Salesforce Overview, Review & Alternatives 2014

Overview

Salesforce popularized the SaaS CRM market and is one of the largest providers of SAAS based CRM in the world. Salesforce has matured to compete with the giants such as SAP and Oracle. Salesforce also has one of the best app stores with enormous integration options. Salesforce has been equally successful in tapping the enterprise and SMB marketplace whereas SAP and Oracle recently began giving attention to the SMB marketplace.

Features of Salesforce

Limitless customization options: Customize fields or set formulas. Customize list views, modules, dashboard and UI.

Reports and reporting: Exhaustive range of reports. Create reports. Schedule report runs. Break up reports to view details. Choose from various report formats.

Salesforce automation: Manage leads, accounts, catalog, opportunity, contract, quota, sales process, database, etc. Perform forecasting.

Marketing automation: Bulk emailing. Create and manage campaigns. Produce email templates.

Access through handheld devices: Salesforce is available on Apple, Blackberry and Android devices.

Information management: Import, delete, merge, backup, duplicate and delete information in the CRM

Intra-organization networking platform: Chatter

Knowledge repertoire: Sales force has a large assemblage of information and knowledge consisting of blog, FAQ, guides, training, webinars, multimedia etc.

External integration: Integration with networking sites, Office suites and Google apps.

Pricing

Generally Salesforce is said to have been priced higher than its rivals. Its Sales Cloud 2 product is priced in 5 different plans.

• Contact Manager @ $5/user/month. Contact management for upto 5 users
• Group @ $25/user/month. Basic sales & marketing for upto 5 users
• Professional @ $65/user/month. Complete CRM for any size team
• Enterprise @ $125/user/month. CRM for your entire business
• Performance @ $300/user/month. Extended CRM to accelerate performance

Salesforce scores high on providing support and has all possible support routes opened to its customers at no extra fee. The dashboard is real-time and and everything on it is in sync with each other. You get tips on each page that are extremely helpful to all categories of users. If you are not mindful about the price but mindful about the features that this SAAS based CRM has to present, then there should not be any second thoughts.

Alternatives of Salesforce

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Insightly

Insightly is a recognized name in the domain of CRM software. It facilitates the user to perform various CRM based tasks such as customer, sales and marketing management, importing organizations, and creating notes, events and users from one place. It has a simplified user interface, smart reporting mechanism, useful help resources, social and media/email integration. This software is mainly designed for the small enterprises, but caters to bigger ones as well.

 

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Zoho CRM

If it’s about the synthesis of cost effectiveness and performance then Zoho CRM certainly stands out. It facilitates you to flawlessly manage your business effectively by simplifying your sales, inventory, marketing strategies, customer support and report analysis. It lets you import excel, CSV, and VCF files in a quick way, which enables you to convert the leads into sales.

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Infusionsoft

Infusionsoft is a complete CRM solution, which is specifically crafted for small as well as mid-sized conglomerates. It has been majorly used by various domains such as manufacturing, media, publishing, wholesale distribution, retail, etc. This CRM software enables you to customize your dashboard, user interfaces and forms.

 

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SugarCRM

SugarCRM has features like data import and export to and from the application, e-mail integration and invoice management. SugarCRM enables you to change page designs through a drag-and-drop tool. You can also establish new work-flows by editing work modules in this software. It also gives you the choice of having your own cloud service provider without any extra charges.

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