When you are the king, everyone is always trying to knock you down and this is true in the CRM marketplace. Salesforce is that king! Say what you want about the high price of Salesforce and whether it is worth it, it is an amazing system with some amazing features unique in the marketplace.
Here are some of the areas where Salesforce really shines:
- Focus on Enterprise Accounts – This is the first thing you might hear: Salesforce is for big organizations. What that means is everything they do is about the solution that a multinational, large organization with lots or users would need. While this might not scale down to be good fits for the more modest enterprise, large organization is the design focus of everything Salesforce does.
- Customer Support – In a word: Fantastic. They take SLAs very seriously and their follow-up is usually impeccable.
- Automations/Workflows – Salesforce Automations are very comprehensive and provide more flexibility than other CRM’s automatons.
- APEX (Saleforce’s programming language for customizations)
- Flexibility – APEX is a full featured language.
- Dev Ops Process – To deploy APEX code you have to follow a basic Dev Ops process
- Apps and Function Integration – One of the coolest features of APEX is that it is easy to create a function that integrates so cleanly into a CRM menu that you don’t even realize that you are in a separate application. The app integrates smoothly into the menu system and so closely matches look and feel that it really is seamless.
- Add-On Marketplace – The marketplace for Salesforce add-ons is immense with add-ons for every little possible thing out there and is absolutely unique. Their marketplace, paying platform, etc is also excellent.
- Third Party Integrations – Every package or SaaS app will have an integration with Salesforce if they have any integrations at all. Salesforce is the first thing they attach to.
- Multi-Level linked Sub Modules – Salesforce has this cool little feature that in a standard CRM display, it can show both the linked records from other modules as well as the linked modules two levels down. So, for example, if you are looking at a display of Accounts, it also shows the linked opportunities (which is standard), but if there is a module of Quotations linked to those Opportunities, then it will also show the Quotation records linked to those Opportunities. This is particularly handy.
- Administration of Large Number of Users – Salesforce has the best tools for managing large numbers of users. My favorite feature allows the administrator to simply log in as any particular user so the admin can see the system exactly the way that user sees the system. It makes finding and fixing errors much faster. An additional key feature is that it allows multiple super-users. One issue with Zoho, for example, is that there is only a single super admin and only a super admin can do certain administrative tasks. If that person is unavailable or on vacation or something like that there are changes and administrative tasks that simply cannot be done.
- Reporting/Dashboards – Salesforce has the best reporting tool and dashboard tool in the industry.
- Best in Class Sister Applications – Salesforce’s sister applications like Service Cloud, Tableau, Heroku, Pardot, etc. are absolutely best in class products tightly connected to the mothership–CRM. While Zoho has a much, much broader list of sister applications and, ignoring the amazing economy of the Zoho bundles, many of them are not best in class–at least not yet. I have often told clients that many of Zoho’s applications are 90-95% of best in class functionality but you can’t beat the price. Salesforce’s sister applications are best in class at a best in class price.