Salesforce Sales Cloud

Puntos a favor

-Highly customisable with deep and wide integration with my organisations SaaS or natively developed applications.
-Allows you to produce very detailed reports to track my own activity and history. Which can also be used by management to track team progress and activity.
-A customisable dashboard that allows frequently uses tabs to be populated to a "bookmarks bar" which allows for faster navigation.
-Great search feature that allows for search across the entire CRM database.

Puntos en contra

-Due to its high functionality and range of options it can be overbearing to use at times.
-Requires internet connection which means there is occasional latency and is not accessible at all times.
-Visually, it's not the most appealing tool that I've ever used.
-Steep learning curve for those that have not used it before, but then that goes for most CRM tools.

Puntos a favor

Salesforce is one of the greatest software nowadays. It has a lot of data stored plus it’s very secure to use so you don’t have to worry about anything happening to your data. Also, it has a cross-platform which means you can use it for iOS, Android, phones, tablets, etc. This software also provides you with information about the client/candidate, is he hired by someone, what he should do next and so on. It creates a general relationship between you and the client. What you have done and what the client has done. Also, Salesforce offers you the first ten licenses for free if you are a non-profit person or company.

Puntos en contra

The main thing that I dislike about Salesforce is the price. It’s quite expensive and every other license that you buy just gets more expensive, so because of that, you should probably ask someone more informed before purchasing. Another thing that I dislike is that they often change their managers. Imagine having one manager and making a good relationship with him and they suddenly change him. You need to start building a new relationship which in some cases can be frustrating. And last but not least, their customer service sometimes can be irritating because most of the people that are hired are not friendly and helpful.

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

The non-profit organization that I work for, Interfaith Caregivers has been using Salesforce for a year. I'm so glad that we decided on this system because I have used it previously in other places of work. One of the reasons why we went with Salesforce was to manage a marketing/fundraiser campaign that we have every year. We were able to store our donor and board members and create a campaign just for them to use as a communication tool and to begin the fundraiser campaign for our annual gala. It was also very easy and much needed to track donor and fundraiser payments for the gala. We are able to store multiple templates which consist of donor thank you letters in the template field. This is a very helpful feature!

Puntos en contra

It is hard for me to dislike Salesforce. I appreciate the fact that we were able to get the nonprofit discount. Also we were able to use the 10 free licenses since we have 10 employees!

I would say the only thing is that I look forward to seeing how Salesforce will continue to grow and evolve and offer other packages to improve the CRM experience. Currently I have not ran into any problems.

Puntos a favor

The integrations are truly outstanding. Simple integrations with almost every piece of software you can imagine. The fact that we can send out emails and see which of the current prospects in our pipeline read it is truly outstanding.

Puntos en contra

Steep learning curve! Salesforce is not easy to use immediately, nor set up. It's best to have somebody in your organization be the, "Salesforce Champion."