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Salesforce.com CRM Software
 | 8 Reviews (4.4/5) |
The Salesforce cloud is the leader in on-demand customer relationship management. The system offers a broad suite of CRM applications for small, mid-market, and enterprise organizations, with a focus on sales and support.
Sometimes referred to just as "SFDC," Salesforce offers vertical solutions for the wealth management and financial services segments only, but its partner network (AppExchange) offers a wide variety of other industry-specific solutions. The applications are built on the unique Force.com platform, a modern architecture that provides increased flexibility and scalability to suit organizations of any size.
The Salesforce app has capabilities in sales management (its heritage), marketing automation, partner relationship management and customer service. These work together to help organizations manage customer accounts, track sales leads, conduct and monitor marketing campaigns, and provide service post sale.
Salesforce’s social media application, Chatter, allows for social networking and collaboration across the organization. For very specialized industries and organizations, the Force.com platform enables custom application development. Developers can gain access to the application development environment and access the tools and resources they need to design, create, and deploy a custom app for their organization.
Salesforce for Outlook allows users to synchronize contacts, calendars, emails and tasks in both places to reduce double entry. Because these capabilities are delivered via the cloud, this happens whether the email or task is completed in the office, home or during the morning commute. Check out the Salesforce.com reviews below for more information about how the tool effectively streamlines work in Outlook with advanced Salesforce contact manager capabilities.
CRM Salesforce solutions are available only for software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployment. Force.com is a secure and scalable platform for development. It provides a complete technology stack that covers database and security as well as workflow and user interface. Because all applications are deployed in the “cloud”, they can be designed, built, tested and deployed without the added expense of purchasing hardware and IT support.
You might be asking why Salesforce over any other CRM? Check out the Salesforce reviews below for anecdotes from real customers. Also, you can click on the orange "price" button at the top of the page for more information on Salesforce cost estimates.
This will vary depending on the number of users and needed functionality. Salesforce for small business allows users to manage an unlimited number of contacts, track sales deals, manage tasks and events, harvest Web leads and track performance with reporting. While the Salesforce enterprise edition layers in call scripts, team-selling functionality, business workflow, setup approval and automation, custom applications, advanced API integrations and more.
This Salesforce overview was produced by Software Advice, which retains sole copyright.
8 Reviews of Salesforce.com
The customer support is not ideal. Their idea of customer support is people in India who answer the phone after 40 minutes to open a ticket. They don't speak English well, and tell you they will get somebody to call you. The person who called did not understand my very simple question about importing data and then closed the ticket after sending me a link to the support issue I had referenced from the help site.
After 5 days, I still have problems importing the data, and they have closed the case with no ability to reopen it. My salesperson was upset that I didn't call him to share my problem during the trial, and didn't seem to understand that customer service is important and that sales people generally disappear after the sale is made. I am trying other systems right now.
We started using Salesforce in 2007, starting with the team edition. As our team grew, we upgraded to the Professional Edition.
We generate a significant volume of leads from our web site which we were able to import directly into Salesforce via their web:lead program. As our lead volume continued to increase, it outstripped our ability to manually follow up on every inbound lead. That prompted us to implement a marketing automation and lead scoring/nurturing program.
This required us to upgrade to the Enterprise edition which provides access to the API for integrations with marketing automation software. The Enterprise edition allows us to define workflows and automate processes and really tailor the system to match our sales processes which continue to evolve.
We recently began utilizing the product catalog and now generate all of our quotes and subscription agreements through Salesforce. We also started using Salesforce to track sales against quotas and annual forecasts.
We were able to accomplish this with internal resources, relying on their documentation and, on occasion, customer support. The system is highly intuitive and can been configured extensively. The help and training tab and having access to a sandbox account is very helpful. Support is there when we needed some guidance.
We have had many new members join our team. The learning curve for Salesforce end users is quite short (shorter than for any other software we use).
Customer support is helpful. We only have basic support so we typically have to wait a day or so for a response when it's a non-urgent matter.
We also utilize Chatter for sharing info among team members, even those who aren't Salesforce users.
It's the backbone of our entire sales and marketing process. Between Salesforce and the app exchange, we have yet to find anything that couldn't be accomplished.
The automation features help coach our clients through the adoption process and allows them to work on their schedule but still receive a high level of customized support and access to user resources.
The customer support team for Salesforce has guided us through developing the web-based software to our needs and has always responded quickly, often through multiple channels such as email, phone and live chat.
Our dedicated account representative checks in on a regular basis and walks us through new features that could help our productivity and provide a higher level of support to our clients.
It would be hard to imagine promising our clients the highest level of support without this valuable tool.
We've customized it a ton and the features we've created are core to the way we do things now.
Can't imagine not using it.
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