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We use Salesforce (combined with ecquire.com) at Mixpanel - it's not a very friendly UI but it has every feature you'll need in the future. You learn to love it
by suhail 13y ago
We use Salesforce (combined with ecquire.com) at Mixpanel - it's not a very friendly UI but it has every feature you'll need in the future. You learn to love it. Plus, every sales person you may hire in the future will already know how to use it (or should). Salesforce, like most CRM tools, has a way to bcc your emails to keep track of the conversations you're having.
You need to start hiring another sales rep too if you're handling 100s of leads by yourself.
You should begin building a qualification framework to understand which leads are valuable and worth your time: Do they have budget? Who has the authority to get this deal done? Do they have a serious need? When will they buy if everything about your product was perfect? And any other unique factors related to your business. Then, get this information into Salesforce!
It's probably time to start using marketing automation/drip campaigns to keep your leads warm too.
Depending on how long your phone calls/meetings run - you'll usually only be able to handle 5-6/day assuming you're doing this full-time so you should consider calculating how many things you can juggle at once.
Use CRM to build a forecast so you can measure your effectiveness. A forecast is as simple as taking the amount of money you might make from each customer that month and multiplying it by the probability you'll close that customer. That'll force you to prioritize.
- Snail_Commando 13y agoHow could the UI be improved?
- suhail 13y agoI think to answer that question, you'd have to pick a very specific part of Salesforce. There are also many different kinds of people who use Salesforce: A sales rep (tracking leads), a sales leader (reporting, forecasts), a sales operations person (reporting/lead management), etc. They all have different problems they want to solve.
- dave5104 13y agoOne of the biggest nitpicks I've always had is the calendar. Whenever I click the quick link from the home page (Chatter summary + dashboards, after logging in), it takes me to the last calendar page I viewed. I don't use the SF calendar all the time, so sometimes it's from weeks ago. Why doesn't it show /today/? Another thing is scheduling SF meetings/events. In order to invite anyone, they need to be inside our system as a user or contact. Most of the time when I'm scheduling a call, I need to end up adding a new contact because they're not in our system (and I don't think it's reasonable to expect everyone I talk to to be in there as a contact). If Salesforce would reconsider the UX around their calendar, I would love them. I'm a UX designer myself, and my company uses SF. I typically use it when reaching out to clients to schedule calls--and I avoid it otherwise.
- hajak 13y agoCongrats on the leads! I started a company 18 months ago but due to my hate of the Salesforce.com UI we pivoted and solve just that: http://www.brisk.io http://www.brisk.io As a company we use Mixpanel + Salesforce and did an integration track product usage and can easily see it when contacting users/companies. Mixpanel is also good for drip marketing, but depends on if you people are logged in or not. Check out Intercom.io or Customer.io depending on what kind of users you have.
- nairteashop 13y agoI have to second this. The UI does suck, and the product is expensive ($65/user/month! once you cross 5 users, and $125/user/month if you want to use the API / build any custom apps), but it does scale very well as your sales team grows, and you start dealing with territories, quotas, etc. It's also a de facto standard, at least in the enterprise space, so an additional benefit to us was that most of the sales folks we hired were familiar with it already.
- weaves 13y agoI started to get sick of the lack of Salesforce email sync, and built this to automatically sync all of my relevant emails to Salesforce: https://www.lelandlabs.com https://www.lelandlabs.com Currently Exchange email only, but Gmail support is nearly done.