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Strategy Sessions: Which Salesforce Edition is Right For You?

In this video, Chris and I discuss which Salesforce editions will integrate best with Act-On, our most highly recommended marketing automation platform. And, we’ll discuss which Salesforce features allow you to get the most value from your marketing automation system.

Transcript

Lauren: It’s Lauren and Chris, and we talk to a lot of people who are thinking of investing in marketing automation platforms, and a lot of the time, when we’re having that conversation, those people are also thinking of investing in CRM (customer relationship management) systems. We usually recommend Salesforce because our marketing automation platform has a really great integration with Salesforce. But there are a lot of different editions of Salesforce, so the question becomes, “Which edition should I choose?” Really, we narrow things down to two specific editions of Salesforce. For an integration with your marketing automation platform, you need at least the Professional edition of Salesforce. Now one step above the Professional edition is the Enterprise edition of Salesforce, and usually that gets us into a conversation of what are the differences between Professional and Enterprise editions of Salesforce? What should I be considering? And ultimately, what’s best for my organization?

Chris: Clients come in saying, “OK, I need at least Professional, so that’s what I’ll get,” but it’s really worth understanding what are the differences and what are the benefits of going with something like the Enterprise edition. We actually typically recommend Enterprise, especially if you are a smaller organization with a handful of seats (licenses for users). If you have a huge sales team, it’s a really big cost difference between Professional and Enterprise.

Lauren: It is. Sure.

Chris: But if you’re looking at, say, one to three seats, really what we would recommend is that Enterprise level. The reason we recommend that is because there are two key features that you get in Enterprise that you don’t get in Professional. They both work great in market automation, they both integrate, that works well, but the two things you get that are added is API access and the ability to create workflow rules. API access will allow you more robust integration with other apps, so if you’re looking to build into your Salesforce account a lot of different apps, some of them are going to require API access.

Lauren: Sure.

Chris: You can purchase API access as an add-on to Professional, but, again, if you only have one to three seats, you might as well up to that Enterprise level.

Lauren: And purchasing that API access as an add-on doesn’t get to the other option, which is the workflow rules.

Chris: When we start looking at workflow rules, it can really make your life inside of Salesforce a lot easier because it allows you to automate certain …

Lauren: Business processes.

Chris: We’re using marketing automation to automate a lot of things, and often times, that’s going to trigger the conversation of it would be great to automate some of these things in Salesforce. And we run into clients that are using Professional that often times didn’t realize, “Oh, I wish I could automate this.” To be able to say “When this thing happens, I want to update this lead record,” or “If this happens, that contact needs to move over here.”

Lauren: Yeah. You get a taste of the automation in the marking automation world, and then suddenly you want that to apply to your CRM system.

Chris: We find those workflow rules really helpful. Lindsey wrote a great blog post about workflow automation we can link toThere’s a lot of great uses for those workflow rules. Typically we say if it’s feasible and affordable, again if you’re only looking at a handful of seats and that cost difference is something you can absorb, we find it really worth it to upgrade from that Professional to the Enterprise level.

Lauren: Yeah, there’s a lot of value there.

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