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Our experience might be out-dated
Submitted Jun. 14, 2017
We started with Salesforce in 2007. We never had someone on staff who really knew what they were doing and the consultants we had in the early years didn't really know what we needed. That being said, Salesforce is certainly a robust CRM and it is wonderfully customizable if you know what you're doing. The issue for us is that we are a very small staff and we need a product that is more "out-of-the-box". We need simple membership management and a member portal. Email function would be great. We currently use Mailchimp because all of the reviews said it would integrate well with Salesforce. We have not found this to be true. The integration has been a nightmare. Mailchimp doesn't tell Salesforce that users have unsubscribed in a way that doesn't allow salesforce to push them right back over. Our list is a mess. We had to turn off the function to allow Mailchimp to push data to Salesforce about click rates, etc to the contact records because it caused us to go over API limits, so that functionality is useless. Events - we have had to customize this as well. We take in leads from our website and convert them into Salesforce opportunities attached to contact records. Not only does a staff person have to spend several minutes registering each person, but there is a lot of room for error with this. Duplicates are a big problem, as there is no authentication. We have to work with a web developer for every event to put it up on the web and make sure it's talking back to Salesforce. Occasionally, it just doesn't. The only way to know that is that we get emails for each credit card payment and one of us has to notice that it never came in to Salesforce. I'm sure that other organizations using Salesforce have set it up better than we have and it is working more smoothly for them. However, our instance is a pretty big mess. We've worked with several consultants over the years and none of them have been able to make it work more smoothly. They've suggested other apps - cvent, eventbrite, mailchimp, click and pledge, etc. We're ready to move away from cobbling all of these things together and work with a product that is already made for associations like ours.
