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Avidian Prophet CRM or Salesforce.com?

We are considering Avidian Prophet CRM and Salesforce.com as CRM solutions for our sales team. I wanted to reach out to the community and get your thoughts and experience with either or both. We are leaning towards Avidian Prophet CRM but wanted to get the good and bad on both to support our decision.

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Mark Grondin

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Brian Clausen

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Serena Hsi

I also have not used Avidian; and, there are quite a lot of add-ons that 3rd party devs have built for Salesforce. If your salespeople intend to broadcast a lot of emails to prospects, I recommend that you move (if you are looking to move) to a CRM that allows you to broadcast through a 3rd party marketing platform, like Pardot, Silverpop, Marketo, etc., instead of allowing users to broadcast through Outlook.

You shouldn't allow sales to send bulk emails through Outlook if the smtp hits your company domain.

As an account/contact/lead management tool, Salesforce Professional edition works pretty well. Paired with a low-end email marketing platform like Pardot for one-to-one, drip, marketing automation, and broadcast emails, it is still relatively inexpensive (when compared to enterprise solutions like Dynamics CRM + an email marketing platform). On monthly pricing, it's comparable in features with Avidian.

Not everything is true in Avidian's comparison chart with Salesforce. Pretty much for any report system, you have to be online in some capacity to get them. Even with Avidian, I highly doubt that you can really access your reports in Outlook without being online and connected to an Outlook server.

Ultimately, it really depends on what sales (and to some extent, marketing) wants to do with how prospects are targeted (maybe you want to be able to share lead activities between sales reps), how the MQL and SQL funnels are managed, or how existing customers are retained through customer lifecycle management practices. When you factor that in, it's really not a pricing question anymore.

therealims

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Thank you!