kishan giri
IndividualForum Replies Created
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Hi
In its annual report, Salesforce claimed the revenue of $13.3 billion for the fiscal year 2019, which exceeds the revenue made in 2018 by almost $4 billion, and makes Salesforce an uncontested leader of the CRM market.
Despite its numerous advantages and indisputable leadership, the Salesforce system still has a couple of drawbacks for users that hinder its absolute success. So, let’s enumerate major Salesforce problems and see how to decrease their negative effect.
Salesforce problems
Salesforce issues of major customer concern
Based on our Salesforce consulting practice, we see that customers most often face the following Salesforce problems:
Expensiveness and implicit costs.
Customization can easily get off track.
Limited deployment options.
Steep learning curve and user adoption issues.
Let's explore them in detail.
1. Salesforce is expensive and has implicit costs.
Some Salesforce customers complain that the system is heavy on the pocket. A considerable growth of Salesforce expenses may result from the data and storage limits. Although the free storage capacity increased tenfold in 2019 (and now constitutes 10 GB of data storage and 10 GB of file storage per org), it’s still may be insufficient for an organization, which has a huge customer base and stores vast amounts of customer data along with sales and marketing materials, like contracts, proposals, presentations, demos, etc. To solve the problem of data and file storage limits, Salesforce customers purchase external databases and DMSs (like SharePoint).
Another problem is the extra cost of Salesforce support. The basic support envisaged by the free Standard support plan is rather limited. It includes Level 1 support from a Salesforce technical team and access to a number of free self-service resources, like Trailhead, Trailblazer Community, etc. Obviously, to address the Salesforce support needs (like, ongoing CRM administration and constant system monitoring) in full, the company will either have to purchase a more advanced support plan (like Premier, or Premier+) from Salesforce or resort to third-party support services.
Solution: Consider your potential investments from the start. If Salesforce seems too expensive even before making a purchase, you’d better opt for another CRM.
2. Salesforce customization can easily get off track in terms of the scope and budget.
No doubt, Salesforce is an extremely powerful platform. Yet, to feel this power, one may have to build in numerous complementary components. In essence, this work may soon remind setting up a Lego house – one may start with small blocks and then spend a long time choosing additional fancy blocks to create a ‘perfect’ solution that fully satisfies one’s needs. However, with the customization capabilities so ample, it’s easy to go beyond the reasonable limits and make the solution too complex for users.
Solution: Dividing custom features into groups, like “Essential”, “Useful” and “Nice-to-have” and delivering them in order of importance will save your Salesforce solution from excessive customization, and keep the customization costs under control.
3. Salesforce offers limited deployment options.
All primary Salesforce competitors, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, Oracle CRM, SAP CRM and others, provide multiple deployment options to their customers (e.g., on-premises, cloud or hybrid solutions) as well as different cloud deployment models, like a private cloud, public cloud or hybrid cloud. Salesforce, has only the cloud deployment option and the public cloud deployment model, which may be an issue for companies that want to manage the infrastructure and security of their CRM themselves.
Solution: In case you need to be responsible for the security, performance, and maintenance of your CRM system, for example, due to strict industry regulations, the only solution is not to use Salesforce.
4. Steep learning curve and user adoption issues.
To master Salesforce features (like quote, proposal, contract management and other functionality), users should complete introductory training, which may be rather lengthy. The training duration depends on the number of custom-built features to master in addition to default CRM functionality. Still, a couple of weeks is the bare minimum for efficient user training, which combines self-learning and instructor-led sessions.
However, even with all the required training sessions passed, there’s no guarantee that users will regularly use the system. If Salesforce CRM isn’t configured with user convenience as a priority, user adoption will still be low. For instance, filling in hundreds of ‘required’ fields with customers’ and prospects’ data can be very tedious for sales reps and impact the adoption of Salesforce CRM.
Solution: To speed up user training, it can be accompanied by release notes on custom-built functionality and ongoing assistance of an in-house Salesforce administrator or an outsourced Salesforce services provider.
And to curb the user adoption issues, making CRM convenient and user-friendly with customization is a must. For instance, if there are a lot of required fields that don’t allow sales reps to save records without being filled in, their number should be reduced. It’s also possible to decrease sales reps’ manual efforts by enabling automated field updates (e.g., when the opportunity stage changes to “Closed won”, the date automatically appears in the “Opportunity close date” custom field).
On a final note
Though Salesforce has several issues to take into account before the acquisition, you can decrease their negative effect resorting to Salesforce consulting and support services.
https://www.scnsoft.com/blog/5-salesforce-problems -
To enable email approval response for your organization, from Setup, enter Process Automation Settings in the Quick Find box, then select Process Automation Settings, select the Enable Email Approval Response checkbox, and click Save.
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Hi
To provide a security model that satisfies numerous, unique real-world business cases, Salesforce provides a comprehensive and flexible data security model to secure data at different levels. Salesforce also provides sharing tools to open up and allow secure access to data based on business needs.
Salesforce provides three layers of security with lots of flexibility to accommodate virtually any business need. Profiles controls object-level and field-level access. Permission sets are used to provide access to additional objects. Field-level security controls provide access to individual fields within an object. -
Hi
Your Salesforce organization can generate backup files of your data on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on your edition. You can generate backup files manually once every 7 days for weekly exports, or 29 days for monthly exports. Weekly exports are available in Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited Editions. -
Hi Suresh
The CRM cycle basically consists of four stages – Marketing, Sales, Product, and Support.
•Marketing Stage – In this stage of CRM cycle, the basic focus is to identify customers by running various marketing campaigns (such as emails, blogs, advertisements, and more), create the database for Account (pertaining to Organization) and Contacts (pertaining to individuals), and finally generate leads by analyzing the gathered customer data.
•Sales Stage –In the Sales stage, basic focus remains on leads. They are the individuals who have expressed some kind of interest in your product offering. ‘Leads’ are further categorized into Open, Contacted, Qualified and Un-qualified.
•Product Stage – In this stage of CRM cycle, the basic focus is on delivery of Product.
•Support Stage – During Support Stage, the primary focus remains on resolving customer issues and providing customer support. In CRM terminology, this function is known as Case Management. -
Hi
Apex Data Loader :- It provides an easy interface and self-explanatory wizard to load the data into Salesforce. You can perform import operation from this wizard but delete and insert operations cannot be performed through this wizard. Data import wizard doesn’t allow to load the duplicate records and all fields can be individually mapped by this wizard within Salesforce.
Import Wizard :- Data Loader is the most efficient tool that is used to move data rapidly into the platform. The tool provided by Salesforce helps perform insert, update and delete operations on Salesforce records. It enables you to interact with your data within Salesforce across all objects.
Data loader can help in various ways such as:
Inserting data from one system to another upon the initial implementation of Salesforce Updating bulk records with new data Deleting bulk records that aren’t required any more Exporting data to other systems Create a backup of previous data.