Anyone Use Salesforce.com CRM
 

http://www.salesforce.com

Any comments/thoughts/ups/downs?

TIA

If you are looking at CRM packages steer VERY clear of Epicor e-FrontOffice!!!!

we use salesforce.com at work for our worldwide sales force, covers us in the UK, Europe, US and Australia. Seems to work pretty well so long as somebody is there beating the sales people round the head to keep it updated. We keep track of most of the leads through it and then use an external mail out company utilising exports of data from it.

Hope that helps

JB
www.mkivsupra.net/bbs

I work for a small company called Vecta (www.vecta.net) which writes business intelligence software (a kind of CRM/sales intelligence hybrid)

It shows what a company's customers are purchasing, when they are purchasing and where they are purchasing from. The software will analyse the company's customers' buying patterns and give the user detailed information to boost sales, build customer relationships, create new sales opportunites, anticipate future customer needs.

We are thinking of moving towards a similar sort of on-demand business intelligence approach that saleforce.com have.

Branners

Hello m8 :D Didn't know you were still alive! Glad to see you are & hope all's well.


Mark

Interesting. I presume it integrates with other back office systems (say SQL) to check levels of sales made etc?

How about the contact management side of things? This looks to be a bit more after the initial account is set up & trading.

We're looking at Salesforce as a tool for to track our sales leads, people and targets etc. Can you do that as well?

We are looking at a high growth strategy, certainly for the 1st 6 months & undoubtedly after. We will have access to unique detailed market demand information and one of the things we already want to do is target areas where we see demand synergy being of particular interest.

Yes it integrates with most major back office systems such as SQL no problem, we are working on making it even more flexible with many other systems in future versions, along with improving the automated import routines and such like. Once the data has been imported the users can then interrogate the data pretty much anyway they like, its very flexible.

Yes the Vecta software can track sales leads, people and targets, there's a whole facility within the software allows you to see what sales reps are doing and what leads they have and how they are progressing with them. Targets can be set and maintained and you can track each sales reps individual progess or as team.

If there is something that the software can't do, we can write custom components (such as custom enquiries) to users needs.

If you are interested in more information then feel free to speak to one of the sales staff as they would be better placed to know if our software would be right for you.

The best people in an organisation NOT to ask whether your software would be right for us ;)

Thanks - have added Vecta into the melding pot. Can you PM or email me your work addy please?

Cheers

Puff,

Ive been looking at CRM on and off for a couple of years for various companies and then we needed one so got back on the merry go round. I looked at salesforce and although its not bad I felt the sales side was very good but the contact manager side was very poor. In the end we opted for accpac crm, its web based, can also sit within outlook and having seen alod of crm solutions we felt it was better than anything else. I feel alot of crm's either offer very basic contact management functionality or go the over end of the spectrum and become over-complicated and neglect the basics. accpac does contact management very well, tasks, shared calendar, document and email tracking against company/contacts, full sales cycle tracking from opportunity to closed deal as well as cases for support issues. You can try a hosted version free for 30 days at www.accpaccrm.com and then the subscription model is very similar to salesforce.com. However we opted to pay for it hosted on our own server (about 3K) because we wanted better email integration (can use it to replace outlook completely) and the performance on the hosted version wasnt fantastic. And they just gave us a backup of the DB so we moved (almost :)) seamlessly from hosted to in-house product. It can run against multiple backend DBs SQL Server, Oracle, DB2.

Good Luck

Gary