LeanData vs. Salesforce Sales Cloud

LeanData is incredibly configurable. The drag and drop nodes are easy to use and while it takes a little practice, once you know how to configure the nodes, the amount of flexibility you have to customize your instance is impressive. We can route to specific individuals, to Round Robins, to Territory Teams and more. Timezones and vacations rules can be established and respected. The tool is incredibly scalable to large teams. We have two different business units each with different routing practices and we are able to configure LeanData to work smoothly for both unique processes.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is great for tracking your dealer (reseller) information, customer information, order information, and generating reports. You would want to use Salesforce as a smaller business because it is easy to use and keeps track of everything. You can also click on the reports tab and quickly generate different reports or save them as an Excel file to share with your team. You can set those reports with desired features and change them to fit your needs. I would say SF is not the best if you are going to send lots of marketing emails, etc, because it is not as visually friendly as HubSpot, for example.

Incentivized

• Lead-to-Account Matching. LeanData has far and away the best fuzzy matching system for identifying the appropriate Account where a particular Lead belongs.
• Lead Routing. LeanData's visual routing canvas allows business users to construct very sophisticated, yet reliable, routing branches that determine what to do with every lead (both new and existing) based on business rules.

Incentivized

• Logging notes: SF makes it easy to log notes in the timeline or static notes that live in an easy-to-see spot for longevity.
• Logging activities: It's easy to post a call, text, email, etc.
• API data: Once connected, SF is critical to automation, such as website activity, login activity, pages visited, etc., which saves the Customer Success side time in understanding account activity.
• Custom fields: you can add custom fields to really personalize your experience. We use quite a few and it's brilliant.

Incentivized

• I think implementing data tables is by far a superior way to achieve complex routing scenarios, but the feature could be more at the forefront (I was previously building very complex webs to achieve similar results before I was aware of how to use them)
• I wish there were a way to have multiple entry nodes of the same type (ie New/Updated Campaign Member) with different filters for better router organization. I realize this could be implemented by adding additional filters to the existing node, but for viewing cleanliness as opposed to functionality itself, I wish this could change.

Incentivized

• I'd like to see a global roll up, but individual customized versions by team
• Consolidate! Agreements are often found under attachments, contracts, confidential information, cases, and a couple of more places
• Statuses: Make the status, owner, and last touch date/time easier to find

Incentivized

Have renewed 3x already. It's the best system we've seen for managing actions and outputs across multiple platforms

Incentivized

There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.

Incentivized

LeanData has very effective customer care services.

The software is an affordable lead routing and management software.

Unlimited customizability and seamless integration with other systems.

Efficiency in lead management and generation.

Clarity of the tool and availability of a strightforward UX.

Incentivized

Salesforce has been designed on the basis of "Clicks, not code". So anyone willing to learn the Salesforce user interface (which is quite good as far as management software platforms go) is able to become a Salesforce user or even a Salesforce administrator. You don't have to know coding language to work in the Salesforce environment. Also, Salesforce has one of the best software training resources (Trailhead) that I have ever encountered. It is free to all, easy to use, and most importantly it is interactive. No scrolling through endless text in a user manual. There are hands-on modules and related videos interlaced and through it all you earn points and badges to display your level of learning.

Incentivized

All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years. Accordingly, I only recall our instance of Salesforce having one unscheduled, brief down time over 6 years. I can't remember for sure, but it may have been due to our Internet Service Provider (ISP) versus Salesforce itself. Also, Salesforce does it's best to keep customers in the loop:

Trust.salesforce.com is the salesforce.com community's home for real-time information on system performance and security. On this site you'll find:

Live and historical data on system performance
Up-to-the minute information on planned maintenance
Phishing, malicious software and social engineering threats
Best security practices for your organization
Information on how we safeguard your data

For a SaaS provider, I'd rate their performance to be one of the best. At times, reporting tends to slow down if the data set is very large, which is the case in any system. But, that's a very rare phenomenon

There is no way I would have such a successful implementation of this product without the implementation and support team. They have been patient, helpful, and very responsive. Even after I had gone live and had been so for a while, our org and thus our criteria had changed. They continued to help me make the necessary tweaks to ensure I was up and running.

Incentivized

The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.

I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.

I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business

I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.

We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this

Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.

We were not able to devote the developer resources to solving the problem in-house at the moment in time we needed to move on this solution. We wanted (needed) a bespoke solution where implementation could be handled outside of our organization. LeanData was able to offer that and on the timescale we were beholden to.

Incentivized

Salesforce sales can do everything Front does regarding email integrations and communicating with your peers. Still, it provides even more insight for our salespeople and leadership team. Although Front is cheaper, we decided the added productivity and visibility provided to the team would be well worth the higher price tag.

Incentivized

Salesforce Sales Cloud is highly scalable and designed to accommodate the needs of businesses of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises. It offers flexible subscription models and can easily scale up or down based on the organization's requirements. Whether a company is expanding its sales team, increasing its customer base, or adding new features and functionalities, Sales Cloud can adapt to support growth without sacrificing performance or reliability. Additionally, Salesforce's cloud-based architecture ensures that users have access to resources and capabilities as needed, making it a highly scalable solution for organizations looking to automate customer relationship management at scale.

Incentivized

• Using the Outreach integration in LeanData that allows us to auto-sequence an inbound prospect that hasn't booked a meeting has brought our average time to touch from 10+ days to >1 day.
• I can't speak to specific numbers, but using LeanData to route our different onboarding related objects has significantly reduced our onboarding time for new customers.
• Adding LeanData Bookit has also reduced our spend by consolidating tools. When we acquired a company last year, we were able to use LeanData on their website and get rid of their routing/meeting tools without having to pay for another instance.

Incentivized

• The inbox feature allows me to see when the customer opens my email, and hence a timely follow-up could result in a higher response rate.
• The mobile app allows users to gain access to leads and customer contacts on the go, which increases sales team productivity and enhances customer conversations.
• The reports of the notes on the account level are not working, which is causing manual work in the weekly report to leadership.

Incentivized