Salesforce- A Force to be Reckoned With
February 14, 2015
Salesforce- A Force to be Reckoned With
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Professional
Modules Used
- SalesCloud
- Force.com
- Chatter
Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce.com
We used Salesforce to handle all of our sales leads for potential Medicare members. We would have our sales and marketing team (both field and inside sales team members, team leads, managers and directors) add potential members into the system to manage basic information and track their potential to sign up for our services. It was specific for just the sales and marketing departments. There was not a system that we had that covered this need (it would be a much better option than using Excel with a team as large as what we had).
- There are a ton of fields to fill in about sales leads. It can be customized to nearly any type of information needed.
- Running reports on specific information, or multiple pieces of information made identifying trends relatively easy. This happen to be one of the most robust programs that I have used that offers the extensive kind of searching and reporting.
- Because Salesforce is a large and robust program, it was easy to get buy in and usage from our sales and marketing teams. It is a system that is used by many large companies, so the learning curve to adopt to our usage was quick and did not require a lot of training.
- We had team members who had never used Salesforce before and the learning curve seemed to be more substantial because there was a lot to the program.
- Because there was [what seemed to be] endless tailoring that could be done on each sales lead, it made updating a time consuming task.
- It was also challenging at times to get the sales team to use the same form fields to help with tracking and reporting. Many of them would use fields that made sense to them or ones from a previous company or put information in the wrong field. It was a time consuming task to have members of our team have to go in and fix the errors.
- There were a lot of different elements that make this CRM system. While they are nice and what I consider "shiny" it may be overkill and distracts away from what Salesforce at its core is suppose to be, a CRM management system. Chatter (messaging feature) is way too much.
- Salesforce was a great tool for team leads and managers to see how the sales staff is meeting to their goals. We were able to pull reports to see exactly where we are at with warm leads, cold leads and leads-turned-into-sales. We could then work with the individual 1:1 to improve sales.
- It was a great tool for our insides sales team to get warm leads and pass them off to the field staff to turn into sales cross geography because Salesforce can be accessed in the cloud. It also worked for our field staff to work as an introduction to our company and how Medicare products and then have our inside sales staff to close to sale.
- Due to being able to access this anywhere (plus the app) our sales team was able to provide that solid A+ service we are known for because we could pull up call logs and notes up quickly.
I believe it was a little overkill for what our company did. Being an insurance company, we already had other proprietary programs that handle many of the same features that were built into it. Our sales and marketing team was less than 40 people and I think there are other options at a cheaper cost that would do the same thing without the complicated user interfaces. I would recommend Salesforce for companies with large sales teams- otherwise, stick to the smaller company CRMs for a lower cost.