Salesforce Sales Cloud vs. Seismic Content

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

It is excellent for a cloud-based workspace between you and your customers. I find the chat feature to be a cool and underutilized tool. I appreciate how you can consolidate all your information on one page, rather than having multiple attachments. Easy to clone DSRs (Digital Sales Rooms), which saves a significant amount of time. Especially when all you have to do is make minor changes between customers.

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

• Seismic allows for one location to store all relevant content so that associates are not having to spend as much time searching for what they need.
• Seismic provides the ability to fully customize content such that one template can serve many needs with the simple ability to answer questions that drive the customization in the content. This customization can range from simple to quite complex depending on your level of expertise with the tool.
• Seismic provides a lot of flexibility when it comes to organizing your content and how to make the experience of accessing that content unique to the needs of each user in the system.

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

• There have been a few times where issues with a server leads to a slow user experience or users are unable to use the platform for a small period of time. Bringing these to a minimum would greatly enhance the user experience.

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

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

Seismic is super easy to use and has so many different features and functionality to take advantage of. But being a company who utilizes Google platform a lot we have some issues with the api connections and integrations across the board. But all in all it is not a huge issue, I would just like to see them improve the integration more

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

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 have never tried chatting/calling with Support for Seismic. However, from others that I have talked to that use Seismic in more of an administrative role, they have been easy to work with and are of great assistance. I think it's a good thing I've never needed to talk to support, as it means I haven't had any issues to this point.

Incentivized

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.

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

Both Highspot and Seismic are great tools. They each provide an extensive library that can be easily customized based on the rep/team/deal cycle stage etc. Seismic has a much cleaner look and feel. As a rep, I felt it was much easier to navigate the tool and organize my content the way I wanted to. Highspot tended to feel cluttered and even overwhelming at times. Along with that, the AI and saved search feature ran smoother in Seismic. I could easily find the document or sales deck I was looking for, whereas in Highspot I felt I had to look around longer than I would have liked.

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

• 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

• The bespoke resources we have created and implemented in Seismic have increased our reps efficiency and effectiveness and ultimately increased their confidence with our prospects.
• Better time management as connecting different lines of businesses and/or functions like Marketing with Compliance allows for a smoother workflow and less time consumption.
• Improved workflows as Seismic allows the distribution of resources either internally or externally quickly with links & PDF files directly into email correspondence or Slack messages.

Incentivized