Homerun is a presales workspace that offers one place to track, manage, organize and inform the user's presales efforts. The solution boasts users among presales teams such as AppViewX, Ciena, Starburst, Graylog, JupiterOne, and others use Homerun to increase win rates, decrease sales cycles, save time, and reduce onboarding time for new hires. Homerun is SOC2 Type2 certified and GDPR compliant.
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Origin Story: The first version of Homerun was an internal tool that organized…
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Salesforce Sales Cloud
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Salesforce Sales Cloud is a platform for sales with a community of Sellers, Sales Leaders, and Sales Operations, who use the solution to grow sales and increase productivity. The AI CRM for Sales features data built right in, so that companies can sell faster, sell smarter and sell efficiently. Salesforce Sales Cloud is used for, and supports: Buyer Engagement Sales Engagement Enablement Sales AI Sales Analytics Team…
Homerun Presales Platform is head a shoulders above Salesforce from a Sales Engineering perspective. Homerun Presales Platform independently tracks deal stages, allowing SE leadership to accurately understand the technical side of the opportunity. Homerun Presales Platform …
Salesforce is too complex to navigate and keep consistency, being really time consuming and leading easily to outdated information and fragmented reporting. Excel doesn't provide any good overview or automation, and it's extremely easy to overwrite data. Heavy to load, too time …
It solves a specific use case which is a home platform for Sales Engineers specifically, given we track different metrics and pieces of information this can not be more useful for our role.
It is specifically designed for Pre-sales and it's easy to maintain giving a great overview of the information that really matters to our roles. It would be helpful and a time-saver to manage calls, notes, recordings and meetings too, and even links to GDrive repositories or sharepoint
It would be very well suited if you have someone with experience with Salesforce as your administrator and someone who can help you set everything up. However, sometimes the integrations and setup can be overly cumbersome. Otherwise, it is functional once you have everything set up and can help with everything outbound (sales and marketing are very well-built).
POC Management: The Evaluation Plans feautre ensures that we follow a clear and consistent process, so that we can track progress across each opportunity.
Feature Gaps: This is one of the most valuable aspects of Homerun Presales Platform. Having the ability to identify missing product features and more importantly quantify the potential revenue at risk because of them has transformed the way we interact with the product team. We can now bring data-driven insights to discussions instead of just regular feedback.
CRM Integration: Homerun Presales Platform can be syncrhonized with Salesforce, which allows us to grab the information we need from the CRM without the need to duplicate it and push anything that might be beneficial to the broader team back to the CRM.
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.
More flexibility in external reporting: Homerun Presales Platform provides solid internal reporting, however, creating external reports can be a bit cumbersome. Right now it takes extra effort to export data to third party reporting tools (e.g., PowerBI), however I got exceptional support from the team to be able to accomplish this task.
I have hard-coded the auto-update of the phone number format and state format from some codes shared by the community, but I do not know where to do it. I cannot reset it either.
It is unclear what functionalities each version has. We use the enterprise version, and it seems we can only have one design of the pipeline. But different business segments would have very different sales cycles, and hence, pipeline tracking would be different. It would be nice to have this available in our version.
It seems I cannot create a report to pull notes logged at the account levels.
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.
Very easy to use platform, with integrations with other tools allowing data to flow between the different platforms. The real bright spot for Homerun is that it is designed with presales activities and cycles in mind, meaning it was very easy to fit within our existing presales process. Most aspects of the tool are also customizable so you can take what already works in your process and port that over to the tools provided. Within days of our initial training from the Homerun team, it became a tool that our team members use daily
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.
Salesforce is always available securely from any internet-capable device anywhere in the world, UNLESS you choose to set security measures so that ONLY trusted IP ranges may access the system at certain times of the day. It's all about choice and flexibility with Salesforce products.
Salesforce performance in general is excellent. "The cloud infrastructure beneath Force.com has been fine-tuned over the past 10 years. It powers nearly 100,000+ businesses running more than 185,000 applications that 3 million users count on every day." Points per Salesforce - 1) Multitenant kernel - With a multitenant platform, each business that uses the app doesn’t have its own copy. Instead, all businesses share a single copy and then customize it for their specific needs. 2) ISO 27001 certified security - You can’t compromise when it comes to enterprise-level security. Force.com is road-tested and trusted by nearly 100,000+ companies, including many of the world’s most security-conscious organizations, such as banks and health care providers. 3) Proven reliability - 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. 4) Proven, real-time scalability - Force.com is used by many of the world's largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec. Applications can automatically scale from a few users to millions of page views, as needed. 5) Real-time query optimizer - You need fast access to your data. The Force.com query optimizer delivers under 300ms response time, at a massive scale. 6) Real-time transparent system status - You can always see real-time system performance, availability, and security information at trust.salesforce.com. 7) Real-time upgrades - Unlike traditional software platforms, our upgrades never break your customizations, code, or integrations. We upgrade the platform for you 3 to 4 times each year. As a result, you’re always on the latest version, with access to the latest features, performance, and security enhancements. 8) Real-time sandbox environments - With a single click, you can create copies of your applications, configuration, and data in separate environments for development, testing, and training. 9) Three global production data centers and disaster recovery - Force.com runs on three geographically dispersed, mirrored data centers with built-in replication, disaster recovery, a redundant network backbone, and no single points of failure
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 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
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.
Homerun Presales Platform is head a shoulders above Salesforce from a Sales Engineering perspective. Homerun Presales Platform independently tracks deal stages, allowing SE leadership to accurately understand the technical side of the opportunity. Homerun Presales Platform provides a clean, easy to use workspace where the important aspects of an opportunity are front and center, and not bogged down inside an outdates, bloated CRM platform.
At our company, we use Salesforce and HubSpot. I personally like both for different reasons. Salesforce makes it easy to generate reports, keep track of dealer and customer information, tie customers to dealers, and is easy to use. However, I like HubSpot for the marketing features. I think HubSpot has easier-to-use workflows and email creations.
Salesforce is the most widely used CRM system. Professionalism tends to increase when things go wrong for market leaders. Salesforce considers us as users because they own the market. Having all of our data in one place and all of our teams working within Salesforce. Anyone who uses Salesforce is impacted by it, even if they don't.
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.
Using Salesforce.com has made my daily routines more efficient and simplified the manual tasks I had to perform independently. I can now access data from any device, online or offline, and provide better guidance to my team about the forecasts provided by the built-in artificial intelligence (AI). A chat with a Salesforce support specialist would be great. The knowledge base has a community forum where Salesforce users can ask questions and learn more about the product.
Gaining a presales-focused view of the sales cycle, allowing us to track our team's contributions in a structured and measurable way.
Improving our collaboration with the product team by giving us actual data on feature gaps and potential revenue at risk due to missing functionality. This will help drive more strategic roadmap decisions.
CRM integration (Salesforce) has reduced manual admin work, saving our team valuable time.
All tools we've implemented with Salesforce had a pretty quick positive ROI with the exception of CPQ & Billing. That was a very large project that I would only suggest for businesses with many SKUs that tend to be packaged together.
