Item: Salesforce.com
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Salesforce.com is a critical business system used by our company to bring in data and serve it up to our inside sales team. Our outside sales team also uses Salesforce.com to track their Accounts, Contacts, and opportunities. Because there is so much rich data in the system, a lot of our departments are in Salesforce so that they can gain visibility into business insights and use the data to their advantages. Auxiliary departments that are in Salesforce include Marketing, Account Management, Implementation, Support, and Operations.

Pros and Cons

Automation - [Salesforce.com] provides an extremely powerful tool that allows you to automate business processes, saving time and creating efficiencies
Reporting - [Salesforce.com] does an excellent job of providing a user friendly UI where you can drag and drop tables to create stunning visual dashboards and reports to see a high level business overview or drill down into the details
Data Validation - [Salesforce.com] provides several tools that help keep your data clean and consistent whether it's with validation rules, automations, or alerts
Security - [Salesforce.com] provides an incredible level of security to the data and records stored, providing even security level down to the field or record itself

Reporting - Although reporting is a positive for [Salesforce.com], it also can be negative due to its limited capabilities. For instance, you can't join objects that are not related, something that can be easily done in SQL or outside database. This is one con to focusing on UI rather than functionality
Big Data Manipulations - For big companies that have millions of records constantly being uploaded/deleted/updated in [Salesforce.com], you can run into data optimization challenges and other technical limits
APIs - On a more technical note, [Salesforce.com] is extremely specific when interacting with its API's and this can be often cumbersome and not intuitive
$$ - [Salesforce.com] is on the more pricey side and it's hard to break away once you get into it, but it can definitely pay off in the long run

Return on Investment

Efficiency - [Salesforce.com] has had a huge impact on our overall efficiency, where we're able to get things done more quickly in less hours due to all of the automations we have in place
Data Quality - We are more readily and easily able to rely on the data within [Salesforce.com] due to some of the data cleaning mechanisms that Salesforce provides, such as validation rules, error logging, duplicate management, merge tools, etc.
Visibility - [Salesforce.com] has provided us a huge competitive advantage because we are now able to see our data in one place with a friendly UI instead of relying on our engineering teams to surface that data and custom build it

Alternatives Considered

I've used Zendesk CRM in the past and it's a nifty little tool that has a lot of potential. However, it just doesn't have all of the automation and features compared to [Salesforce.com]. I must prefer a system that can be easily administered as well as provide a customization experience for my end users.

Key Insights

Do you think Salesforce.com delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Salesforce.com's feature set?

Yes

Did Salesforce.com live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Salesforce.com go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Salesforce.com again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Slack, Jira Software, Calendly, MS SharePoint, Talkdesk, Zoom, ZoomInfo

Usability

[Salesforce.com] provides an ease of use from two different perspectives. If you're an administrator of the platform, it is easy to navigate and go through the set up process. They focus on a clicks not code mentality, but if you have to customize your [Salesforce.com] instance through code, it's also easy for developers to develop directly in the platform. As for the end-user experience, they've come a long way with Salesforce Lightning and the ability to navigate between records and tables. The only slight negative is that it can be a bit cumbersome to fully customize the UI due to the way the metadata is currently set up.

Support Rating

I've had almost always had a pleasant experience with emailing my Account rep or submitting a support request to Salesforce. They first provide you tools to investigate issues for yourself (the Community, knowledge articles, help articles, Trailhead, status pages) and if you can't figure it out on your own, then they always get back to me within 4 hours (but it can depend on your SLAs). Most support personnel are polite and understanding and they try their very best to understand and educate you. There are frustrating times where it seems like they haven't read any details in your ticket before asking a question - but I have experienced that across all companies and all industries.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you have a giant team of Sales people, or even a fair sized team, I highly recommend utilizing a CRM system such as [Salesforce.com]. There are several smaller CRM competitors out there, but Salesforce just provides such a suite of tools that all aspects of the business can take advantage of, it's hard to compare Salesforce to another other CRM platform. Even if you are a Care or support center, the ServiceCloud provided by Salesforce gives you a lot of out-of-the-box functionality you never knew you needed. If you're tracking things in excel, it's hard to argue again migrating that process into Salesforce to take advantage of the automations and data integrity features that Salesforce provides. Take caution, if you are simply trying to use Salesforce as a data source and visualization tool, you will fail!

Salesforce.com is the way to go!

Software Version

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce.com