Salesforce CRM Review

You a€™ll find that it’€™s fairly rare to find a negative Salesforce review. In all of the lists of comparative CRM reviews, Salesforce tends to wind up on top, followed closely by the likes of Microsoft Dynamics, Zoho and Sugar CRM. Of course, when writing a balanced review, a lack of negative things can actually be a mild nuisance, because the goal is balanced journalism, rather than edification.

Well, having worked with Salesforce and a few of its competitors at length, I have to say that writing a balanced Salesforce review really is difficult, because there truly are a minimum of negatives to really focus on. I have, however, found one or two minor issues, which I will approach first, before I get into the overwhelming amount of positives to appreciate with Salesforce.

The biggest negative is quite simply the price of Salesforce. It’s not cheap, and this definitely limits the demographics who would find it viable. Small businesses will probably find themselves opting for something like Sugar CRM simply due to the price tag of Salesforce.

The other negative issue is the limitation of space available in the cloud model. I won’t try to list an amount here, because this number seems to fluctuate wildly, but in past investigation, it has always been dwarfed by Zoho and Dynamics, and the price to expand it is a king’s ransom.

But, with those two downsides, what can Salesforce do that makes people still have unconditional love for it? Well, the biggest thing that makes Salesforce so popular is the API and the resulting App Exchange which basically make the potential feature sets limitless. Apex, as this API is called, is a very easy to learn library which works with Java, AJAX, HTML5 and PHP to create custom forms, automata and plugins/extensions that can add a ton of functionality to the core design.

The App Exchange is not unlike the App Store or Google Play Store on mobile devices, with a similar easy interface and easy channel for publishing. This facility is expansive and vast, meaning that not only can Apex give you the power to will Salesforce to do darn near anything, but a lot of the time, someone else has already made an app to do what you need.

This also makes integrating other services such as social networks, LMS systems, BI systems and much more quite easy to do. Couple this with solid standard CRM features like sales communities, marketing and sales leads, email integration, opportunities and quotes, forecasting, dynamic engagement, approvals and workflows, social accounts, Chatter support, automatic analytics and mobile compatibility, and it’s fairly obvious why it’s the most beloved CRM by the general community.

It has a solid set of features and an innovative coding system that literally makes its capabilities infinite. But, I trust that this Salesforce review is at least a little more balanced, because I want to reiterate that the space limitations are a bit of a downer, and the high price does make it less accessible to some, which is very unfortunate given how tremendously powerful this design really is. Perhaps Salesforce will read this, and maybe see the error of their ways in excessive price and absurd space limitations, and rethink their stance there.