Salesforce

Comments: Salesforce allows me to keep track of leads and where they are in the sales process. It allows users to customize their own views, although the desired view is not always available. Putting pre-set products into a quote is not hard, but printing out the quote or sending it with a title that is appropriate for a client is more challenging. Overall Salesforce is useful as all members of a sales/marketing team can see linked information, however as a pure sales tool there are better options. I can understand why larger organizations use this program however I don't think it is as flexible as needed for smaller companies/startups.

Pros: This software allows for a very nice layout by which you can see all of your opportunities, stages of the sales life-cycle, quotes, and notes. It is very easy to customize and save reporting so you can run reports daily or weekly. With email tracking you can see how often your emails are read or if a client has even seen an email. There is a lot of connectivity with other programs such as Act-On so marketing can also see how their performance is affecting sales.

Cons: The program is not intuitive to use. Some things like customizing reports are very simple while other things, such as printing or customizing a quote are more challenging. There are items on Salesforce Classic view which are not visible in the "better" Lightening view. Seeing daily tasks requires customizing the tasks field rather than just appearing on your dashboard as a daily list. Once a lead has been changed to an opportunity the view changes and you can no longer see tasks that you had previously set up. Notes become harder to find and this usually causes the sales team to create a duplicate account for each client which is messy and harder to keep track of.

Comments: Its a CRM. Like all CRMs what you put into it is what you will get out. If you live in it day in and day out its a great program and the reason for their popularity and success.

Pros: The fact that you can have access to your information anywhere is comforting.

Cons: Convoluted. There are lots of hoops you need to jump through in order to really have this software work for you. An GOD FORBID you have any issue because support is not great. At least in my experience.

Comments: I wish I had known about it's capabilities a long time ago because we would've switched to it for onboarding much sooner. I didn't realize you could create custom objects that could tie to an account record and setup virtually as many fields as you needed.

Pros: Our onboarding team uses Salesforce for onboarding new customers. It allows us to track communications, activities, mark task that have been completed and create reports and dashboards to show how accounts are progressing through the onboarding process. Salesforce is the best in class tool when it comes to customization and trackability. We can setup whatever fields we need and collect whatever data we need based on various workflows. You can also create automated tasks.

Cons: Salesforce is a bit clunky and slow at times. We had to have training by a Salesforce expert to implement the systems we needed, so I wouldn't say it's very user-friendly (but that's expected when you have such a robust system).

Comments: We did not realize the capability to interface so with our manufacturing and accounting systems. While not exhaustive, the information which can be shared between the three systems had been invaluable to our sales engineering team. It's also been a great help for sharing company wide project status for pipeline projects. One of the greatest benefits has been in sales planning. We're no longer limited to running reports from 4 systems . Salesforce allows us to quickly create pipeline reports and create punch up reports for sales team members.

Pros: Since integration of SalesForce to our sales engineering team we have full visibility of quote, inquiry and sale pipeline activities. In previous systems these activities we're silo functions which depended on spreadsheet analysis lots of discussions and sales person memory. Salesforce has proven a great central repository and clearing House for all of this information.
The linking with Outlook was a critical piece of this which we purchased from a third party.

Cons: The front end pricing seemed ok. BUT it took a LOT of customization to get the level of user friendly interface and process integration we needed. We ended up having to expand the customization scope twice after the initial contract. So the overall cost per user and startup was much higher than budgeted.

Comments: Salesforce has been a lifesaver as a user and admin. I have used multiple programs in both roles, and Salesforce wins hands down. I can't stress enough how much your future self will thank you by choosing the right CRM program the first time.

Pros: In every company I have consulted for and worked for, we have used or switched to Salesforce. Once built out properly, it is an asset that is scalable and will continue to benefit your sales team. The functionalities are endless: Leads, Accounts, Opportunites, Metics calculators, pipeline management tables, Groups, and options to create products too! (This one was difficult to construct but I was more than ecstatic that I could use this for wholesale as well)
Let's talk about customer support: Very comprehensive. There is a whole website dedicated to tutorial videos, live chats, and Q&A boards. If you still can't figure out the problem they do have a real human you can speak to who will help you out.

Cons: The learning curve to set up your salesforce correctly is rough if you have not done any Salesforce admin work before. Starting off with a small group is easier, and the program is more forgiving when you have fewer accounts, leads, etc, but as your org grows, you will want to ensure that Salesforce is set up correctly. Errors with when you have a lot of data will take a long time to fix.