VanillaSoft Pro Software

Been using it for about 2+ months now - it's a great, easy to use the tool. I'm in Account Management, so it's great to keep track of when clients have been contacted, for how long, and the purpose of the call.

Pros

Scheduling callbacks and logs of completed calls/actions

Cons

Not being able to leave the active page once calling someone - will render that call as unrecorded / a lot harder to find

Advice to Others

Great product. As always, do research about what your NEEDS are, and make a decision from there.

Super easy to set up and use. Everything is up and running in no time.

I loved how fast and easy the software was to use. It was an easy system to implement and even easier to teach my staff. I was able to track and follow new leads and potential clients and keep information clean and organized.

Cons

None to list.

Advice to Others

None to list.

The platform itself is super easy to use. It definitely make the sales guys move faster in their day to day. The pricing is simple, straight forward. You can add on and remove bundles on you own without having to talk to a sales rep which make it easy to decide how much you want to pay. You can also add certain features to certain users instead of a group purchase, which you can rarely do on CRM's.

Pros

Ease of use - speed of activity!

Cons

The support. The online knowledge base is less than most, and the email support is not as fast to give same day resolutions. You almost have to call every time. There's also a lot of room for added features which would make this my favourite CRM ever. A few more integrations are still missing, but that said, they also have unbeatable features such as SMS messaging which I haven't seen any company come close to doing as well as Vanilla!

Advice to Others

You wont be disappointed, but don't put all of your eggs in one basket. This is a nice add-on, not a full CRM.

Likes Best

I like the customization that can be done with VanillaSoft for each Project.

Likes Least

I'm not a big fan of the 3rd party voip provider and wish it was integrated more seamlessly into VS.

Recommendations

Good Software, give it a try! We were on Five9 and made the switch for better control over our experience.

Likes Best

The company is extremely responsive to customer needs and support requests. When I started my company I needed a scalable CRM with a calendar solution for outside sales reps. Vanillasoft fit the bill in all respects for our niche utilization and blew all other options out of the water in terms of ease of configuration and use. Initially there wasn't an option to auto sync calendars with outside software. About six months after I submitted this as a suggestion, we had a working gmail synchronization capability at no development cost to us.

Likes Least

I am going to ignore the obvious inconvenience that is inherent to hosted services infrequent but nevertheless frustrating slowdowns or communication errors with the hosted server. The only actual disappointment I've had is also something I am sure this is a common problem across all vendors of SAAS solutions: updates and changes. While I love the constant effort at increasing functionality and streamlining usability, I simultaneously hate updates because my user base finds learning new procedures on the fly very challenging. There were several updates that affected my users which came as a surprise with no warning before or change log notification after. We had a few frantic hours of complete chaos. Also due to our company structure Vanillasoft is our sole avenue of completing work and we use the majority of its features quite intensely, so naturally if there is a bug in the new features... I will be the one to find it. There is however an upside at the end of this which supports what I said earlier about responsiveness. After requesting some kind of upgrade notes, all future upgrades have been well documented in advance. The most recent large scale remodel has the ability to switch back and forth between new and old versions and this has given me the ability to prepare my users for the inevitable permanent change over to the newest iteration.

Recommendations

Although many CRM solutions claim to be one size fits all, I speak from experience that most often the promises of customization and add on modules fall short of what you need. Many times I've been party to situations where thousands are spent to develop integrations which never come to fruition or which which work so poorly as to be useless. It took a lot of research to find a solution that was geared toward appointment setting and also allowed the flexibility that we needed to customize individual campaigns for our clients. My recommendation is to take advantage of trial periods and put in the work to thoroughly test the out of the box configuration to see how close it already is to meeting your needs before committing.

Likes Best

VanillaSoft has an entrepreneurial mindset and is always willing to help, or discuss ways to improve their service and offerings to their clients.

Likes Least

Some integrations are a little buggy - i.e. not being able to see recurring events on calendars.

Recommendations

None - VanillaSoft is one of the most easy to use, powerful sales tools that you can leverage for your organization.

Likes Best

Easy to use and integrate. So far many of the employees enjoy the product. Bug-free. The most important thing is the money value of the product paid.

Likes Least

I don't dislike anything about this product that I am using.

Recommendations

The price can be lower and also improve the overall workflow of the product.