Salesforce Sales Cloud vs. Zywave Sales Cloud - Agency Management

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

prospects easy to find; however not all current information is listed. The process for importing prospect lists into the agency management system could be streamlined.

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

• It's very flexible. You can add custom fields easily and create/update workflows and activities quickly.
• The layout is easy on the eye. The dashboard is laid out well and helps you stay on track with renewals and activities.
• Emails attached to an activity are easily viewed and housed within the activity on a separate tab.
• Adding and reviewing policy info is simple. The tabs make it helpful to find and view info quickly.

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

• Training for new employees and follow up for all employees.
• Importing into agency management system is several steps.
• Not all information on prospects is given, although most have adequate information.

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

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

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

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

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.

The Zywave Customer Support team is phenomenal! Never any complaints. They resolve things quickly. You can call and talk with a real person, submit a chat question, or email them. Their training videos are good—short and sweet. We still use multiple Zywave products in our Benefits, Commercial Lines, and Marketing departments. They are a great company to work with. The implementation/onboarding for all products has been amazing! Training for products has always surpassed the training we received from other vendor partners.

Incentivized

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.

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

We moved from BrokerageBuilder (BKB) to Epic in June 2019. Epic pros over BKB: You can use Epic for CL, PL, Bonds, and Benefits—one system for your whole agency has a lot of advantages. In Epic, you can drag and drop emails and documents to clients, policies, and activities. Epic has an auto-save feature. Reporting in Epic is better. Epic cons compared to BKB: The design aesthetic of Epic is not as nice as BKB. Navigating Epic is clunky—everything is in multiple layers. Epic is less flexible for custom fields. Epic is designed for CL/PL, so it's not ideal for a Benefits user, although they are improving/investing in the benefits side. BKB is just better for a Benefits user.

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

• 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

• Sales team reluctant to use.
• Initial training was fine but could use some follow-ups.
• ROI has not been measurable.

Incentivized