Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce.com
Salesforce is being used by department, not organization wide, we currently have (5) five instances of Salesforce.com including communities and provide access to over 500 Retailers / Partners.. The most common use(s) of Salesforce is for lead collection, distribution, sales support, analytics, basic account management and partner management.
- Analytics. Within Salesforce, every data table or object and every field is tracked, the built in reporting, dash boarding and analytics features are plentiful.
- Lead and Case collection, distribution, processing and reporting is simply amazing. From collecting leads and cases in email, from websites or one of our many call centers is simple, effective and intuitive.
- Using Partner Portal and Partner Communities makes sharing data, processes and communication simple and transparent both internally and to our Partners.
- Apex governor limits are a bit restrictive, however, most people will not run into this issues unless they are massively modifying their instance of Salesforce.com.
- Development tools for writing and deploying both Apex and Visual force are less than I would expect, although they work properly, they are a little thin on the "cool features" side.
- Approval processes are one of many of the newer and sweet features within Salesforce, but are currently a little difficult to setup and lacking in features. This does seem to improve with each new release.
- Lead Management has gone from "eh" to "Wow" overnight, increasing inside sales number by and amazing % and partner sales by over 6%.
- Case management before Salesforce, a phone call, email, fax or telepathic communication from the Customer or Partner may be received or..... After Salesforce Case management 100% transparent to both the Company and to the Partner, contained within Salesforce, reportable. Some of the metrics are: Who requested what and when. Who received the case, when and time (HH:MM) to formally accept the case, what happen on the case (Reject and why, Completed, in Process), was the case closed and when (and Case completion time, from submission to completion (HH:MM).
- Productivity management. Sales person A did what, with how and for how long? Operations person did what, when and for how long? Etc....
We initially reviewed several other products SugarCRM, Siebel, MS something or other. In every category Salesforce was determined to be the better product. The only real hard decision was with price on SugarCRM Free edition. It is hard to compete with free when looking at pricing. But the free also removed the possibility of support.
Salesforce Sales Cloud Feature Ratings
Using Salesforce.com
750 -
50 Call Center reps enter, work and sale products.
50 Sales managers work Leads/Opportunities on larger sales. ( > $1,000,000)
50 Operations people work cases requests, upgrades, product swaps, billing and general inquiries etc., from all sales and partners.
500 Community partner manage leads, opportunities and accounts.
2 - We have two full time people who support Salesforce, the Admin and a Developer. The Admin assists the developer with everyday functions, trainings of users and requirement gathering for new features. The Developer does the heavy behind the scenes lifting, database type management and integration management etc....
- Leads and Opportunity management.
- Case management.
- Partner communities.
- Contracts and E-Signature.
- Partner Communities.
- Contracts and E-Signature.
- Case Management.
- With integration, equipment provisioning.
- Data aggregation.
- Marketing!