Salesforce is one of the worst contact management softwares I have ever used in my 15 years as a salesperson. Contact management and time management are the two most important aspects of your day when running your practice and I still can't believe how bad salesforce is at this after using the platform for so many months now. I have given it a fair chance and my expectations were reasonably high based on what I was told it would be like but they have grossly over promised and severly underdelivered. I honestly don't know how people use it for effective contact management and relationship building with clients and customers. It is clunkly, non intuitive, simple tasks take way too many clicks and time, it's very slow, and I mean very slow to load compared to other platforms I have used and for what we should expect for our internet speed and just the expectations of technology today. Not to mention the expectations set by SF. It's not that hard to learn as I heard from some reviews in the beginning. I think some people get feedback mixed up with learning curve and just horrible processes. Anyone who is in sales knows how important contact tracking and activity tracking are. I love to track for my business and I am a very good at taking care of clients because of my attention to details. With SF, it takes many more clicks and actions for the most basic logging of activities. It makes no sense, not even from a managerial level as our compliance team has complained about how to best monitor activities with the way the system requires us to enter info. Think about it like this: your a bakery chef and someone comes to you and says they are going to build you a custom kitchen, the best custom kitchen that will help you cook and serve customers. They build the kitchen and stick the cooling racks for the baked goods on the opposite side of the kitchen from the ovens, not next to them, as far away as possible. You ask them to update it, and they seemingly can't. It truly feels like whoever developed the software has very little to no experience in sales or any position that requires relationship management. I have asked a number of peers in my industry and in other industries about their experience with SF and every single person I have talked to hates it and has similiar feedback to me even though they have their own customised versions. From my experiences, you would have to have some really terrible CRM software for salesforce to be an improvement.
