LocaliQ vs. Salesforce Sales Cloud

The forms of online marketing continues to grow and LocaliQ's associates have the relevant skills to keep up with this and recommend what is suited for our business. Geo fencing is another area that makes a lot of sense as people use their phones more and more for accessing the web. Through LocaliQ we can pinpoint physicial places where we can market to a group that matches our target audience.

Incentivized

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).

Incentivized

• ThriveHive is a smaller marketing team dedicated to helping small to medium sized businesses perfect their marketing messages. ThriveHive is particularity good at understanding how Google, and other search engines work, and have been instrumental in helping my company to grow and evolve.
• With ThriveHive, you get a dedicated coach who is matched to your type of business. This experience with similar businesses gives your coach a better understanding of your business and the challenges your company faces.
• My coach is very good at responding to my needs within 1 to 2 business days. Email contacts are fluent and as often as I need, to discuss ideas or questions. I can only speak of my relationship with my coach, and I am very pleased.
• I feel that ThriveHive makes every effort to take excellent care of their clients, and makes you feel like you are their most important customer. I definitely believe that this is one of ThriveHives' greatest assets.

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

• LocaliQ could improve how it tracks and reports on customer journeys across those channels to provide a clearer view of ROI.
• The pricing structure is not fully transparent, making it hard to understand the true costs associated with campaigns. Breaking down the fees associated with LocaliQ would make budgeting easier.
• LocaliQ is able to provide basic ad creative, but there tends to be a disconnect between our brand voice and what is expected with creative. It would be nice to be able to get all design work within LocaliQ rather than have to use and outside designer all the time.

Incentivized

• 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

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

Overall usability pretty good. If we would have gotten better return on our advertising dollar I would have continued with them - their dashboard was very easy to use and the recaps they provided were helpful. They try to put data in bite-sized pieces for the client that are understandable (unlike google's reporting page itself which can be a bit difficult to understand at times). Their team was friendly, semi-responsive, and provided explanations when requested

Incentivized

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

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.

Incentivized

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.

I have investigated national services like American Eagle and also small market locally owned business like Red Shoes. Each year, I look into at least one other service provider to evaluate our service value. So far, no other company has come close to providing an all around service

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

There is always the challenge with practices that have multiple locations, trying to target a geographical zone that is sometimes to wide. But we have successfully navigated this issue when needed to target those who need the most added volume.

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

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.

• It's hard to quantify but I know I've had at least 5 to 10 new clients in the last 6 months come from efforts related to my website
• Not having to work on my website myself also helped free up my time, I don't need to worry!
• Customer service is good, the team doesn't wait till there is a problem, they schedule check ins regularly

Incentivized

• 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.