Salesforce is a great platform for building sales leads and working together as a team. I would recommend you set up the dashboard before officially using the system, as it can get complicated if you don't know how to use it. The system and staff are very friendly and helpful in building a great sales funnel and lead generation.
this provides the basic self service for all the users to organize and manage the client information. easy to pick up and gives them the information on demand verse waiting for a report writer to template stuff up.
Pros
easy to organize the data
gives simple reports on demand and on the fly to the users with minimal training
Cons
sharing templates to others
Likelihood to Recommend
This is ideal when you don't have a dedicated salesforce admin or report writer. the basic stuff can be a self service model and get the user to look at their data and where they are missing stuff, it will tell them how to self improve to collect the data so that they have imformative reports
Salesforce Starter is used to consolidate many interdepartmental workflow functions into one central place, in the cloud, secure and easily accessible to all involved. It also provides a place to hold records for many different processes, eliminating the use of separate excel files. Report generation of this data is easy to do within Salesforce Starter, and those can be automated.
Pros
Report Generation
Table view customization
Global Searching
Cons
Table views can be sorted by column. Filters can be applied, but only to one column. Multi-column filtering like Excel allows would be extremely useful and a big improvement.
The ability to quick copy data in a table view would also be helpful, like (ctrl ') in excel.
Likelihood to Recommend
Salesforce Starter is a very flexible, easy to implement CRM package. It's appropriate for all business and company sizes, but likely small to med-large companies.
Starter edition provides a comprehensive toolset for small businesses to get up and running in a matter of days, instead of weeks or months. The package includes sales, service, marketing, map capabilities, and email/phone processes built in. More than that, this edition makes it very easy to scale using starter automation with workflows/flows. Then as you expand, you can easily upgrade to professional and enterprise/unlimited editions with further integration capabilities.
Pros
Sales CRM with built-in guidance and reminders to manage and track opportunities.
Self-service for customers and internal employee needs. Integrates forms and chatbots very easily into your existing website.
Guided setup with inherent flows to make transitioning from legacy systems to new age cloud-based technologies
Integrates with Outlook and Gmail extremely well. Includes the Salesforce Inbox mobile app to link records with calendar and email. Email reminders included automatically.
The Salesforce Mobile App comes with Starter, making it super easy to work on the go, even in remote areas.
Cons
Certain items look like they are included. For example, sales cadences with call flows are an additional cost.
Customizing certain business processes during the guided setup, without having Salesforce dev or admin experience.
I wish it included lower-tier marketing tools for sendable contacts with subdomains for domain health.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you own a business that has complex selling processes or requires integrations with 3rd party tools/systems, you should look at Professional, Enterprise, or Unlimited editions. Salesforce operates very well across pretty much every industry, but not all sales, marketing, and operational processes are created equal. If your marketing process requires a long list of sendable contacts then I would recommend adding on Pardot or Hubspot. Always start small and scale up, to avoid boxing yourself in down the road.
We use SalesforceIQ to track our engagement with out customer base. We use it across parts, sales and service. It has helped us address communication within as multiple people deal with customer locations.
Pros
Tracking phone calls is extremely easy when using the app on the iphone. After a phone call is complete it prompts the user to enter in call details.
SalesforceIQ also automatically logs emails for us. This has saved us time from entering in information manually.
SalesforceIQ was easy to set up and allowed us customization for fields that were relevant to our business.
Cons
SalesforceIQ has some reporting items that are a little harder to easily uncover but I have found work arounds or manually created reporting to get that information, such as number of times a salesperson was at a location.
Some of the upgrade items I would like to see are available in salesforce sales cloud that allow easier automation for marketing.
Likelihood to Recommend
SalesforceIQ is a perfect CRM to start with and get your organization used to tracking customer contact. It was an easy setup and well adopted. It allowed us to rollout completely in just 30 days. We have seen a large increase in our ability to communicate. It may be lacking in some items if you already have a tracking method but was the perfect starting point for us.
