Item: Salesforce Sales Cloud
Rating: 9
Author: Parker O'Very

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce.com

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Salesforce is our primary CRM and system of record for sales and marketing. We use it to manage our prospect and customer relations, marketing campaigns, reporting, and more.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Customizability. It is built to cater to just about any CRM need.
Integrations. Everything integrates with Salesforce.
Robust. It's like the Hulk of CRMs.

Cons

Workflows. If you have too many workflows on the same object, it doesn't seem to be able to handle them all. Every now and then, some just don't work.
Complex. It is not an easy system to get going.
Partner solution. It is not a great PRM tool.
It's not built for ABM. They way the lead and contact and account objects work, it's just not great for ABM. There are certainly ways around it, but it is built on a lead-based marketing and sales mentality. In today's B2B world, this is archaic. The top-down strategy of ABM is just the way to go.

Return on Investment

Everything marketing and sales runs through Salesforce. It pays for itself easily.
Because it is such a heavy platform, it takes a lot more setup, implementation, maintenance, etc. This means time and money. But the return we get from all of these efforts more than pays for itself.