. We find that they are more knowledgeable and more willing to research issues.

Very fast page responses and search capability. Open API allows integration of most applications keeping the users inside the app.

Over the past five years we have only experienced one actual downtime whereby the service was unavailable for several hours.

99.9% of the time the page turns are <1-2 seconds. Search is extremely fast even though we have over 50gb of data.