PCmag@Work (Small Business): Review – Salesforce.com Professional Edition
A comprehensive review of the company’s current offerings, including details on pricing and editions and assessments user interface and fatures for each.
“Salesforce.com has always been a cloud-computing company. It’s now a veteran of the on-demand CRM space, having entered the market at a time when client-server computing and in-house data centers still dominated. Salesforce.com has grown to support clients as large as Siemens and Starbucks; it takes some serious ingenuity to support such corporate behemoths and yet still remain relevant to small business customers. My latest test found that the company has done it, in spades. Salesforce.com remains our Editors’ Choice CRM product, even if its pricing is beginning to look downright stratospheric in the face of intense competition on the low end.
Salesforce.com Editions and Pricing
Salesforce offers five separate editions of its Sales Cloud 2 product. Contact Manager Edition costs $5 per user per month, and somewhat resembles a cloud-based ACT. It tracks contacts, customer interactions, tasks, and hooks into Outlook and Google Apps, while also offering document sharing and mobile access. Group Edition costs $25 per user per month. It tracks sales opportunities, offers pre-built dashboards and basic reporting, adds the ability to capture leads from your Web site, and tracks Google AdWords performance within Salesforce.com. Group Edition is a good starting point for many SMBs, but Professional Edition is even better. It costs $65 per user per month, and it’s is the real SMB sweet spot. It offers full reporting and analytics, custom dashboards, e-mail marketing, sales forecasts, granular permissions, real-time data sharing, and basic customer service tools.”