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Salesforce for Dummies - NOT! Huge tool with huge setup and maintenance costs, not for small organizations.
Updated June 03, 2015

Salesforce for Dummies - NOT! Huge tool with huge setup and maintenance costs, not for small organizations.

Darrel Raynor | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Professional

Modules Used

  • Force.com
  • Data.com
  • Work.com
  • Content

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce.com

SF is used across the organization in two orgs I am a part of. It was to attempt to replace the ordering, registration, invoicing, and other forms of course booking and management.
  • If you can spend a huge amount of money with consultants tailoring the workflow, it is a good product. Plan on 2-10x the purchase price.
  • If properly and simply configured, it is a good CRM with hooks to many other systems. Again, every hook is time consuming and can be fragile.
  • Very flexible - to an extreme. So you can program it to do what you need, with either very expensive in-house expertise or consultants.
  • Having worked off and on in software development for decades, it is just too complex. That said, integrating point solutions is no joke either. SF tries to automate so many processes it reminds me of a 6 sigma project - 500,000 repetitions is a good mark, you will save loads of time and money. For a small team it is a tremendous time suck. Both the organizations I am familiar with here probably spent way more money that they could possibly have saved. That said, they did not have good guidance in implementation.
  • From a database perspective, it is difficult to pull all information. Providing a link to simple tools would save having to deal with the complex reporting system.
  • Negative in almost all cases, way too much effort for such small businesses. Bad decisions both.
  • At some of my other clients, who implemented a regimented inflexible set of rules, it works well. They are much bigger or have many thousands of repetitions.
  • Microsoft Dynamics,Sugar,custom Access versions,several others.
Sugar is simple, able to be implemented and adapted by a decent developer, easy to teach, fast to implement.
Microsoft Dynamics is in the middle, all CRM functions, but not the workflow capabilities, need very good developer and configurator, must hire them in.
SF is hugely complex, see rest of review.

I would NOT implement SF or MS Dynamics in a small org, rather do Sugar or a custom other solution.
Salesforce is great for large organizations who want to FORCE standardization. It is not great if you do not know what you want and very expensive to prototype. Look for areas of leverage, where you can automate repetitive workflows that get executed hundreds of thousands of times, not dozens of times, per year. Overkill for the smaller flows. The above rating is for SMBs, I do recommend it for large orgs who know what they want and have the money, time, expertise, and number of executions to harvest economies of scale.

Salesforce Feature Ratings

3.3
Customer data management / contact management
5
Workflow management
2
Territory management
3
Opportunity management
4
Integration with email client (e.g., Outlook or Gmail)
4
Contract management
2
Quote & order management
3
Interaction tracking
Not Rated
Channel / partner relationship management
Not Rated
Not Rated
Case management
Not Rated
Call center management
Not Rated
Help desk management
Not Rated
2.0
Lead management
2
Email marketing
2
3.0
Task management
2
Billing and invoicing management
4
5.0
Forecasting
3
Pipeline visualization
7
Customizable reports
5
7.8
Custom fields
9
Custom objects
9
Scripting environment
7
API for custom integration
6
Not Rated
Single sign-on capability
Not Rated
Not Rated
Social data
Not Rated
Social engagement
Not Rated
Not Rated
Marketing automation
Not Rated
Compensation management
Not Rated
Not Rated
Mobile access
Not Rated

Using Salesforce.com

All. Most use if for CRM for all stages of custom courses (high level), open enrollment registration-payment, and invoicing.
Script genius, database admin, workflow analyst, report writer, business analyst for requirements, project management to handle the hundreds of moving pieces.
  • CRM - contact, lead, opportunity, etc.
  • Pricing, billing, invoicing, managing receivables.
  • Marketing, list management, emails.
  • Don't know of any.
  • SIMPLIFY so current staff can maintain.

Salesforce Implementation

Change management was a major issue with the implementation - Training is more than information on how to do a task or workflow in Salesforce. It is also about *why* they should do their task that way using Salesforce. It disrupted every major process at the center, and so each should have been mapped, discussed, communicated, and prototyped, not just dropped on the staff. They clearly did not want to use Salesforce.