When it comes to CRM, Sales​force​.com is the 800lb gorilla. For the sales organization looking for power, flexibility, and effectiveness, few solutions will meet your needs as well as Sales​force​.com.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software has evolved significantly in the past 20 years. At its core, many concepts are still the same. But as technology has evolved, so too have business expectations on visibility to customer information, the ability to automate workflows and notifications, and the capacity to bring together a complete picture of customers under a single roof for deep analysis and insights. While many offerings have come and gone, one constant has been the presence of Salesforce.com. Not only have they been able to continue to compete effectively, they've lead the charge to become, and remain, the dominant CRM software on the market.

Salesforce.com (often just "Salesforce"), is a Software as a Service (SaaS) software offering that allows businesses to effectively manage their customer relationships. For Salesforce, this has historically meant providing exceptional tools for managing your sales activities, and to provide visibility into the activities, needs, and communication with your existing customers after the sale. Salesforce has evolved beyond merely a CRM, and now heavily leverages their Force.com platform on which third parties can develop custom applications and add-ons to augment their CRM capabilities. This means a sales team has not only the best practice tools offered out of the box with Salesforce, but they additionally have access to a plethora of third party apps to augment that process, pulling in customer insights from external data sources, automation communication and campaigns, and providing exceptional insights to their prospects.

Salesforce is one of the most common CRM tools GRAYBOX recommends and encounters for and with our client partners. Given such a long tenure in the market, Salesforce has had a long time to build in a tremendous amount of configuration flexibility to the application. This toolset allows non-developer users to add fields, forms, lists, reports, custom objects, custom workflows, and many other tools to their implementation. Where many competitive options either do not allow this flexibility, or require code to accomplish the same tasks, Salesforce has made an intentional effort to put this power in the hands of business users. Where configuration doesn't meet the needs, Salesforce has augmented the ability to extend the application through their Force.com platform and the launch of AppExchange. Through AppExchange, users can browse pre-existing third party tools that cover a plethora of unique business needs, and install them directly into their account. Where customers of the past would have needed to hire a developer or engage a development agency, users of today can leverage a familiar process and workflow to easily add to the capabilities of their system. Finally, Salesforce has leveraged their marketplace leading position to make a number of targeted acquisitions over the years, including ExactTarget and, by extension, Pardot. The result is that Salesforce has a Marketing Automation suite baked into to the product that provides tremendous leverage to standard CRM functionality, and greatly extends the reach and effectiveness of both inside and outside sales teams.

Salesforce can be a great fit for businesses of all sizes. Pricing is dependent on which of the feature sets your business needs, but the company has traditionally kept at least one plan in the $25/month range. The more sophistication your business needs, the more expensive the plans become. This model allows businesses to start small and grow into the package over time. However, if some of the key enterprise features are needed out of the gates, there is definitely a hefty price tag to embark on the Salesforce journey. So the ideal business profile for Salesforce.com requires some degree of size and cash flow as complexity increases. Salesforce is incredibly flexible and accommodating, but there's definitely a bit of a steep learning curve, which can be intimidating for the small or midsize business that hasn't used the software before.

As with any flexible tool, it can help to have some experts in your corner to ensure you understand the options available to you, the pros and cons of each, and the impacts decisions will have on the broader business. The consultants at GRAYBOX are thorough and experienced, and can help ensure you have all the information to make informed decisions to ensure your success. Whether you need help evaluating whether or not Salesforce is a good option for your business, or help implementing or optimizing Salesforce, GRAYBOX can make sure the right voices are at the table to ensure a successful project.