Salesforce.com - Still the #1 CRM in the World
July 30, 2021

Salesforce.com - Still the #1 CRM in the World

Erik Viager | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Enterprise

Modules Used

  • Pardot
  • Salesforce for Outlook

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is used primarily by our Business Development and Account Teams. Our Salesforce.com instance has been highly customized to meet our business requirements and objectives. For Business Development and Sales, we are actively managing and tracking Leads, Contacts and new business Opportunity record types. The Account team is solely focused on growing organic business, and tracking those opportunities within Salesforce.com. Aside from managing different record types, our teams use the dashboard functionality for reporting up to executive leadership on how we are performing against our goals.

Pros

  • Salesforce.com is extremely customizable. I would not consider it an out-of-the-box solution, although its standard fields allow for fundamental CRM activities and reporting.
  • Salesforce.com is able to integrate with 100s of third-party softwares—often times creating efficiencies in processes.
  • Reports within Salesforce.com have the ability to be simple as a standard Account report, or you can get very granular with your report filtering to segment a very specific result, eg. Accounts in California who are active clients and fall within the pharmaceutical industry and have a specified market capitalization.

Cons

  • If a user creates a record and that user is no longer active, you are unable to make changes to that record unless an admin changes the record owner.
  • Duplicate and Matching rules should be automatically activated when implementing the CRM to ensure data integrity.
  • Salesforce.com is an extremely complex platform, and if not implemented properly, can create issues down the road when businesses grow and change. This is not a functionality issue, but I believe that Salesforce.com should consult with all clients on what business units they need and optimize the system for scaling as the organization grows.
  • We created a custom dashboard for the executive leadership team that shows opportunity investment versus revenue—visually representing ROI on an aesthetic and easy to understand dashboard.
  • We have made Salesforce.com the single source of truth for all things new business. Every activity (call, meeting, email, etc) is tracked in Salesforce.com on the respective opportunity and contract record. Final proposals and SOWs are also uploaded to the opportunity, making Salesforce.com the one-stop-knowledge-shop for every opportunity.
  • Our Salesforce was initially not implemented correctly and was not able to meet the ever-changing needs of our business. Working with a third-party consultancy, we were able to audit our changes in the sandbox environment before pushing them to production. Once pushed to production, there was zero disruption of business processes.
I've used simpler CRMs such as Copper and Hubspot in my past. Hubspot is a pretty straightforward CRM, but it's ability to be customized is nowhere near Salesforce.com. Copper (formerly Prosperworks) was a nicely designed CRM, but it is know as the "CRM for G-Suite". Now, in my current role, we do not use G-Suitre and we have multiple business units (BU) that span several offices across the word. Salesforce allows us to create BU-specific requirements and easily integrates with Pardot, which we use for marketing automation and campaign management.

Do you think Salesforce Sales Cloud delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Salesforce Sales Cloud's feature set?

Yes

Did Salesforce Sales Cloud live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Salesforce Sales Cloud go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Salesforce Sales Cloud again?

Yes

The Salesforce.com Lightning Experience is very user friendly compared to the Salesforce.com Classic layout. I would still recommend any new users to take a few "Trail Heads" (free online courses from Salesforce) to help users get acquainted to the CRM. Overall it's a nice looking platform and easy to navigate. You can also easily customize your top navigation bar to include quick links to the records, objects or reports you most often leverage.
90% of the support I receive from Salesforce.com is from the Salesforce Knowledge Base. The knowledge base has educational articles and "how-tos" but also is a community forum of Salesforce.com users posting their questions and getting answers from other, more experienced Salesforce.com users. I wish there would be a chat with a Salesforce.com Support specialist feature.
Salesforce.com is well-suited for established organizations with a solid clientele roster and a dedicated Business Development and Account Team. I would not recommend Salesforce.com to small start ups as these organizations can get basic CRM functionality from free or much cheaper CRM platforms. But if a company is forecasted to grow, Salesforce.com is a great CRM to grow with. It is very customizable, but customizing the backend of the Salesforce.com CRM will require a Salesforce Administrator, someone with the experience to create the custom objects, etc., or a third-party consultancy to build the CRM to meet the unique business requirements.

Salesforce Sales Cloud Feature Ratings

9.8
Customer data management / contact management
10
Workflow management
9
Territory management
Not Rated
Opportunity management
10
Integration with email client (e.g., Outlook or Gmail)
10
Contract management
Not Rated
Quote & order management
Not Rated
Interaction tracking
10
Channel / partner relationship management
Not Rated
Customer Service & Support ()
Not Rated
9.5
Lead management
10
Email marketing
9
10.0
Task management
10
Reporting
10
9.7
Forecasting
9
Pipeline visualization
10
Customizable reports
10
10.0
Custom fields
10
Custom objects
10
Scripting environment
Not Rated
API for custom integration
10
10.0
Role-based user permissions
10
Single sign-on capability
10
Not Rated
Social data
Not Rated
Social engagement
Not Rated
10.0
Marketing automation
10
Compensation management
Not Rated
10.0
Mobile access
10

Using Salesforce.com

40 - Business Development, Account Management, Client Relationship Management, Executive Leadership, IT
2 - We have two in-house admins, including myself. I am not certified, but have self-taught myself the back-end of Salesforce.com over the years of use. I would recommend that admins require the Salesforce.com Admin Certification.
  • Customer Relationship Management
  • Opportunity and Pipeline Management
  • Reporting and Forecasting
  • Our Salesforce.com is connected to a plethora of other platforms, creating efficiencies within our day-to-days
  • Integration with our Accounting department to trigger closed opportunities to automatically open a new PO.
We are given competitive rates and just invested a lot to optimize our instance. I don't see why we would not renew.

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