Salesforce offers the most powerful CRM platform available, but consider your needs.
March 23, 2015
Salesforce offers the most powerful CRM platform available, but consider your needs.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Enterprise
Modules Used
- SalesCloud
- Force.com
- Chatter
- Partner Portal
- Knowledge
Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce.com
I've done Salesforce implementations for a number of companies, so I have experience with many of the various solutions offered by the platform. Salesforce is certainly a powerful CRM, but it offers far more than that. From support, to marketing, to custom development on the Force.com platform, it's easy to tie together multiple departments and allow them to share the same data.
- Salesforce isn't just a CRM solution, it's a platform. Even if you don't have the time or resources to develop an in-house app, there's likely strong integration with 3rd party solutions.
- Salesforce offers a robust security model. There's definitely a learning curve, but it makes it easy to control who see what for management and reporting purposes.
- The mobile app is very good for Salesforce which allows users to accomplish a lot while on the go.
- The GUI isn't as modern as some of the newer solutions. It requires a lot of mouse-clicking from users to navigate.
- Since it uses a custom language, developers are hard to find and tend to be expensive.
- Cost. While there are some entry level solutions, you can get many of the core CRM features from other solutions for less money.
- Improved Reporting visibility across organization
- Consolidating business systems
- Better visibility of support cases for sales team
I've used Goldmine and evaluated Microsoft CRM and Sugar. Sugar reminds me of Salesforce lite. It has many of the core CRM features but not the extensive functionality. Microsoft has great integration with Office products, so there's some workflow benefits there. Goldmine is far behind the times and doesn't enforce best practices, so it's easy to mess up business processes.