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

Salesforce is hugely customisable, as a consultant, I am always asked to customise the system to fit the needs of the client, and I have not yet found a requirement that cannot be met, it may take knowledge and expertise from multiple different types of people (admins, developers, specialists etc.) but with enough understanding the sky is the limit.

Puntos en contra

There are certain limitations which may need to be overcome when setting up a new CRM system, if you are coming from a complex CRM previously, then achieving the same functionality is not always easy, but that is the reason you are switching systems, to gain benefits, not just to put a new interface on to the same solution.

Puntos a favor

In every company I have consulted for and worked for, we have used or switched to Salesforce. Once built out properly, it is an asset that is scalable and will continue to benefit your sales team. The functionalities are endless: Leads, Accounts, Opportunites, Metics calculators, pipeline management tables, Groups, and options to create products too! (This one was difficult to construct but I was more than ecstatic that I could use this for wholesale as well)
Let's talk about customer support: Very comprehensive. There is a whole website dedicated to tutorial videos, live chats, and Q&A boards. If you still can't figure out the problem they do have a real human you can speak to who will help you out.

Puntos en contra

The learning curve to set up your salesforce correctly is rough if you have not done any Salesforce admin work before. Starting off with a small group is easier, and the program is more forgiving when you have fewer accounts, leads, etc, but as your org grows, you will want to ensure that Salesforce is set up correctly. Errors with when you have a lot of data will take a long time to fix.

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.