Salesforce.com -- Just Give the Account Managers What They Want.
February 02, 2015
Salesforce.com -- Just Give the Account Managers What They Want.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Professional
Modules Used
- Force.com
- Chatter
- Data.com
Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is being used organization-wide by the Northcraft Analytics direct sales team, distributed around the U.S. and Canada, along with our network of partners internationally. Salesforce.com is our single system of record for all leads, opportunities, products, quotes, contacts and forecasting. For us, Salesforce enhances the efficiency of the sales team via automated quoting, helps us make strategic channel decisions based on lead source, enhances partner collaboration via Salesforce2Salesforce and increases internal collaboration & knowledge sharing with chatter.
Pros
- Usability -- Sales reps do NOT want to spend their time entering data... and shouldn't. The goal is to collect the minimum amount of data quickly, Salesforce.com enables us to do that.
- Quoting - Salesforce.com has professional, simple and effective quoting that is integrated entirely with the product catalog. It is simple to modify and looks professional.
- Lead Management - Leads are high volume. We want to know which lead sources have the highest conversion rate. We were unable to get this information easily with our previous system.
- Integrations - Salesforce.com is connected to everything -- Email marketing, Data.com, BI Visualization tools, other salesforce.com systems, etc... This makes the information more rich in our system so we can have more effective intelligence about our customers.
- HTML Email tracking - It's nice to know that any emails you send out of the system give you visibility into the customer/prospect perspective.
Cons
- Keyword search - It's wonky. Searching for contacts & accounts could be better. It looks like Google, but doesn't work exactly like it. It seems to be a poor mixture of keyword searching and old FTS technology.
- Import/Export functionality - I'm hearing that this has just been updated, but we've had serious trouble bringing in large data sets before. There are 3rd party fixes to this, but the import utility isn't great.
- APEX Scripting - If you get beyond the WYSIWYG customizations... or want to add workflow... be careful. APEX is proprietary and not as intuitive as JavaScript, so the professional services can run high for certain things. That being said, you can use it out of the box for the most critical activities usually.
- Not faster lead conversion, that depends on the sales rep, but better intelligence on where to focus the sales rep's time based on the information.
- Increased sales rep efficiency via quoting, interaction management and lead management.
- Better pipeline predictability with forecasting
- Oracle Siebel CRM,SugarCRM,Microsoft Dynamics CRM
- Siebel is great for customizability, but not for usability.
- SugarCRM isn't as well-known enough by reps, it also lacks as many packaged integrations as salesforce.com
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM has a good price, ok usability but is more difficult to customize than salesforce.com
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