Salesforce Sales Cloud

Puntos a favor

Salesforce powers both our business development, sales, and recruiting efforts in our company. Salesforce makes it easy for us to know what is the last stage of a candidate, what are the next steps he needs to take in his candidacy for a single position, and also if he has already been talking to someone else in our company.

Salesforce also makes it possible for us to know what was the last message we sent out to a single candidate or client. It is also great in terms of establishing relationship because we can customize HTML emails as if we are sending a tailor-fitted email to a single person even-though it is just an email blast.

It is great as well in terms of driving sales and business development effort. We can keep track of the cadence of each possible client, and we can also indicate if they are set for a phone meeting or in-person meeting with our higher ops. The chatter is also great, and from time to time Salesforce gives us a snapshot of what we have done and what we are doing.

Puntos en contra

I really don't have a lot of bad experience with regards to us using Salesforce. Maybe one thing they can improve on is how their technical support works. Sometimes they are not that helpful, and they are not that trained enough in resolving each person's concern.

Puntos a favor

Very easy to use and setup customizations. There are a lot of options to customize the system to your needs without having to write code. Going from test to live in super fast and easy. It is updated three times a year that bring a lot of new features that improve what we can do in the system, Salesforce becomes more powerful each time. The ad hoc reporting is incredible to have.

Puntos en contra

The price is pretty high for some who are not going to use it all. There are a lot of extras that would need to get bought for you to get everything you want from the system. It might not be clear what is an extra. It lacks some functions that you might expect from a system like conditional fields cannot be highlighted.

Puntos a favor

Let me, first of all, start off being admitting that I do not currently use Salesforce in my business but used it quite extensively during my time in Corporate America as an account manager and program manager. As an account manager, we were required to enter all activities and customer interactions in SF. It was a very user-friendly and intuitive interface. I am certain that it has changed quite a bit since then but was still a great platform back then. Some of the features I enjoyed most were emailers and scheduling call backs (served as an assistant). Even though I forecasted during my role as an account manager, I did not appreciate the value of being able to track revenue forecasted by account and service managers until I transitioned into a role as a national program manager. I even worked with engineers to develop a special promotional code that allowed me to track revenue for my program forecasted by my co-workers deals. Although it was a lot of work, this was a huge milestone for me and the company. For the first time, we we able to track revenue for a particular funding source.

As an entrepreneur, I have an even greater degree of appreciation for forecasting revenue. SalesForce gets thumbs up from me.

Puntos en contra

I have no "least" liked features. Perhaps, the only semi-negative I have to share is that we had to develop a special backend program to track revenue for my program. But even that is a compliment to SF. The fact that their software is so flexible speaks volumes.

Puntos a favor

I have been using, recommending and adopting salesforce.com for my sales teams for ten years in several different digital technology, media and advertising organizations. I can say unequivocally that the CRM software has evolved from being a supplement and "nice to have" to a must buy and necessary and vital tool for doing business. The key to any business solutions and software product is getting the team to adopt and use it. Training and practice is essential. Its like your golf game, the more you practice the better your score or working out, no pain, no gain.

I like the social media and conversational abilities you can have with sales team; the app is excellent for quick reviews and checking on status of pending, pitches and prospects; the flexibility and customization options based o salesperson, account, deal size, industry vertical. In one organization we adopted it for internal sales data use and tracking and also incorporated product data about our partners, customers, audience metrics and analytics and distribution platform.

Puntos en contra

Depending on the level of subscription, will also vary with the amount of personalized training you receive. I would also say there needs to be more attention and customization devoted to industry verticals that contain many nuances regarding customer segments and rev streams. This includes the advertising and digital sales industries where there are multiple customer touchpoints and rev streams including agencies, direct to client, programmatic, 3rd party vendors, ad tech partners etc. I also think saleforce.com needs to develop more compatible software and training that integrates salesforce,com into other software linked to finance, accounting etc.

Puntos a favor

Once you have your Salesforce process setup and streamlined, it's great to use. It's easy to access leads and opportunities and manage data inside them with relatively few issues. I also like the dashboard feature which allows you to see a lot of data from different reports in an aesthetically pleasing manner. I have never used the Zoho CRM, but I know my company switched over and has been using it for over 2 years now.

Puntos en contra

The setup process can be difficult and might require some degree of coding logic. Like all software sometimes features won't work and you'll have to contact the salesforce administer within your company to fix it. Also, the reports can kind of be tricky to set up.

My biggest complaint is that no two people can edit a file at the same time. There have been times where I've spent 15 minutes inputting information in a file and tried to click save only to see an error message saying that someone else has edited the file. So I wish it would allow for real-time editing amongst co-workers or at least allow me to refresh the page while saving all the data I have already typed up.

I'm also not a fan of "lightning mode", which is the new UI that they are trying to push. Salesforce classic is just so much easier to use, and you can see so much data at one time when looking at leads/opportunities.