Salesforce

Comments: It is an essential tool for medium to enterprise businesses, but it has to be designed well from the beginning. Implemented properly, the executive team, operations, sales leadership, inside sales, direct sales, marketing, and more will benefit.

Pros: HIGHLY customizable. All data fields can be pulled into reporting/dashboards. To implement properly, you have to reverse-engineer what metrics are important to your business. Once you have a comprehensive understanding of the reporting that you want to see then you can build fields, pick-lists, radio buttons, etc so you capture all relevant data. The beauty is that you are not at all limited to the out-of-the-box configuration (which is good, but generic). In the past I have built in lead sources and ROI, appointment setting quality grading, commission reporting, stack ranking, and many other highly customized reports. Start with the end in mind and then find a good implementation partner who can execute on your plan.

Cons: Cost and support at the lower levels. Unless you have (pay for) their premium support, their customer service is not quick to act.

Comments: Overall it has been great for me. As I said, once you get your salesforce process setup up, it's really easy to use, and the crashing that occurs is very minimal: it really only happens when your Salesforce admin tweaks with something. I can't speak to the cost (As I'm just a user), but from my perspective I would recommend it if you're looking for a solid CRM.

Pros: Once you have your Salesforce process setup and streamlined, it's great to use. It's easy to access leads and opportunities and manage data inside them with relatively few issues. I also like the dashboard feature which allows you to see a lot of data from different reports in an aesthetically pleasing manner. I have never used the Zoho CRM, but I know my company switched over and has been using it for over 2 years now.

Cons: The setup process can be difficult and might require some degree of coding logic. Like all software sometimes features won't work and you'll have to contact the salesforce administer within your company to fix it. Also, the reports can kind of be tricky to set up. My biggest complaint is that no two people can edit a file at the same time. There have been times where I've spent 15 minutes inputting information in a file and tried to click save only to see an error message saying that someone else has edited the file. So I wish it would allow for real-time editing amongst co-workers or at least allow me to refresh the page while saving all the data I have already typed up. I'm also not a fan of "lightning mode", which is the new UI that they are trying to push. Salesforce classic is just so much easier to use, and you can see so much data at one time when looking at leads/opportunities.

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).