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Salesforce Implementation learnings
September 15, 2013

Salesforce Implementation learnings

Vijay Gadigeppa, PMP | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Unlimited

Modules Used

  • SalesCloud
  • Force.com
  • Data.com

Overall Satisfaction

  • Real-time Reports/Dashboards.
  • While the product provides core sales and service CRM capabilities, it does not have the breath of Siebel. Need to purchase Apps for additional functionality. The product works very well for opportunity forecast pipeline planning, but many other things require an add-on application. For example, an additional tool is need by reps to handle quoting. An add-on is also required to handle rep commissioning (Xactly is one obvious choice in this area).
  • Opportunity Pipeline: We have much better visibility into our opportunity pipeline which ultimately allows us to close more deals faster.
  • Completed/Pending Activities: We have customized the system to trigger activities at various points during the sales cycle which helps us manage the process more efficiently.
  • Competitive Data Find. We monitor competitor activity mainly through our call center and log this data in Salesforce.
CRM domain has matured with Salesforce.com. They are now the de-facto leader in this category.

Product Usage

700 - Field sales
5 - Developers
  • We use Salesforce in a fairly standard way. The primary use is around sales opportunity forecasting. We have multiple franchise businesses that manage their own P&Ls and each of them uses Salesforce to managing opportunity forecasting. These forecasts then get rolled up at the corporate level.
  • Individual sales managers can manage sales pipelines and have visibility into deal details like whether or not a product demo has been given, tracking follow-up calls, deal progress, etc.
  • Marketing analysts are also managing which leads get entered in the system and a lead qualification process. We use Pardot for marketing automation, but have not yet integrated Pardot with Salesforce which means that we do not have a very clear picture of lead sourcing effectiveness.
  • The product is also used to track the installed base.

Evaluation and Selection

Siebel to Salesforce.com
Oracle Fusion
Microsoft CRM

Implementation

Not enough experience to judge.
  • Implemented in-house
  • Professional services company
We used Sales Optimizer.

Training

  • Self-taught
No. You need in-person training if you want to implement advanced functionality using the Force.com platform; integrating with other back-office applications, etc.

Configuration

Business processes: We configured the product to conform to our internal business processes. For example, every account needs to be touched by a rep within a certain time window. If there is no activity after that time has elapsed, a flag is set that alerts the rep to contact the account. Similarly, flags are set at various points in the opportunity sales cycle to drive regular action after certain time periods elapse.

Support

Support is generally good. They meet the premium support SLAs.
Yes - Currently on Unlimited platform which includes premium support.

Usability

Real-time analytics: With Siebel, we used to export data to Informatica for reporting. Salesforce allows us to report real-time against the data in the system. There are some limitations (no real trend reporting and we can only report on Salesforce data - not external data sources).
Point-&-click Customization (for the most part). It's quite easy to customize the system without any assistance from the IT department. There are many configuration possibilities that do not require any coding skills.
Agile development: Since Salesforce is a cloud-based system, we do not have to test upgrades in a testing environment before rolling them out to production. However, when new features become available, we do need to make sure that our process are still appropriate. It's vitally important to have the right processes in place to get the maximum benefit from the software.

Reliability

Integration

  • Oracle ERP
They do support this integration but it's necessary to engage an SI for implementation.

Vendor Relationship

The company was easy to work with. The only real issue is that account managers and customer success managers change every few months which is somewhat inefficient.
We purchased a very large number of licenses and there was scope to negotiate around volume discounts.