Lattice Engines (discontinued) vs. Salesforce Sales Cloud

Lattice is ideal for a company who has not identified a list of targeted accounts or has not done segmentation. As long as the total addressable market is up for grabs and a company needs data on how to prioritize and distribute accounts, Lattice is able to add a ton of value. If you already have a list of accounts you are pursuing, Lattice will be able to help score than A-D, but generally will not tell you anything you don't already know

Incentivized

It’s great at bringing in members from different sources and streamlining their journey — making it easier for our staff to manage follow-ups and tailor actions based on where each member is in their path. As for where it’s less suited, I’d say it depends on company size — it might be a bit too much for a very small organization.

Incentivized

• Lattice does a decent job of rating leads that are low performing/low priority
• The rating models allow for flexibility within the enterprise
• The grading model is easy to understand from an end user perspective

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

• Speed and fluidity of the product. When updating pick list values it sometimes took 5 or 6 seconds to validate before moving on to the next step.

• 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.

Incentivized

I will continue to use PRISM, especially now, because I after 3 years in the same geography, I have just transferred to a new territory. The tool really helps me focus on the best opportunities to pursue, which can sometimes be difficult with over 100 assigned accounts

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

It is very easy to use. Sales people really like the interface. For marketing not as easy to use due to the reporting. It’s a little bit difficult.

It’s not very set-up for marketing users who need a full on view of all sales users. It’s not like Salesforce.com where you have marketing admin access and can create dummy profiles and dummy accounts. It’s really designed for just a sales rep and their account set

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

The product didn't go down.

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

The Lattice team kept the timelines we agreed to and pushed the envelop to deliver ahead of time when we needed it.

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

It's very good. They are very responsive. They aren’t pushy on providing too much. They are very transparent about what you’re getting and paying for

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.

Please see my answers to the previous question. We had very good feedback from our product management, strategy and sales leadership and reps regarding our training.

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 just watched videos. They have very good pure video based training for high level. I have seen the training for reps. It is not very complex

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

While the training is very easy, we had to do a lot of heavy lifting to really scale it. It’s been a bit of all hands on deck. We have had the marketing team walk the sales floor to get training to happen. Our challenge was having the bandwidth, however once it’s done it’s done

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.

Lattice was an incumbent tool from several years ago. Early on, we enjoyed a good relationship with the team there. After the acquisition, we have definitely seen a decrease in the quality of support and engagement from the team. As a result, we will look at several competing vendors when our contract ends with Lattice.

Incentivized

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

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

• We have seen quantifiable ROI when our reps have used the product to target accounts. In a recent example we found that accounts that targeted these "hi-po" accounts identified by using Lattice analytics created over $27M in pipeline over a month long period for a key product we are interested in selling more of to customers, compared to a less than $1M for accounts that were not identified as "hi-po".

• It is easy for the sales team to track how well the dealers in their region are selling products.
• It is easy to generate reports and see how well sales are each month compared to past months.
• Quicker time to get products shipped to customers.

Incentivized