Salesforce

[Gretsch]

God I hate this stupid "sales tool". It's a total wast of time, makes doing your job harder, and is a used by incompetent micromanagers. There is a special place in hell for the creators of this worthless product.

End of rant.

Opinions.

[rr-nyc]

Salesforce is by far the best CRM available. I have used several over the last 15 years and this one makes sense. While I understand it can be used to micromanage, there are far better uses for the program. Those who use it to micromanage have completely missed the point and shouldn't be in management to begin with.

To be able to delegate tasks, follow up and to confirm actions are taken are hugely important to any sales organization. It allows sales reps to better understand where they are in the sales process and makes for better forecasting. It also makes ordering and manufacturing more efficient while allowing a company to trim down unnecessary inventory.

[azguy]

Originally Posted by Gretsch

God I hate this stupid "sales tool". It's a total wast of time, makes doing your job harder, and is a used by incompetent micromanagers. There is a special place in hell for the creators of this worthless product.

End of rant.

Opinions.

It's much better for notes from a meeting than an old torn up business card or a stained cocktail napkin

[wantonebad]

visualforce developers make serious money, but the real beauty of SF is you don't need to be a VF coder to develop in salesforce. CRM platforms, whether locally loaded DB's or cloud-based web portals, by their very nature are flawed tools. Because it's all about connecting the dots and "drilling-down" to the data you want/need. People have their own idea of what that data is and what works and doesn't work. Moreover they change their minds which makes maintenance and updating a nightmare. But of all the tools out there, salesforce is about the best I've seen, JMHO.

***EDITED TO ADD
My biggest issue with SF is the lack of a viable back-end. Yes there are many 3rd party tools, that preform well at a price, but there is a real need for a robust reporting and proprietary data tool, data loader doesn't cut it and Informatica is like using a bazooka to kill a mosquito. That said where there is a will there is a way...

[taughtmepatience]

Originally Posted by Gretsch

God I hate this stupid "sales tool". It's a total wast of time, makes doing your job harder, and is a used by incompetent micromanagers. There is a special place in hell for the creators of this worthless product.

End of rant.

Opinions.

If you hate Salesforce, you should try Seibel. Siebel is the worst program I've ever dealt with. period.

[Gretsch]

Yeah, the issue is clearly how mgt. uses the tool...and how it's set up. The way my old company implemented it was f'ing stupid. I'm sitting in training for my new company now and I'm having flashbacks to how my old company used it. Chatter however is, IMHO totally worthless no matter how it's implemented, but I hate twitter too.

[wantonebad]

Originally Posted by taughtmepatience

If you hate Salesforce, you should try Seibel. Siebel is the worst program I've ever dealt with. period.

Couldn't agree more!!

[threemonkeys]

I only dabbled a bit with Salesforce, but the best CRM tool I've used is SalesLogix. For me it was a great prospecting tool (search by SIC code, zip code, company revenue, etc) which helped me generate revenue.

I think a small thinking micro-manager that doesn't focus on the the big picture will always find some little, petty, irrelevant item to enable their anal-retentive personality. Make your goal to become one of the top sales leaders. Once you're there, you are essentially Teflon coated. At least that has been my experience.

Well, um...I suppose I should probably get back to work now.

[Gretsch]

Most of SF doesn't apply to me as I'm a Sales Engineer. The good news is that I think this implementation is going to be better. Not as much busy work for the account team. At the end of the day, a tool is only as good as the carpenter.

[blackmsport]

I am a CRM Manager at work.... Salesforce, or other CRM tools are one of those things we need to enable sales team with up-to-date cust info and to collect mist up-to-date cust info from sales team

As a CRM manager and Customer datamart owner .... I have to rely on these tools and I cannot rely on little notebook / diaries that sales team write about their cust..... to update my datamart

[sea-dweller]

As a user, I think that SF is the best CRM tool I have ever used. It is very configurable (can be a pain, as it is quite complicated), but has some very nice reporting tools.

I work in sales and have to enter my "opportunities" into SF.com . Have been a user for about 4 years now.

[GradyPhilpott]

I thank my lucky stars that I have no idea what any of you are talking about!

[rr-nyc]

Originally Posted by GradyPhilpott

I thank my lucky stars that I have no idea what any of you are talking about!

lol....Unless you're in sales, of course

[1proscoe]

SFDC is the best one I've ever used....

Just wait until your CFO decides to use NetSuite as the company's CRM of choice (mainly because it's a financial driven package rather than CRM...)

[TattooedGQ]

I'm in SFDC daily......actually in it right now....unfortunately I've had to get good at creating reports etc, so it's pretty much a breeze now....so long as nobody typo's their info.

[rockmastermike]

I use SFDC everyday at work for reporting and like the filters available to drill down nto what is valuable. outside of reporting, I don't use it much

[fusionstorm]

Originally Posted by 1proscoe

SFDC is the best one I've ever used....

Just wait until your CFO decides to use NetSuite as the company's CRM of choice (mainly because it's a financial driven package rather than CRM...)

My company flipped from SFDC to NetSuite a number of years ago, b/c at the time NetSuite had more than just CRM built into it (SFDC lacked order tracking and more robust ERP capabilities at the time). However, NetSuite definitely lacked in the CRM realm compared to SFDC's CRM tools.

We switched back to SFDC for CRM a couple years ago, and were running the two systems in parallel while we built out the SFDC back-end to our liking. We migrated over completely at the start of this year. My inside rep is much happier now.......