Crossbeam vs. Salesforce Experience Cloud

I would definitely recommend Crossbeam to others, and frequently bring it up early in conversations with potential partners as a first step in evaluating a partnership opportunity. Crossbeam allows you to easily see overlaps for current customers, prospects/target accounts, and open opportunities. Being able to quickly and easily assess the business opportunity with a partner, and find mutual customers that would benefit from a combined offering is a huge value add. The integration with Salesforce makes the tool easy to use and scalable, without needing to constantly update account lists. Being able to view the overlaps within the Crossbeam UI and easily export the lists makes the tool really easy to work with.

[Salesforce Experience Cloud (formerly Salesforce Community Cloud)] seems to be very well suited for what we want to use it for, which is to allow customers to have access to their ongoing and already-resolved cases, which will save our customer success team time and allow for transparency. It also seems well-suited for fine-tuning knowledge libraries, as it allows you to track the knowledge articles that are most impactful (and conversely, those that are less impactful) as you are able to track the path that customers use to self-serve ahead of submitting a ticket. I haven't run into any scenarios yet where we wanted to use Experience Cloud as a solution but discovered that it wasn't a fit.

Incentivized

• Frictionless onboarding and easy to get started with new partners
• Intuitive reporting of overlapping accounts - flexibility to export to CSV
• Ability to connect with Salesforce to keep account lists dynamic, while also allowing the option to use CSV uploads

• Complete integration with the Salesforce ecosystem. Data displayed in your Community portal reflects records from a Sales Cloud organization
• Highly customizable. A Community Cloud portal can be totally customized both visually and with different funcionalities with little to no coding skills required

Incentivized

• Establishing sharing settings for each specific partner could be more intuitive and easy to check.
• Some of the navigation can be slightly confusing as it seems there are multiple ways to view the same information within the platform.

• None that come to mind - integrations, experience, and use is great! However, if you're trying to learn it yourself, you may benefit from consulting an expert. Or, if you're wondering if it's good for you, a business analysis will suit you well before you implement to save yourselves, time, money, efforts, and even people.

Incentivized

Usability is pretty streamlined, especially if you're familiar with other Salesforce products, but even if not, take it from me, as I just entered the technological space about two years ago, that this product is pretty simple to learn. You don't have to jump in with your head underwater. Small wins and learnings along the way are what foster long-term understandings and enable your evolution alongside the product. I definitely recommend Salesforce Trailhead along with it

Incentivized

Through ease of use and expandability, I think that Community Cloud is a best in class at exposing Salesforce integrations, as well as expandability in working through building custom add-ons for Salesforce for collaborations and self-service. Additionally, the speed to market on these changes are lightning-quick and allow for experimentation.

Incentivized

We have weekly calls with our Salesforce reps. They bring new ideas to the table and help with taxonomy builds. They have also answered many questions and connected us to the right people for us to grow our knowledge and utilization of the platform. They are a good partner overall in comparison.

Incentivized

Salesforce Experience Cloud was selected due to its tight integration with our existing Salesforce CRM platform. Customization of the portal was much, much simpler compared to Sharepoint - especially with role-based security parameters that are ultimately inherited based on attributes within the Salesforce CRM platform. Salesforce Experience Cloud was a natural fit for this customer-facing purpose.

Incentivized

• Crossbeam allows us to quickly assess opportunities with potential partners and feeds directly into prioritization for our integration and partnership strategy.
• It solves the challenge of keeping account data private that you don't want to share and enables us to easily share the information that is beneficial to both parties.

• Its given us much better issue and customer satisfaction tracking, since before Community Cloud much of our communications were extremely siloed within Outlook. We had no visibility because communications happened on an individual basis rather than a holistic level (the company).
• We've increased user interaction and given our customers a reason to come to the website repeatedly.
• Our costs have gone up, naturally, as the system proves to be a strong solution. We have pulled in other resources and teams which requires more licenses. I guess that's a sign of success but also a cost.

Incentivized