Salesforce for the World
Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce.com
Salesforce is being used by our Sales, Marketing, and multiple Service teams to manage our customer lifecycle from web lead to sales pipeline to customer launch/onboarding and training. All executive reporting and dashboards live in SFDC as we use it as the source record for bookings and customer health. It enables all teams to access the same data set while using different modules/customizations to run tasks specific to their teams' processes.
Pros
- Salesforce gives a great out-of-the box foundation for Sales process that is easily adjustable to each company's workflow. Small businesses can use the basic Lead > Account > Opportunity objects and larger orgs can enable quotes, orders, multi-currency, partner management, case management, etc as needed
- With the help of a good admin, you can build multiple types of table relations and workflows, email notifications, automated approvals and much more. I haven't come across a business request I haven't been able to build within the platform (especially with the help of free/low cost plugins)
- They've greatly enhanced the mobile world making it very easy for remote users to stay up to date via their phone or tablet along with a nice mobile app for admins
- Complex process logic can be built by people who cannot write code via new Flows and Process Builder. Prior to these modules, we had to hire a developer to create and maintain anything past field updates
Cons
- There is a lot of room for improvement around quoting products for orgs that sell anything more complex than one line items. A configuration option is desperately needed but will probably not be updated since there are so many 3rd party apps that can be plugged in. Many of them are more complex and too expensive for what is needed, so some native improvements to Salesforce would be appreciated
- The UI is a bit outdated compared to a lot of newer platforms on the market but still not bad for a CRM. Hopefully the next UI update will include some of the navigation features seen in recent project management tools
- Better overall understanding of the full client experience as a lead moves through the process. It is really nice to have our internal teams using the same system and we can track how long it takes to move through each phase
- Collaboration among teams has greatly increased with Chatter. Our remote users have no lag time when sharing updates or files, and our handoff from sales to services is primarily done via the chatter feed
My selection for Salesforce is heavily dependent on my role as an admin/architect. I work primarily with companies from 40-400 users, and the ability for me to customize Salesforce to fit each company regardless of size or industry is very important. The automation I can set up with no code knowledge is great, and the user community is robust enough so that I can depend on my counterparts to figure out pretty much any issue I come across.
My experience with other CRMs is limited to migrating companies from other CRMs to Salesforce. The open access to SFDC's API is key and allows data migration as well as mass transformations not available with some vendors.
My experience with other CRMs is limited to migrating companies from other CRMs to Salesforce. The open access to SFDC's API is key and allows data migration as well as mass transformations not available with some vendors.
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