Like any other professional salesman, I despise being tethered to data input. However, how do you aggregate and compile all relevant sources of information to give you a comprehensive understanding of your sales universe? Additionally, how do you purposefully manage your pipeline and provide timely, accurate forecasts for revenue? I'm sure that SF is not the only CRM that provides this functionality, but it is widely used, easily adopted and already integrated with dozens of other apps and tools.
Price-It's pricey but worth every penny if used effectively. Integration: Cost to integrate can be costly (time and money) if not familiar/capable of doing so on your own.
Pipeline Management, Sales Organization, Process & System Improvement, Capability Expansion
- Very customizable - Large customer-base - Lots of resources(manuals, tutorials etc) available
Be warned! - After two years they are renogatiating the contract. We joined Salesforce with monthly payments and an X percentage of discount. They now FORCE ;-) me to go to quaterly payments and threaten to drop the discounts. For an internet startup like us this is killing and if I would have know this I would have NEVER selected Salesforce. I feel Salesforce really misuses their position. For me Salesforce stands for unreliable and untrustworthy. I'm still negotiating with them. I will keep you up to date! I'm really on the look-out for people with the same experience! Please PM me if you also feel beeing mistreated by Salesforce.
Standardization in the sales process Integrations with relating systems-
Salesforce CRM can be tailored to collect just the right amount of information to track a particular business's key metrics without overwhelming salespeople with an inordinate number of fields to populate. This helps maintain efficiency and improves pipeline reliability, since records are kept better. Dashboards help with decision-making and are a great basis for meetings and discussions.
Without the right customization, the platform can become a mess and few people will use it if that happens. It's best to use a certified consultant to deploy the platform, which can be costly, but very worthwhile. Also, the monthly fees are relatively high for the subscription.
Distilling all of the sales data to inform decision-making at the tactical and strategic levels is a key value-add. The type of detail required for different levels of the organization varies, so it is especially beneficial that Salesforce can be set up to report the information useful to each audience.
I love Salesforce! It's the business platform on which any business can gain a competitive business advantage. You might be able to say the same, to a lesser extent, for one or two of Salesforce' so called competitors. The difference? They're not Salesforce. Salesforce is the unchallenged leader in Business CRM Systems. They lead in everything that means anything. Salesforce was smart enough, years ago, to realize what would give them market dominance for a long time to come lies in always being the innovator -- so far ahead of their competition that looking back to see them is just a waste of time. With Salesforce, I think much less about making the technology work -- this allows me more time to innovate with the technology. Transforming Marketing & Sales Operations.
I've got two pet peeves about Salesforce that have begun to develop in the last 2 years. 1st -- Pricing. It's getting a little crazy -- what these solutions cost small & mid-sized customers. Then they spend how much on DreamForce every year? The VALUE is still there -- that's how Salesforce justifies being 2X or 3X more than their competitors (along with their very generous donation of time & treasure so some great causes) -- but someone is going to jump up & bite them someday soon. Especially at the low/middle parts of the marketplace. 2nd: They're starting to act like Enterprise Software Sales People. There was a time (about 7 years ago) when Salesforce aggressively marketed their solutions as allowing you to not have to rely on your IT department. I don't know about you, but I really liked that. The IT guys really didn't like it -- so here we are 7-years later and Salesforce seems to be "kissing up" to IT again.
PROBLEMS: You name it. Rising costs, falling revenue, slim margins, lack of Accountability, lack of Visibility into the operation. Getting one's butt kicked by their competitors. BENEFITS: Increase Sales, quickly. Make Marketing accountable, Bringing the two into alignment (although this really requires a Marketing Automation solution that works with Salesforce -- Pardot anyone?).
Look and feel; Ease of use; Reports and dashboards; Customization capabilities provided through Force.com; Niche capabilities provided through AppsExchange vendors; Widely used which reduces the need to train new Sales personnel; Easy and quick to implement;
Service levels and application performance can be tardy; Regular scheduled maintenance and outages seem excessive for a 24 x 7 platform; Pricey relative to functionality; Lack of other basic Sales functions, such as pricing, configuring and quoting; Extra charges for basic things such as Development environments, even for Enterprise licenses; Included sandbox environment does not come with data which makes it unusable; The excessive pitching of the social enterprise using Chatter at times gives the impression the company is no longer focusing on key competencies
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Cloud-based, more conducive to the deployment of the extension、High reusability, fast implementation, low cost, flexible pricing, and faster delivery of processing plans.
Salesforce was created to serve small and medium-sized enterprises, resulting in some product limitations. Now many large companies are also using salesforce, and the data volume and business complexity of large companies are still very large, so salesforce faces the limitations of small and medium-sized enterprises, and the efficiency is very low in timeout when querying large quantities of data and executing complex logic by itself.
Business management (especially sales) feels great, and it's easy to generate reports and things like that. Such as: 1) S.F has a good user experience and friendly interface; 2) rapid implementation, our company transferred from LOTUS and received good feedback; 3) with a mobile APP, the fast establishment event cannot be better; 4) free installation, direct web application.
Lead, Account, and Opportunity management are great, Einstein features, especially the new generative AI are very exciting.
Too many of the features that make Salesforce truly great are cost-prohibitive for smaller accounts. A better model would be to charge based on a scale so larger companies pay more due to their higher volumes and smaller companies get the features in enterprise or platinum and as they grow their costs will increase based on usage.
Sales cloud helps us effectively manage our opportunities and pipeline. COnsolidating our sales knowledge into one location to effectively advance sales through a structured, repeatable process.
Salesforce services allow organizations to understand their customers better, improve customer service, and increase sales. It also helps to streamline operations, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. I feel that the response from salesforce service is professionally upgraded in recent times, showing that it is adaptive to new customer demands.
Salesforce services are costly and need proper budgetary freedom to get them done. However, this problem is being managed by salesforce by providing discounts for businesses in emerging economies.
Salesforce Services is helping organizations manage customer relationships better, automate business processes, and gain insights into customer data. By leveraging Salesforce Services, I understandood my customers better, improved my customer service, and increased sales.