|
|
|
|
|
Comments or Suggestions?
|
|
|
|
|
|
By Sunil Ciszewski, Application Development Manager, The Alexander Group, Inc.
Salesforce.com provides all the necessary features for individuals and small-medium-sized businesses to explore the world of collaborative selling. It represents one of a handful of new products in the emerging market of e-CRM that provide their functionality and data storage over the Internet.
Salesforce.com lets sellers share account, contact, opportunity, quote, and note information pertaining to customers and prospects. It has an easy-to-use browser-based interface that supports Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator. Users can have the service for free for up to 5 accounts. After that, it costs $50 per month.
The obvious advantage to using Salesforce.com is that you don’t have to install any software. Getting the program up and running is effortless. There are no application maintenance needs, data is backed up and stored for you, and you automatically receive upgrades when salesforce.com adds new functionality.
In addition, you or your administrator can prepare specially formatted text files with your current account and contact information that can be uploaded into the system. This allows companies that have been using single point solutions like Outlook, ACT!, and Goldmine to skip time-intensive data entry.
For offline viewing, Salesforce.com has teamed up with Puma Technology’s Intellisync product. Intellisync, as configured for salesforce.com, provides support for Outlook and Palm Pilot (III, V, and VII).
Salesforce.com provides an easy-to-use interface that shows all the product’s major features on the menu across the top of the application. Each major section shows a summary list of records (e.g. customers whose last name begins with “S”) and allows you to drill down into the details of any particular summary record.
Once you drill down into a particular record (e.g. John Smith), you are shown all the details of that record and all the Opportunities, Activities, Notes, etc. that are associated in some way with that record. This summary-to-detail paradigm works the same way for all the major components provided in the application.
Salesforce.com’s product represents, in my opinion, the next generation of applications. It’s platform independent, provides centralized administrative functionality, easy upgrades, and an intuitive extensible interface.
Internet-based software has all the potential that client/server applications had at first, without many of the technical and ideological hurdles where system incompatibilities lead to strife between an eager sales force and a hesitant IT department. If your organization is looking for a quick way to implement a basic sales force automation system, seriously consider Salesforce.com’s offering.
Review Summary
|
Features
|
Y/N
|
Comment
|
|
Customer Management
|
Y
|
Good. Can store companies and contacts.
|
|
Activity Tracking
|
Y
|
Good. Can associate activities with all the major components, or create
as stand-alone. I would like to see e-mail reminders or some kind of alarm
functionality included.
|
|
Opportunity Tracking
|
Y
|
Good. This is probably the strongest feature they have.
|
|
Quote Management
|
Y
|
Fair. You can only create quotes in the context of an Opportunity.
|
|
Mobile Capability
|
Y
|
Good. Uses Puma’s Intellisync.
|
|
Sales Process Automation
|
Y
|
Below Average. I saw some sales process automation, but would like to
see a much more automated way of setting up a sales process and driving
users through the process.
|
|
Forecasting
|
Y
|
Average. The forecasting seemed rudimentary to me.
|
|
Reports
|
Y
|
Good. There are a fair number of canned reports included in the
product.
|
Things that need to be added to the application:
- More sales process automation – allow the administrator to define a sales process and drive the users through the steps.
- Marketing automation – allow the tracking of marketing campaign information, mail merge functionality, and directed e-mail functionality.
- Lead distribution – allow an administrator to create multiple leads and distribute them to the sales force based on criteria.
- Product/inventory management – at least allow the user to store a list of hierarchically structured products.
- Order processing – add some sort of order processing or credit checking capability.
- Information links - links to online information services (D&B, etc.) to automatically pull-in data about your customers.
Overall Rating
Interface – (A)
Ease of Use – (A-)
Ease of Setup – (A)
Overall Functionality – (B)
Cost – (A)
Printer-friendly version
|
|
|
|
