Best CRM Software in 2023: Top 10 Platforms | O8

Salesforce is a popular choice for organizations wishing to unify multiple real-time data sources and orchestrate complex business logic, serving as the “brain” of an organization. If you are looking for a simple CRM that just works out of the box, this is not your best choice – the learning curve is high, and definitely not designed for small teams who just want a place to store customer information and manage a simple sales process.

The functionality of Salesforce is expansive, well beyond its CRM capabilities, and ever-growing.

It can serve as a platform for customer service, digital marketing, eCommerce, an integration point for 3rd party apps (and MDM, ERP, analytics, and identity systems), blockchain apps and networks, AI, business intelligence (BI) and analytics, a website CMS and front-end, as well as industry-specific solutions for health care, manufacturing, government, and other industries.

Salesforce is huge, extremely powerful, and complex, making it a great candidate for larger businesses (~$100M+ in annual revenues) or those with specific complex needs and ERP systems.

This same power and flexibility also make Salesforce a nightmare for companies that just don’t need what it has to offer. We’ve seen instances where Salesforce implementations go multiple times over their initial implementation estimates, sucking money and cash flow from the company, in situations where the company didn’t truly need Salesforce in the first place, only to have low adoption by the sales team post-implementation, which is truly an awful scenario.

Not to scare anyone, because we’ve also seen great, successful, highly-adopted Salesforce implementations, but you truly have to consult with an experienced industry professional like our company before making such a deep investment in CRM infrastructure. Otherwise, you are relying on the sales team at Salesforce, and their incentive is to sell you Salesforce – not to ensure your success no matter what the platform.

Salesforce Integrations: Hubspot, Marketo, Others

If Salesforce is operating as the “brain” of your organization, it doesn’t actually have to be your defacto CRM, nor does its sister product Pardot have to be your marketing automation platform. There are actually excellent integrations between Hubspot, Marketo, and others.

This is an important point to consider – we don’t generally recommend Pardot, but rather often have to “deal with it” because clients have chosen Pardot because they are were not aware of other options that integrate with Salesforce.