Use a good consulting company to get the most from it.
March 13, 2013
Use a good consulting company to get the most from it.

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Enterprise
Modules Used
- Sales Cloud
- Service Cloud
- Force.com
- some Visualforce stuff we've created
Overall Satisfaction
Pros
- Salesforce is great at deal mgmt and forecasting, and as a repository for account information and contact management.
- Integration of support tickets into CRM view of Account is really useful (rather than having them in a separate system).
- Ability for Inside Sales to create email templates for one-off sends is also really useful.
Cons
- We tried Chatter, but it never clicked here (or anywhere I've tried to use it). One problem is that the whole company is not on Salesforce, so it's not used across the company. Furthermore, it doesn't have standard chat features like gamification, rewards for chatting, chat search capability etc. The tool just seems to create a lot of distracting noise and was not adopted by Salesforce users.
- Salesforce can be a bit tough and expensive to customize. You need a sys admin with some stroke to make it sing. The ideal profile for this person is part programer, part business analyst, and part program manager. Without this, the system is always less than satisfactory. The whole argument that Salesforce is a SAAS offering, and therefore services and support are less important is just not trueI feel that Salesforce really needs a services arm.
- There are many customizations essential to making users of the system productive. For example, I have to create workflows and dashboards to show many of the things we want to know - especially around data maintenance and Business Intelligence. I have to build dashboards for users. - both sales people and execs struggling with what they need to have for it to be useful.
- The product is really a toolkit rather than a set of capabilities that are ready to go out of the box.
- Sales CRM tracking allows us to forecast much better than we could without it. We hit support ticket SLAs. We also get some good business analytics (# customers, products sold, customers by industry, deal sizes etc.) out of the system.
Product Usage
2 - One marketing person and me.
- We support three primary processes via Salesforce: sales CRM, support cases, and lightweight marketing/emailing for the sales team.
- CRM: Opportunity tracking; territory management; detailed information about accounts and deals. This is where sales people or Account Managers go for account information.
- On the support side its simply case management. Opening cases, escalating cases, appending support contracts, etc. The Service Cloud is not a great tool for handling support cases. Not a good support tool. They have tried to build workflows and everything from scratch but it doesn't really work that well.
- Marketing lite: Inside sales reps use Salesforce for Outlook. This provides them with automatic syncing between Outlook and Salesforce for email and appointment tracking. It provides basic email templates, but is clearly not a real marketing automation system like Eloqua or Marketo.
Evaluation and Selection
Spreadsheets
Zoho crm
Sugar crm
Goldmine (back in the day!)
We are an enterprise class company and, as such, need an enterprise-level system. Salesforce is the clear enterprise market leader, and that drove our decision.
Sugar crm
Goldmine (back in the day!)
We are an enterprise class company and, as such, need an enterprise-level system. Salesforce is the clear enterprise market leader, and that drove our decision.
Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Training
- Self-taught
I'd recommend some training for selected heavy users/admins for sure, and then I'd recommend you create your own internal training once you get it customized.
Configuration
Building custom dashboards mainly.
Support
Usability
Reliability
Integration
- Intaact. Tenrox. LinkedIn. iProfile.
Integrations are fairly standard and not too complex. For example, we can log into Intaact (our accounting system) directly from Salesforce and pull data back and forth. Account level billing data etc. data shows up automatically in Salesforce. Similarly for integration with Tenrox, our project management system.
However, these integrations are almost impossible to build without 3rd-party help. Typically, we always need a consultant from the vendor company to help with custom objects / workflows.
I turned on the integration to iProfile myself, because intergration was relatively simple.
However, these integrations are almost impossible to build without 3rd-party help. Typically, we always need a consultant from the vendor company to help with custom objects / workflows.
I turned on the integration to iProfile myself, because intergration was relatively simple.
- Treehouse
We use Treehouse for partner management and our marketing department also uses it for some marketing automation tasks. Leads in SF will be passed to partners through Treehouse, and when deals close, this is registered in Salesforce so that they can be paid.
Vendor Relationship
Their standard license terms online have auto renewal and +7% annual increases built in, I'd negotiate that out.
Comments
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