Our team is using it for tracking sales and following sales conversations.
I'm pretty indifferent towards the solution. I don't use it for anything personally, although the company itself makes use of it for sales. My background is Microsoft and even then I don't really use Dynamics for anything.
It's a core component of any CRM, and just having the ability to journal the conversations happening is great from a sales perspective.
I like that I can subscribe to the chatter surrounding an opportunity, as my sales team doesn't actually call anybody or follow up with anybody. Yet, if they paste bogus numbers on the pipeline, I can follow it to see that they didn't do the job. It's nice to have that transparency.
Salesforce is a phenomenal application. It's very diverse.
It does need very specific resources to help deploy it and buy in from the users. It's one of those items it's pretty disruptive and if it's not deployed properly and if it doesn't get utilized efficiently, it won't be effective.
Salesforce doesn't seem to be a really great document repository like SharePoint and SharePoint is backed in behind Dynamic CRM. Therefore, in most cases, generally speaking, it seems like it makes more sense to go the Dynamics route, assuming that the customer understands that if they're already using Exchange, Teams, and Azure Active Directory, they're using role-based access and controls for security and compliance. They have SharePoint as the underlying solution for document collaboration.
Salesforce at that point doesn't make a whole lot of sense for many Microsoft users. For example, with a customer I work with, they have this kind of disparate entity, and they select Salesforce as they say it's the one that pops up on Google when you search and that's likely why they went with it. You can't go wrong with picking Salesforce, however, you also need to have an on-site sales resource such as a Salesforce admin to manage it as nobody can figure it out. It's pretty complex. On top of that, the connection to Teams and SharePoint is so far away.
We would like it if it were possible to record a meeting on an MP4 and be able to upload that into Salesforce as something the sales team can track. There might be third-party plugins that allow for that type of usability, however, I'm not too familiar with them.
While my company has likely had the solution for years, prior to my involvement, they have recently made a mandate to sign into the product daily. That has been as of March.
The solution is pretty rock solid. There doesn't seem to be issues with bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.
While I can't say exactly how many people at my company use it, I know it's a large amount and we have 500 staff members.
We also use Teams for our video conferencing and meetings, and I've been using Team's folders to save assets, notes from OneNote, video recordings, and stream recordings from the Teams sessions. I saved them all into the Teams file, however, the larger population of the Salesforce team doesn't even know how to use Teams and doesn't know how to log into Teams even if it's for meetings.
I didn't handle any aspect of the deployment process. We have a guy on site that kind of manages it and he seems kind of stressed about it. He supports it for the entire organization.
I am not sure which version of the solution I am on at this time.
There's a Google disruption going on here in terms of how to share content and paste it back into Salesforce. I've just tried to put the link in there. Now I'm kind of on the journal conversations. If I've added an activity or event, or I just paste the notes or link to whatever else inside the journal conversation, there seems to be payback if other users pay attention to it.
I'm kind of a Microsoft guy. However, if someone's having a look at it, I would advise that they really look at what they're trying to accomplish and what the rest of the tech stack looks like. Maybe it is the best for what they're trying to do, however, from a Microsoft perspective, most folks have exchanged Teams and everything else, and it goes hand in hand, with your Active directory and the rest of those identity services.
When you start with a disparate CRM, it's kind of against the grain and it's not quite as cohesive. On top of that, when you have meetings and everything else, you have content and collateral that's created so you need to know where are you going to store those assets.
I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It's a good solution, however, it's not something I would personally pick.
