Salesforce Sales Cloud

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.

Pros

Without Salesforce our organization simply would not be able to function as quickly as we do now. We have so many automation processes and workflows setup that has saved us a lot of time. We use this platform across 15 departments in our organization, and it continues to grow. Everyone who sees the benefits of this great CRM... asks for User licenses... it's that good. We love the Contact Management, Lead-> Opportunity tracking and most importantly the Reports and Dashboards!

Cons

Salesforce can be pricey especially as it grows within an organization, so that would be the one setup. However, they do offer a Non-Profit Starter pack that I'd recommend small non-profit organizations to look into.

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.

Pros

Salesforce is incredibly robust for automation and capturing data if you have a knowledgeable administrator at the helm of your business. Being able to create different sections (objects), fields, reports and rules in a matter of minutes makes it the best CRM I have ever used.

Cons

In Salesforce, everything is connected, which can often times cause errors or minor issues when making a simple change/addition. The software is getting better at educating users and administrators, but it lacks the full ability to debug easily.

Pros

Industry leading software
Massive community support network
High volume of add-ins and extensions
Intuitive natural user interface (lightning)
Easy reporting
Highly customizable

Cons

Some administration/development is quite complicated for newer admins
Product support, even on premier, is frustrating. Had to explain the same issue to each tier of support. Often I resolved our issue on my own.
Mobile app has been inconsistently working for both iPhone and Android for the last year or so.
Some browser based issues & Mac v. PC Java based issues.