Salesforce - Cross-departmental success
January 30, 2015
Salesforce - Cross-departmental success
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Professional
Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce.com
Salesforce was initially implemented for just sales, but has grown into a cross-departmental product for everyone. It's used for marketing, product development, sales, customer success, implementation and support. It addresses how we track a prospect and customer from the moment they submit an inquiry or support request to when the deal closes. We can also track all customer activity and health through our Salesforce instance. It has become a one stop place to review internal productivity and customer success.
- Analytics - Salesforce has an extensive analytical platform. It allows you to analyze program success, map the lead lifecycle, and get a full picture of all variables affecting a deal from forecast to close to upsell.
- Campaign Tracking - We do use Marketo for our marketing automation and program analytics, but Salesforce allows us to take this a step further by identifying what programs influence opportunities and customers.
- Triggered Workflows - Salesforce allows you to easily build simple triggers (or more complex if you have the skillset) to activate certain actions or populate certain fields so you are not responsible for all data points. You can easily fill in related data and send internal alerts to keep your sales teams, and other departments, on top of key prospect and customer interaction points.
- Activity Tracking - It is IMPOSSIBLE to track number of activities, number of touches, or anything related to the activity object. Activity tracking and related analytics is very manual.
- Roles & Hierarchies - They make it look easy, but it's not a simple implementation.
- Field and Instance Management - There should be a better way to manage who is affecting what fields when you first implement a Salesforce instance. A lot of the best Salesforce features are things you have to activate once you've discovered them on your own. It's not as obvious as they make it seem.
- Increased sales productivity
- Improved sales forecasting
- Optimize support case management
- Faster lead lifecycle
- Better customer management