An independent review and assessment of the top Salesforce.com Strengths and Weaknesses. Full Salesforce.com Review Report available at http://www.CRMsearch.com.

1. Salesforce.com Pro’s & Con’s
An Independent Assessment
By Chuck Schaeffer

2. Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the cloud CRM pioneer. However,
with its substantial size, it no longer leads the industry
in terms of revenue growth, but in absolute terms of
SaaS CRM revenues, customer acquisitions and user
subscriptions the company is a clear market share
leader. In this Salesforce.com CRM review we examine
strengths and weaknesses of an industry leader.
A more detailed Salesforce.com Review Report is
available at http://www.crmsearch.com.

3. Salesforce.com Pro’s
• The company is a proven innovator. This strength alone separates Salesforce.com
from much of its competition and provides software longevity and 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 channels and provides
online communities for customers to make themselves heard. Too often CRM
companies don't actually practice the Customer Relationship Management they speak
of, however, Salesforce.com 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.
• Salesforce.com is championing social CRM and delivering the technology for its
customers to achieve social CRM business objectives.
• 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.

4. Salesforce.com Con’s
• As Salesforce continues its transition from a CRM company to a platform company, several
CRM competitors have exceeded Salesforce's CRM features, functions and capabilities.
• Unlike primary competitors such as Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, SugarCRM and others whom
offer both choice in deployment (on-premise, on-demand or a hybrid combination) as well
as choice in cloud platform (vendor cloud, private cloud or public cloud), Salesforce.com
does not support any public cloud (i.e. Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, etc.)
which limits hosting options, prevents portability, threatens IT investment and significantly
increases exit costs. For example, Salesforce.com customers who choose to extend their
CRM software solution with custom development created with a single vendor tool set
(Force.com) and which only operates on one cloud will likely not be able to transfer and
protect that investment if they choose to leave Salesforce.com.
• Salesforce.com marketing software is competitively weak in the SaaS CRM industry. To
achieve lead management or marketing automation capabilities such as digital prospect
tracking, lead scoring, progressive profiling, nurture campaigns and rich marketing analytics
requires a separate product acquisition. Salesforce has introduced the Marketing Cloud, but
its limited to social marketing and satisfies few or none of the previously listed lead
management or marketing automation requirements. Many Salesforce.com customers turn
to third party marketing automation software products from vendors such as Act-On
Software, Eloqua, Marketo or Pardot, which deliver strong solutions but increase costs and
multi-vendor management issues.

5. Salesforce.com Con’s
• Salesforce.com is without sophisticated business intelligence (BI). Customers seeking data
warehousing, data mining, online analytical processing (OLAP) or predictive analytics will
need 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 costly. For small
business customers that require software customization, 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.
• The company operates fewer international data centers than many of its competitors. This
can impact user performance (latency, hops, jitter, etc.) as well as pose regulatory concerns
with regard to data privacy and government compliance. This may make Salesforce.com
less appealing for customers that get progressively further away from the U.S.

6. Salesforce.com Con’s
• The Salesforce.com customer base is predominantly B2B. The CRM software is not
nearly as well oriented to the B2C industry.
• Surprisingly, Salesforce.com generally doesn't provide a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for
its cloud service 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.

7. Conclusion
• Salesforce is an innovator—and this is a key strength that sets the company apart
from much of its competition. They were one of the first business software companies
to inject consumer technologies into business applications—and continue to do this
faster than most of their peers. They have accelerated the pace of platform as a
service (PaaS), mobile CRM, social CRM and more, and show few signs of slowing
their creativity and momentum. In fact, the company must continue to out-innovate its
competition not just for product superiority or value-add purposes, but to stave off the
inevitable downward pricing pressures that are otherwise unavoidable as online CRM
software becomes commoditized. The on demand CRM market is now plentiful with
credible competitors, so Salesforce.com's innovation is far more about holding off
price erosion than technology advancement.
• Salesforce.com's core competencies are innovation, evangelism and marketing
prowess. A potent combination that can leap frog competitors, create new category
leadership and earn significant market share. In many ways, the company's future is
less predictable now than when run from the bedrooms of a small San Francisco
apartment over a decade ago.