Salesforce Sales Cloud vs Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring): Which is a better fit?

Angel J.: My name is Angel, and I'm the HMIS Operations Manager for a company that is now 60 plus employees large, and I rate Salesforce Sales Cloud five out of five. Prior to Salesforce Sales Cloud, we used a multitude of different softwares, including softwares like Trello. We used Google Office, we used Microsoft Office, Microsoft 365. We used Zendesk. We used a lot of different softwares and tried to use them in a way that was collaborative, but it often left us with too many things to manage in different spaces. We chose Salesforce Sales Cloud because it is one of the top leaders in the industry. We knew that it had its own reputation, and it also brought to it a lot of tools already in-house. One of our top needs is for security and safety of our data. So Salesforce was able to handle some of the HIPAA requirements that we have for our data. We also wanted to make sure that it was a platform that all 60 plus of us could interact with inside of one system instead of having multiple softwares to handle our daily needs. And then we also wanted to use some of its intuition, such as the Einstein, where it helps us to make better decisions, helps us to understand what our activities are, keeps track of what we do in the system, and helps us to grow in using the system. This is one of the reasons why we chose Salesforce Sales Cloud. Getting started with Salesforce Sales Cloud, I would say was not the easiest route. You will definitely need someone that has the knowledge of Salesforce. At the very least, knowledge of database technology. We did have to source out some of the needs to Salesforce consultants, which were very easy to find. Salesforce did help us get these consultants, but it was not a one-stop, set up, everything works automatically. And we do not use it just for sales. We use it for customer management more so than sales. So the bit that we had to have customized was something that was not already in the box. So it wasn't the easiest, but it also wasn't the hardest. The advice that I have for anyone considering using Salesforce Sales Cloud for their business is to make sure that you document all the things that you need from Salesforce. Figure out the reason why you believe that Salesforce is going to serve you, so that you can aim at those specific products and add-ons that Salesforce already has in their system. They are very good at understanding some of the things that their system can do with what you have, but making that documentation and going through that with the employees, going through that with your organization prior to coming to Salesforce is probably going to be key. It does get costly if you don't understand what you're doing with Salesforce and you have to have multiple consultants try to figure it out for you. So if you can get organized and document what your needs are before you come to Salesforce, it'll help you pick the best products that Salesforce has to offer.

Josh A.: My name is Josh. I'm the founder and CMO, and I give SharpSpring a five out of five. If you want more reviews like this, you can click below. Prior to using SharpSpring. I was using a few different tools. I was using Pardot, Pipedrive, ActiveCampaign and MailChimp. The reason that I was looking to change solutions is because those solutions... Well, it depends on the solution. For Pardot, it wasn't really easy to use. It required more of a professional kind of Pardot expert, and we didn't always have one around. For Pipedrive, it was more of a CRM, so it wasn't really a fully functional marketing or sales automation software. It really just kind of kept track of your leads. With ActiveCampaign, I felt like their tool's on a good track, but not nearly as refined as what I later found with SharpSpring. Soon as I saw SharpSpring, I realized there was a lot more functionality and capability and that it was more refined than ActiveCampaign. And the last one that I would explain would be MailChimp, and MailChimp really worked well as a good email marketing tool, but it wasn't a holistic kind of complete marketing and sales automation tool. So those are the reasons, those are the tools that I use prior to SharpSpring. The reason I chose to use SharpSpring and [inaudible 00:01:21] SharpSpring is because it's so robust. I feel like the team at SharpSpring does a good job of continually adding new features, and plus, they have a very solid base, a good foundation of features already in place. It allows us to do both marketing and sales automation, all in one software, which is a huge convenience. I don't have to worry about connecting different pieces of software. For the most part, it all works together in one tool. And it's very affordable, knowing that you get all those different tools in one place as well. If there's a capability that it doesn't have, then it works really well with APR so you can, you can kind of make up a gap for anything that you don't find built-in to SharpSpring by default, which makes it just a very robust and powerful tool. Yeah. SharpSpring, as far as integration goes, was very easy to integrate and stand up. That part was really quick. I would say there's a little bit of a challenge in just being able to customize the software. And it's probably a challenge to customize and integrate software in general, when you're dealing with any sales and marketing automation tool; every company has very specific needs. I know quite a few companies that actually use SharpSpring, so I've been able to see this firsthand. But everyone has different needs and different capabilities, so getting it just right takes a lot of work and a lot of refinements. I think it's important for companies to know that from the start. What I will say is the SharpSpring does a really good job of giving you options and flexibility in their solution set so that you can make sure that everything gets set up to the way that you like. It just may take a little while to get there as you're figuring out exactly how to harness their tools and harness their setup options, to get it set up exactly how your organization wants. When someone is considering to look to integrate SharpSpring or to choose a similar like sales and marketing automation tool, there's a few things that I'd recommend. Foremost is, I would recommend creating a very clear set of use cases. For me, a use case is just how you're going to use the software, so if you can come up with all of the core reasons that you're going to be able to use the software and want to use a software, define those at the very beginning before you even start your search. So that makes your search a lot easier; if you're asking questions, you'll know what to ask. You'll know what are must haves, what are not. And then as you are getting sold on the software or going through the sales process, you can ask to make sure that all those things can be accomplished with the software and what type of time and cost to expect with a software. Now with SharpSpring, for the most part, everything is built into the same price. There's no major ad-ons, so that's a huge advantage, but in general, it's just nice to know what exactly it is that you really need in your software and for your solution before you get into the sales process.