Salesforce

"Salesforce - Marketing & Lead Gen"

Comments: We are using Salesforce to streamline new business leads and nurture leads into actual sales. We are able to analyze, vet, engage, and track the progress of the new leads we receive from our Facebook lead gen ads. Salesforce integrates directly into Facebook's Business Manager and automatically imports new leads in real-time. We are also able to see the cost per lead acquired and other rich insights from our Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns that get directly populated into our dash.

Pros: Salesforce is one of the most powerful and sophisticated CRMs available. The onboarding process and demos with the reps were exceptionally helpful. The reps really took time to understand our CRM needs, our workflow process, and how we can best utilize/adopt Salesforce into our new business department to grow revenue and track progress. The tool is completely customizable and has very advanced marketing integrations within the cloud. The ability to track leads and history (who followed up and when) and add notes and assign leads to specific people makes the entire workflow so much more efficient. It's worth the price tag if you take advantages of the features.

Cons: We wish the marketing cloud add on wasn't so expensive. There are many tools available that offer the same features such as Sprout Social and Hubspot. However, the price was a little steep for the $6,000. I also wish pricing was a bit more transparent. The discounts and contract lengths have been very inconsistent in our experience.

"Cost effective and very efficient CRM"

Comments: I helped in implementing corporate engagement plan for donation management.
It has easily defined schema and took less time to customize the module.

Pros: Easily defined, fully connected and talking features. It is widely popular in each industry sector, market leader and radical in changing the whole ecosystem of CRM industry. SaaS or PaaS it has changed whole ecosystem. Every company which is on on Salesforce has saved tonnes of money and time while focusing on their potential.

Cons: Too many customizations lead to duplicate efforts. It releases so many versions so fast that sometime unnecessary update clients do.

"Salesforce: Helps Improve Internal Communications/External Customer X"

Pros: 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.

Cons: 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.

"Jeremy's Review"

Comments: Good. I like using it and it is easy to keep track of all of my contacts and the conversations/information I have on them.

Pros: It is very easy to navigate through and simplifies the process. Most who use excel or something else find themselves losing contact with many contacts. This makes that easier to track.

Cons: I cannot make my home screen the way I want. It is set up how my company (Colliers) wants it set up - not the way I would like it to be set up.

"Is the price and learning curve something you can afford?"

Comments: We are using salesforce as our CRM. It is the only one that actually works with our other systems. We really like having one environment to operate in as opposed to several systems.

Pros: The marketing automation is hands down the best in the market. The ability to nurture prospects through the sales cycle is amazing. Lead generation tools are top-notch, sales tools, and the sales system is set up for growth, and customer retention is a breeze as well.

Cons: It is expensive to implement. We needed a consultant to help us with setup, which was not cheap. Also the learning curve for over 200 employees took time.