Salesforce Review, Pricing & Features

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is an advanced CRM platform with over 150,000 customers. It offers key features for lead capture, contact and deal management, workflow automation, and reporting. We recommend Salesforce for those who need an advanced, highly customizable CRM and are looking to scale their business to enterprise-level.

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Table of Contents

• What is Salesforce?
• Salesforce Review Summary
• Salesforce Pricing & Cost
• Salesforce Features
  • Lead Capture
  • Contact Management
  • Communication Channels
  • Deal Management
  • Workflow Automation
  • Reporting
  • Integrations
  • Mobile
  • Legal & Security
• Salesforce Customer Support
• Salesforce vs. Competitors
• Is Salesforce Right For You?

Salesforce Review Summary

Salesforce was founded in 1999 by Parker Harris and its current CEO is Marc Benioff. Salesforce’s mission is to build bridges and meaningful connections between companies and customers. Today, Salesforce has over 29,000 employees and is based in San Francisco, California.

Salesforce helps marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT teams work seamlessly together under one system. Salesforce offers standard and premium tools for lead capture, contact and deal management, workflow automation, and insights reporting. Overall, Salesforce is best for larger companies and enterprises with robust, and complex workflows.

In terms of pricing, Salesforce’s base prices fall more on the expensive side. If you purchase additional functionalities, the cost rises exponentially. Salesforce’s most popular plan costs $150 per month and its most expensive plan costs $300 per month. Even without the additional functionalities, we still consider Salesforce’s pricing to be expensive.

Overall, Salesforce is a highly customizable tool with advanced functionalities. We recommend it to those with a large budget, who are looking to scale their business to enterprise-level. We also recommend having assistance from a Salesforce representative when it comes to customizing your CRM.

Salesforce Pricing & Cost

Salesforce’s pricing ranges from $25 to $300 per month. All Salesforce plans are charged on an annual basis. Salesforce also offers a free 30-day trial for each plan.

Salesforce Features

In our review, we will walk through the features offered by HubSpot. We’ll discuss HubSpot’s usability, customer support, and describe the major benefits and drawbacks of the software. We’ll also show real images of the software to give you an idea of what it’s like to use the tool.

Lead Capture

Leads are individuals or organizations that have an interest in your products or services. Lead capture references the process of acquiring someone’s information with the goal of converting them into a paying customer. The more lead capture methods you use, the better you are able to reach a wider audience of potential customers.

Salesforce offers a wide range of lead capture methods – including forms, social media, live chat, and email.

Lead Capture Forms

Forms are one of the easiest ways to capture lead information because they allow the leads to provide their information themselves. Salesforce’s lead capture form feature is very basic – it’s best for creating simple forms. If you prioritize the design of your form, we recommend using another platform like HubSpot for this feature.

You can include standard fields into your forms – including name, phone number, email, and location fields. After you choose your form’s fields, Salesforce will generate a code that you can insert into your website’s code. A disadvantage of this feature though is that Salesforce does not let you preview how your form will look or let you customize the arrangement of your fields.

Facebook Lead Ads

Salesforce lets you directly connect Facebook Lead Ads to your CRM. Facebook Lead Ads lets you create forms that can be advertised on Facebook. Overall, this integration is easy to use in Salesforce.

Once you’ve integrated Salesforce with Facebook Lead Ads, all you have to do is choose the forms you want to capture information from and map your Facebook form fields to the appropriate Salesforce field.

An advantage of this feature is that when a user fills out a form on Facebook, the form will auto populate information from that user’s Facebook profile. This reduces the time it takes to complete a form, which reduces the chance of someone not finishing it.

Live Chat

Salesforce lets you include live chat into your website and connect your CRM with your business’s Facebook page. These features are incredibly useful – the ability to chat with visitors in real time gives you a better chance of gaining a lead’s trust and therefore their contact information.

Salesforce lets you reply to your visitors from within the CRM. Salesforce will automatically pull up a visitor’s contact information and open a case for them so you can capture relevant details while you are chatting. Salesforce also lets you have multiple chat tabs open at the same time, choose your online or offline status, and create customized lists to organize your chats.

Email

Salesforce offers a chrome extension that will automatically capture information from anyone you have been emailing. Depending on the content of your emails, the extension can capture names, emails, company names, and phone numbers.

As seen above, you can choose to add someone as a lead and further edit their details all within Gmail. However, we found that other platforms with the same extension, like Copper, are better at auto filling information.

Contact Management

Capturing a lead’s contact information is crucial in converting them into a paying customer. However, the type of information you can record, and how it’s stored and managed will determine the value you gain from your CRM. This is known as contact management.

Contact Profiles

Salesforce lets you create a profile of every lead you’ve captured. The more information you have on someone, and the more unique a profile, the better the chance you have of converting that person into a lead. Salesforce’s contact profile feature is robust – it offers a wide range of contact fields and lets you add additional information not available in other solutions like Copper and Pipedrive.

You can include standard contact information like emails, phone numbers, associated deals, and files. You can also include relevant marketing campaigns, their lead source, log calls, send emails, and create meetings, and new tasks.

Salesforce also includes a "chatter" feature, which acts like a social feed. This is where you and users in your organization can like, comment, and post updates about a contact within their own profile. This feed helps make sure that everyone is kept the most up to date on a contact, which helps them make the best decision in turning them into a paying customer.

Contact Storage

It’s imperative that your contacts are stored in an organized manner and are easily accessible. Overall, contact storage in Salesforce is effective and customizable. You can use Salesforce’s contact storage if you have 50 plus contacts.

You can segment your contacts by customized lists or filters. The filters you can use can be based on specific accounts, names, location, dates, lead source, and emails. You can also use Salesforce’s search bar to look for a certain contact.

Communication Channels

One of the key elements in converting your contacts into a paying customer is maintaining consistent communication. With Salesforce, you can communicate with leads through the following channels:

Email Marketing

Salesforce lets you send emails to specific contacts from within their profiles. You can also create campaigns in Salesforce, which let you email multiple contacts at once. If the visual design of your email campaigns is a priority for you, we recommend using a different platform, like HubSpot.

Salesforce lets you send standard emails that can include images, links, and file attachments. An advantage of Salesforce’s email marketing feature is that you can also insert merge fields. These pull data from within the CRM, including data related to the recipients, and the sender.

Another advantage of Salesforce’s email marketing tool is that you can create templates of frequently used emails. Using templates saves time and helps maintain consistency. Salesforce email templates let you include images, merge fields, file attachments, and write them in HTML.

As shown above, Salesforce also offers its own, additional solution called Email Studio, which lets you send personalized emails at scale. It offers a drag & drop editor and lets you use code and templates to create unique designs.

An advantage of Salesforce’s Email Studio feature is that it offers Einstein AI, Salesforce’s own AI technology that uses data gathered on its entire user base. With it, you can view important analytics like email engagement, which can help you determine which emails are best to send and at what time.

Social Media

Salesforce offers their own solution, Social Studio, which lets you engage with your social community on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter from within Salesforce. This includes being able to comment, like, retweet, and message directly. This solution is advanced because it also offers key insights that you can use to optimize your responses.

Salesforce’s Social Studio lets you view what people are saying about your business and competitors. You can analyze their sentiments and even view the conversations that relate to positive and negative ones. From there you can take direct action, like replying to them.

One of Social Studio’s key features is Topic Profiles. These let you create lists of relevant conversations about your business. An advantage of this feature is that you can include posts that tag you and even posts that don’t tag you or tag you correctly.

This is because you define keywords that Salesforce uses to fetch conversations on different social media sites. This feature gives you a more accurate viewpoint of how your business is being discussed and gives you the chance to engage in whatever manner you find best.

Phone

Salesforce lets you make phone calls to contacts from within your CRM. The benefit of this feature is that you do not have to use multiple applications, which saves time.

Salesforce automatically logs your calls and associates them to the contact you’ve called. Salesforce also includes a feature that lets you take notes during a call. However, you cannot edit the style of your text or include attachments.

Deal Management

When leads become sales qualified leads, you’ll need a system that properly manages your deals. Effective and efficient deal management will provide the most updated information and allow sales representatives to focus their attention on building stronger relationships with potential customers.

Pipelines

With pipelines, you can visually track the progress of prospective customers through every deal stage. Salesforce’s pipeline tool is robust and works well for enterprise-level businesses working with 50 simultaneous deals. It should be noted though that this feature can be overwhelming for first time CRM users and is tedious to use in general.

Salesforce lets you create multiple pipelines and customize them in a manner that best aligns with your business’s sales funnels. In Salesforce, this means creating a new sales process where you can reorder, rename, and create unique stages. You can also insert "win probability" percentages for your stages.

Deals can be further organized through filters. This includes filters based on dates, opportunity names, owner names, stages, and probability percentages. You can also drag and drop deals between stages, which make it easier to update their statuses.

Task Management

Tasks in a CRM are the actions that need to be taken in order to bring a deal to completion. Tasks can be assigned to you or others in your organization. This feature is basic, and slightly inefficient in Salesforce.

You can write notes for a task, set a due date, choose related contacts, and set their progress and priority levels. You can also set reminders for tasks, which are key because they reduce the chance of losing a potential deal. However, these can only be set at a custom date and time.

Two disadvantages of task management in Salesforce are you cannot customize the names of your tasks or include relevant attachments.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is the process of assigning a numerical value to a lead. This reflects the likelihood of that lead becoming a paying customer. Lead scoring also helps sales representatives spend their time where it is most lucrative. Salesforce offers lead scoring through Pardot, their own B2B marketing automation solution.

You can add or subtract points for actions like email opens, file access, custom redirect clicks, and form errors. A disadvantage of Salesforce’s lead scoring feature though is that you cannot create your own unique scoring rules.

Workflow Automation

Workflow automation is when common tasks are automated through the use of tools, apps, and technology. Workflow automation saves time, and reduces the chance for human error. Salesforce offers a triggered events feature called "Workflow Rules".

Triggered Events

Salesforce lets you create workflow rules where events trigger a particular action. For example, you can automatically send a thank you email to those that just purchased your product. Overall, this feature is not the easiest to navigate and somewhat limited, especially when compared to automations in other tools like HubSpot and Zoho CRM.

Salesforce lets you create workflows related to campaigns, chats, contacts, deals, emails, tasks, and social posts. You can also create multiple events for one trigger event. However, a disadvantage of Salesforce’s automation feature is that you are limited in the events that can be performed. You can only create new tasks, email alerts, and field updates.

Reporting

CRM reports include key data that helps individuals and businesses make strategic decisions and tactical changes where needed. This includes important insights like deals won and lost, pipeline progression, sales forecasting, and sales funnels.

Salesforce’s reporting features are robust and very customizable in terms of the data accessible and how you can visualize it. However, it can be a little intimidating to use at first.

You can choose multiple visualization methods for your data – including bar, column, line, donut, scatter plot, and funnel. Salesforce also offers dashboards, which let you present multiple reports side-by-side.

With dashboards, you can formulate a more well-rounded perspective of how your business is performing. For example, you can create a dashboard of your sales pipeline, which can include reports of the leads that were created, and leads converted to opportunities, total revenue by stage.

Salesforce Integrations

Salesforce offers integrations that expand the functionality of your CRM. They also eliminate the need to toggle back and forth between systems. Some of Salesforce’s key integrations include:

Mobile

Salesforce offers a mobile app for both Apple and Android. A mobile CRM gives you the best chance in ensuring that your customers are getting the best service possible at all times.

Salesforce’s mobile app is robust – you can view and create tasks, contacts, campaigns, chatter posts, and new events. An advantage Salesforce has over other platforms’ mobile apps is that you can also view reports.

Legal & Security

Having proper security and data protection is critical for your CRM. Data breaches can harshly affect your company’s reputation and be costly to remedy. Salesforce offers key security features and compliances to make sure your data is secured and protected.

Customer Support

Overall, we found Salesforce’s customer support to be average. While Salesforce offers a variety of help resources, we found that the quality varied greatly between resources. For example; Salesforce’s live chat customer support was quick and responsive, but we found their help articles to have low readability.

Salesforce’s articles contain bold terms, helpful videos, and images with indicators, like boxes and arrows, that reference the specific feature being discussed. However, many of them also contain long paragraphs with minimal spacing between each line, making them more difficult to read.

Salesforce vs. Competitors

Compared to its competitors, Salesforce is one of the more advanced solutions available. It is the most similar to HubSpot in terms of advancedness, but Salesforce is better suited for enterprises. Salesforce is also more customizable than its competitors.

The top Salesforce competitors are:

Is Salesforce Right For You?

Overall, Salesforce is a highly customizable tool with advanced functionalities. We recommend it to those with a large budget, who are looking to scale their business to enterprise-level. We also recommend having assistance from a Salesforce representative when it comes to customizing your CRM.