GoldMine CRM (discontinued) vs. Salesforce Sales Cloud

GoldMine brings some great Sales forecasting tools to the table. By using the set analytics business can properly be forecast and adjusted as new variables are added. Trends are easy to pick out once set up and running. The whole list of customization allows most businesses to make adjustments on the fly to produce better results in the field. From small operation on up GoldMine will scale to fit your needs.

Incentivized

Salesforce Sales Cloud is great for tracking your dealer (reseller) information, customer information, order information, and generating reports. You would want to use Salesforce as a smaller business because it is easy to use and keeps track of everything. You can also click on the reports tab and quickly generate different reports or save them as an Excel file to share with your team. You can set those reports with desired features and change them to fit your needs. I would say SF is not the best if you are going to send lots of marketing emails, etc, because it is not as visually friendly as HubSpot, for example.

Incentivized

• Organizing trouble tickets or "cases" in customer profiles. They are associated with the customer, so you can go into any customer record and click the cases tab and sort them by any of their columns.
• The dashboard is invaluable as a support technician. It allows me to find my trouble tickets and sort them by the date they were last updated, allowing me to continuously follow up on older ones as time goes on.
• The integration of companies, contacts, and cases is essential, as it allows our departments to access the same pools of information efficiently.

Incentivized

• Logging notes: SF makes it easy to log notes in the timeline or static notes that live in an easy-to-see spot for longevity.
• Logging activities: It's easy to post a call, text, email, etc.
• API data: Once connected, SF is critical to automation, such as website activity, login activity, pages visited, etc., which saves the Customer Success side time in understanding account activity.
• Custom fields: you can add custom fields to really personalize your experience. We use quite a few and it's brilliant.

Incentivized

• GoldMine itself can be a little hard to use if editing the information within the program is not enabled. This comes into play if the main information storage is another system that is migrated to GoldMine
• Third party apps or software can be complicated to be moved into GoldMine history. It is possible, but requires some upkeep and maintenance.
• GoldMine takes A LOT of expertise to set up. If set up incorrectly by a bad representative, then it can affect the overall usage of the program in significant ways. Make sure you ask the Goldmine rep several questions and get recommendations for the rep as well as the product.

Incentivized

• I'd like to see a global roll up, but individual customized versions by team
• Consolidate! Agreements are often found under attachments, contracts, confidential information, cases, and a couple of more places
• Statuses: Make the status, owner, and last touch date/time easier to find

Incentivized

If there were a product that would mean less on-site support/maintenance with comparable or not much more cost, I would seriously consider switching. Furthermore, going to a more mobile, paper-less application process would tip the scales in the favor of a competitor. I'd also like something that integrates web forms so that data entry is more stream-lined as is response time

There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.

Incentivized

Personally, perhaps I should give it a higher rating, but I do genuinely think it was very easy to pick up and run with, but I did have a full training session and of course was keen on using it. In my previous marketing role many years ago, I 'd tried to create an MS Access database and this has taken ages, so being introduced to the power of GoldMine really impressed. People have comments on it, but my opinion is its still fast and a great workhorse

Salesforce has been designed on the basis of "Clicks, not code". So anyone willing to learn the Salesforce user interface (which is quite good as far as management software platforms go) is able to become a Salesforce user or even a Salesforce administrator. You don't have to know coding language to work in the Salesforce environment. Also, Salesforce has one of the best software training resources (Trailhead) that I have ever encountered. It is free to all, easy to use, and most importantly it is interactive. No scrolling through endless text in a user manual. There are hands-on modules and related videos interlaced and through it all you earn points and badges to display your level of learning.

Incentivized

For me, its always been there, no worries here about downtime or the internet being down or switched off. Having it on a laptop as well with Goldsync means I'm always able to updated my notes and then synchronise. This to me is one of the benefits of purchased on-premise software, it cant simply be turned off!.

All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years. Accordingly, I only recall our instance of Salesforce having one unscheduled, brief down time over 6 years. I can't remember for sure, but it may have been due to our Internet Service Provider (ISP) versus Salesforce itself. Also, Salesforce does it's best to keep customers in the loop:

Trust.salesforce.com is the salesforce.com community's home for real-time information on system performance and security. On this site you'll find:

Live and historical data on system performance
Up-to-the minute information on planned maintenance
Phishing, malicious software and social engineering threats
Best security practices for your organization
Information on how we safeguard your data

Pretty good, Yes, there are occasions when i may think there should be an easier way to do things, but over the years, I've always found a way to get the information out that i want, sometimes just needing a bit of help from the technical team. Day to day,. it works for me very well.

For a SaaS provider, I'd rate their performance to be one of the best. At times, reporting tends to slow down if the data set is very large, which is the case in any system. But, that's a very rare phenomenon

Their customer support is spot on! We never feel like we're being made to wait, and when we email, they respond and offer assistance very quickly. It's the same response I'd expect from an in-house IT team down the corridor. Some support teams you know you're talking to the first line support chap who probably doesn't know how to resolve your issue, and you have to wait until they give up and pass it, but GM support people seem very knowledgable

Incentivized

The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.

I was originally trained by the UK distributor and then subsequently trained my self and had access to GoldMine consultants. In the long run, this saved me a lot of time really since I knew the product on an advanced/administrator basis and able to perform day to day tasks. Some things, still needed the consultants. The trick was with the training, I knew when I was out of my depth

I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.

I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business

I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.

We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this

As I said earlier, to me now with all this experience, it is ensuring that you focus on two things:- 1/ Ensure core customisations only are required until you get users started and embedded in using the system. 2/ Ensuring users get some good level of dedicated training time, internal or external, but I feel this is best done in a group rather than at your own speed. Afterall, no one really customises their MS Word or MS Excel each time, they just ignore the bits they don't need or ask if they do need them

Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.

We use this with GoldMine when placing our orders, they both have there uses with in our company. We also use Zoom for automatic emails and calls, this tool is more for searching for the right contact within the companies I work with. I think GoldMine covers a lot more of my needs and [OSAS] Traverse [ERP] is just for billing purposes.

Salesforce sales can do everything Front does regarding email integrations and communicating with your peers. Still, it provides even more insight for our salespeople and leadership team. Although Front is cheaper, we decided the added productivity and visibility provided to the team would be well worth the higher price tag.

Incentivized

GoldMine, when maintained well has always been pretty reliable and in over 10 years, I don't think we've ever lost a day or more than an hour or so when we cant use it. Occasional a 'blip' will happen and you will have to log out, the only thing to bear in mind, which I'm not good at is ensuring you keep the mailbox to less than 2000 mails in your inbound box, I hover around 1800 and need to streamline this to get rid of my junk or notifications from LinkedIn groups for example when i mean to read, but never get round to it

Salesforce Sales Cloud is highly scalable and designed to accommodate the needs of businesses of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises. It offers flexible subscription models and can easily scale up or down based on the organization's requirements. Whether a company is expanding its sales team, increasing its customer base, or adding new features and functionalities, Sales Cloud can adapt to support growth without sacrificing performance or reliability. Additionally, Salesforce's cloud-based architecture ensures that users have access to resources and capabilities as needed, making it a highly scalable solution for organizations looking to automate customer relationship management at scale.

Incentivized

• Documentation and easy access to documentation regarding a particular customer or contact.
• While utilities exist to re-align territories and other assignments in Goldmine they are not always well documented so even if you are savvy and want to implement some functions yourself you will likely need a VAR support person to do the job for you -- at least the first time.
• Typically, I have found support to be responsive and prompt. More importantly, even with drive failures, we rarely suffer any downtime with Goldmine.

• The inbox feature allows me to see when the customer opens my email, and hence a timely follow-up could result in a higher response rate.
• The mobile app allows users to gain access to leads and customer contacts on the go, which increases sales team productivity and enhances customer conversations.
• The reports of the notes on the account level are not working, which is causing manual work in the weekly report to leadership.

Incentivized