Salesforce.com Independent Review

Salesforce.com Strengths and Weaknesses

Competitive positioning in the cloud CRM market is highlighted with the following strengths and weaknesses.

Salesforce.com Strengths

• The company is a proven innovator. This strength alone separates Salesforce.com from much of its competition and provides increased payback for customers.
• Salesforce.com promotes a vibrant user community. The company uses its own Ideas solution to solicit community input, actively monitors social networks and provides online venues for customers to make themselves heard. Too often CRM companies don't actually practice the Customer Relationship Management they speak of, however, Salesforce.com clearly walks the walk.
• The Salesforce.com user interface maximizes consumer technologies to deliver a simple and rewarding user experience. This has delivered a profound effect in achieving user adoption.
• The company's combination of Force.com, PaaS tools and AppExchange lead the SaaS CRM industry in terms of cloud integration, software customization, third party extensibility and ecosystem.

Salesforce.com Weaknesses

• As Salesforce.com continues its transition from a CRM company to a platform company, several CRM competitors have superseded Salesforce's CRM features, functions and capabilities.
• Salesforce.com marketing software is competitively weak in the SaaS CRM industry. To achieve lead management or marketing capabilities such as digital prospect tracking, lead scoring, progressive profiling, nurture campaigns or rich marketing analytics requires a separate product acquisition. Many Salesforce.com customers turn to third party marketing automation software products from vendors such as Aprimo, Eloqua, Marketo or Pardot. Salesforce has haphazardly tried to position Radian6 as the basis for a Marketing Cloud, but such positioning is not credible and satisfies few or none of the previously listed lead management or marketing automation requirements.
• The Salesforce.com customer base is predominantly B2B. The CRM software is not nearly as well oriented to the B2C industry.
• Salesforce.com is also without sophisticated business intelligence (BI). Customers seeking data warehousing, data mining, online analytical processing (OLAP) or predictive analytics will be required to procure third party solutions from AppExchange or elsewhere.
• Despite an initial thrust and acceptance in the small business market, small business customers repeatedly opine that professional services options are few and extremely costly. For small business customers that require software customization, system integration or other professional services, the lack of channel options, combined with the lack of desire for smaller projects by the few partners available, leave this customer segment without many options.
• When reviewing features to features its apparent that Salesforce.com is the highest priced product in the SaaS CRM industry.
• Salesforce.com becomes less competitive when looking beyond CRM as a point solution. For companies seeking broader business software suites, including back office accounting or ERP systems, the inconsistency and relatively shallow integrations delivered with third party AppExchange vendors do not stand up well to single vendor solutions from competitors such as NetSuite and SAP Business ByDesign.
• Surprisingly, Salesforce.com generally doesn't provide a Service Level Agreement (SLA) unless the customer requests and negotiates it. Even then, SLAs are inconsistent from customer to customer and fall below uptime guarantees of primary SaaS CRM competitors.

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