How do you guys use Salesforce?

I'm trying to learn how to use salesforce and my manager really wants to incorporate it.
I know it's a CRM tool and it helps syncing contacts, emails, etc with outlook, but how do you guys use it to take full advantage of it?
Everything seems so complex when I first log on, and those tutorials don't help at all..lol

 

Not sure how Salesforce would be useful outside of an asset management setting. For IB, Outlook does everything you'd need.

Although, the one really cool feature in Salesforce is that you can send an email in HTML with a tiny bit of code embedded that the recipient will never see but that reports back to Salesforce when and how many times your email has been opened. Comes in handy when some jerkoff tells you he never got the email or that he hasn't had time to look at it. Way better than a read receipt which the recipient can just refuse to receive or send back to you.

 
Best Response

The bank I interned at used Salesforce extensively. I was actually participating in the design of the client/lead database there. It is a very powerful tool, and they have a special Investment Banking version which has a lot of useful features for bankers.

The database we had did the following: 1) Had a list of all companies in the industry my bank focused at 2) Had financial information about each company that was more extensive than what you can get from CapIQ, especially on private companies 3) Had information on each company products and services well beyond of what you could find elsewhere 4) You could search all that within the database 5) Had contact database with contact people at each company, and useful information about each of them (for example the degree of relationship of our bank with them) 6) Had all the versions of pitches and models assigned to each company, so you could track your progress with them 7) Had comps in different categories for each company pulled from the companies in the database 8) Allowed to send customized updates/marketing info to selected groups of companies, which you could track - who read it, when, and so on. 9) You could analyze any of that information in different ways

Using Salesforce is nontrivial mostly because the interface is not intuitive and online help is shit. You have to either get trained, or constantly call their tech support to be able to use it efficiently.

 

^ that helps a lot, thanks. But regarding the usefulness of the database, don't you have to input the initial data to the database to begin with, so isn't that not a benefit of salesforce, per say? Maybe I misunderstood, but you made it sound like salesforce provided that database. I'm pretty sure you meant salesforce provides a platform to store such database, right? Eitherway, great information, thanks again

 

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