Going on a decade of using Salesforce.com
January 28, 2015
Going on a decade of using Salesforce.com
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Professional
Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce.com
Salesforce is our operational database of record, though some contact information is mastered in a proprietary database that powers our website. Salesforce is a bit of a data dumping ground for us. It's the place where we try to resolve duplicates and have a 'single source of truth' on our members and customers.
Pros
- I continue to be surprised at just how flexible Salesforce is when it comes to creating custom objects, establishing relationships among these objects, and presenting related information (including dynamic roll-up fields) on custom screens. For a product that is built for sales organizations, it can support a myriad of other business processes nicely.
- There will probably always be room for improvement around custom dashboards in any CRM platform, but Salesforce is robust in this area and can put powerful insights at your fingertips. Granted, this is focused on historical and real-time data, with future projections only meaningful to the extend that you have accurate data on your sales opportunities and are trying to predict revenue. Using Salesforce to try to predict operational needs like staffing levels can very quickly lead to hand-waving and guess-work.
- Salesforce is powerful when fully embraced across your organization as the place to push all customer and prospect interactions. With the right discipline, you have all the most essential information at your finger tips for any contact or lead.
Cons
- Salesforce reporting is a perennial complaint. I've found it to be sufficient for most of what I need day-to-day, though not particularly impressive. I regularly stumble across data that I can't access from within a certain report because of the way the data is joined (or isn't) and the limited scope of the report based on the reporting option I chose. Reporting is most useful when combined with dashboards.
- Salesforce has some quirky constraints around custom objects, roll-up fields, and the way parent-child relationships are defined. Changing these relationships can cause reports to disappear and dashboards to break. Salesforce warns you about this, but doesn't make it easy to figure out what will break when you make changes.
- We have spent a lot of developer time maintaining a custom integration between our proprietary systems and Salesforce. Many of the related headaches in Salesforce are of our own creation (e.g. we use an up-sert into Salesforce from our own systems and haven't defined processes from scrubbing old data out of Salesforce when it's deleted from our own system).
- Salesforce has given us a flexible, affordable CRM that everyone in the company can easily access and use. The same is not true of our proprietary systems.
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