SALESFORCE.COM: A REVIEW

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In the world of CRM, one name that you’ll keep coming across is Salesforce. Salesforce.com is a widely acclaimed and appreciated customer-relationship management (CRM) tool that was designed by the Salesforce group established in 1999 and headquartered in San Francisco, California.

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The functionalities of many of the products the company offers overlaps, as they are all centered around how customer data can be effectively channeled to drive business success.

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Saleforce.com is fully automated and can help users to optimize their CRM by providing the necessary data for highlighting the bets leads and determining the distinction between losses and wins in terms of business deals. 

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The Salesforce crm software is generally considered as the standard CRMtool, and it is arguably the best overall CRM solution that there is.

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With over 20% of the market patronizing Salesforce, it is indeed something of a household name in customer management. The richness of its features, third-party integrations, and supplementary possibilities make it perfect for big enterprises with diversifies and ever-changing needs.

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Immediately you finish implementing it, Salesforce provides you a wonderfully constructed CRM product that is fast, effective and vastly customizable.

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A lot of businesses choose Salesforce when they have grown out of lighter-weight CRM tools, which may be somewhat effective for smaller enterprises with basic requirements, but do not provide that extra allowance for customization, and more specialized features that are needed by bigger companies.

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As well as providing a wider range of inbuilt elements, Salesforce also provides an all-around world of business products that go way beyond business tools. The fact that you can create business management systems, automate your B2B marketing network, as well as field your employees using a single SaaS provider is a huge sales pitch for Salesforce.

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However, the costs mount up quite easily while working with big business management platforms like Salesforce, and so it is wise to consider adopting a unified method.

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Functionality

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Salesforce offers a suite of different services, called “clouds,” each covering a wide variety of business requirements. These include the Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Analytics Cloud, among others.

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They all can be accessed through a centralized CRM platform, which is available on Android and iOS mobile devices as well as on desktop.

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Salesforce now comes in two varying styles namely; Salesforce Classic,and Salesforce Lightning (which is the newer and more recommended style.

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Other extra services and analytics can be appended to the Salesforce clouds including, Einstein analytics, as well as an anaptotic service powered by artificial intelligence. These can be added as an extra layer over any cloud you choose to use on this CRM platform to provide supplementary information and understanding of your workflows.

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You can also layer Chatter, an internal social platform, across any of the clouds of your choosing in order to better connect all workers and employees. The Salesforce App Exchange store can also be utilized by independent software vendors to build even more apps to integrate with Salesforce.

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The two commonest clouds that Salesforce users choose are the Sales and Service clouds. In fact, Salesforce sells both of these clouds in a package which it bills as the“complete CRM for any size team.” Below is a look at the features of these two clouds.

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The Sales Cloud

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As its name suggests, this CRMcloud has to assist the agents of a business in the management of potential leads and closing deals as its main objective. The major features of this cloud include:

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• Contact management: All contacts in a users account may be linked to relevant opportunities, sales, social media or blog posts and so on.
• Opportunity management: This feature allows you to outline your deals based on different qualities such as their standard prices, quoted prices, quantities, as well as any other relevant product code.
• Lead management: With this feature, you can outline your leads along with any contexts and insights that may apply.
• In-app emails: It is possible to send emails to your leads from within the Salesforce CRM platform. This is very helpful as it speeds up the process as well as ensures that all you have instant access to any data you may require.
• Report building: You can customize your own reports and charts without having any coding background. You simply have to drag and drop what you need.
• Teamwork: Users may send messages or files to their team members using this cloud platform.
• Outlook and Gmail integrations: The email accounts of the entire team may be synchronized in order that everyone gets the same information.

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The Salesforce Sales Cloud may be accessed using desktop or mobile devices, and this allows users to keep the work moving from wherever they are. An average of 37% sales boost has been observed by users of this Salesforce cloud.

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The Service Cloud

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The Sales Cloud is aimed at helping your business get customers, but the Service Cloud was designed to help in the retention of the customers you already have. It provides your enterprises with the tools needed to give your clients the most relevant and practical customer service. The major features of this cloud are:

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• Customer messaging: Customers can message and chat with users.
• Mobile channels: Customers that feel more comfortable on mobile devicescan also communicate with agents using SMS texting or Facebook Messenger.
• Social customer service: Users can also oversee their social media accounts and platforms in real-time, which makes it possible to communicate with the customers on such platforms.
• Field service: You can make your in-house job performance better with quick access to schedules and inventory. This way, the creation and management of work orders using Salesforce on mobile, with or without the internet is possible.

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This cloud has an overall impact that increases the productivity of users and results in more customer happiness, loyalty and retention. A study carried out last year showed that this customer support cloud of Salesforce leads to 32% more customer satisfaction.

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Salesforce Pricing

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The cloud CRM that Salesforce provides was designed to meet the needs of large enterprises and companies, but as the CRM universe opened up more, the provision of smaller business options became more necessary, and so the need arose for Salesforce to expand their scope and provide simplified alternatives that are easier and cheaper 

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There are four monthly subscription levels available on Salesforce LightningCRM option.

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• Lightning Essentials: fitting for up to five users at $25 per user;
• Lightning Professional: suitable for teams of various sizes, starting at $75 per user;
• Lightning Enterprise: starting at $150 per user, and lastly
• Lightning Unlimited: offering top-notch services at $300 per user.

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Salesforce is a vast and far-reaching CRM solution having so many options, add-ons and customizations, and so the above-listed subscription options are simply starting points.

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Spending a bit more can get you up to the exact storage and customization levels that perfectly suit your requirements. It is however important that you be sure of the exact amount that you will be charged for any supplementary features outside of your primary subscription cost.

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In addition, there are extra charges if you want to get training, help with implementation, or if you want to get more products or increase your storage capacity.

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To be completely honest, Salesforce is quite expensive in comparison to other CRM products. A lot of SaaS tools offer free variants of their products besides offering entry-level subscriptions that cost much less than $25 per user, and can be used for as long as desired.

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Exceptional Features

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-While $25 per user is not so pricey, that price tier is limited to only five users, and the next tier costs a massive $75 per user. This is way more expensive than competing products, and many start-ups and smaller companies are likely not to be able to maintain this pricing level in the long run comfortably.

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Competing CRM products hardly pose a threat to Salesforce in terms of availability of options and add-ons. Added to all the basic CRM, marketing and sales features you need, Salesforce offers stunning dashboards, top-notch reporting and analytics and high-level customization possibilities. Here’s a peek at some of Salesforce’s amazing and exclusive features:

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• An all-inclusive business  environment: Salesforce provides business tools that are all impeccably integrated. It is such a CRM solution that a company can develop with, and progressively incorporate new features as required. Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Community Cloud, Quip and Salesforce Platform are some of the available Salesforce categories.

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• Straightforward importation: With Salesforce, it is quite easy to get your customer-relationship management system up and running, as you can easily import data from your Gmail email, Google calendar, Excel spreadsheets and more.

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• Prevalent integration options: A major plus that comes with using Salesforce as your CRM solution is that it enables you to integrate easily with your most used apps and accounts. This gives Salesforce a largely universal scope. Widely used apps such as Jira, Outlook, Zapier and lots of other data and development tools can be instantly integrated with your Salesforce CRM.

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• Trailblazer online community: Most CRM tools have an online community of some sort, but the Trailblazer community of Salesforce is by far one of the fullest, as it is chock-full with documentation that is very useful to admins, and this makes it an invaluable resource. There are step-by-step directions showing you how to create a custom report, how to turn on user notifications, and every other thing you will need to know. An all-embracing user-only forum for just admins and users to communicate is also available.

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• Manageable productivity tools: Another awesome pro to the Salesforce CRM is its inbuilt project management features. Immediately a business implements Salesforce, sales and marketing users and managers can easily manage and develop workflows, allocate and monitor jobs as well as keep an eye on permissions as required. In addition, there are optional productivity features that can be gotten via the App Exchange online store.

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The Cons of Salesforce

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Just like a lot of other business management platforms, almost all Salesforce features and products come with branded names, and this means that it is quite challenging to grasp what each package or subscription entails fully.

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And this is quite superfluous, to say the very least. As a result of these complications and complexities, contracts with Salesforce can quite easily become problematic. A lot of users have reported being unclear as to what is included in each subscription package, and what they would have to pay extra charges for.

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Many users who stop using Salesforce state that this sort of lack of clarity is to blame. The cost of procuring extra storage space is also another major drawback that discourages some businesses.

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Another mighty huge disadvantage to using Salesforce is that their customer service really leaves a lot to be desired. Added to that, information on how to do anything on this CRM platform does not come without filling out some forms, making calls or sending an email, and so those who believe in figuring out tools like this by themselves don’t really have so much to go by.

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Most messages and requests sent also don’t get adequately replied. Many former users of Salesforce state this as the reason why they stopped using the CRM tool. For those running small ventures with limitations in tech support, Salesforce may be very challenging to use.

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On the other hand, for larger businesses and companies that have a lot of CRM requirements and needs, Salesforceis a great option.

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Final Verdict

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Salesforce is the leading name in the world of CRM, and that can be attributed to so many factors. Although its multifaceted software features can seem a tad confusing or even overwhelming, the supplementary databases and other sources of info in terms of documents and virtual training courses can go a really long way in assisting you to scale the learning curve.

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The outstanding customization possibilities, as well as other interface features of this CRM solution, can become a strength to any company, once they are fully understood and harnessed.

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All in all, although it is more expensive than competing products, the Salesforce CRM software is quite capable of boosting the sales and retention of your company.