Bergen Adair
Micromanaging your business’ relationships with individual customers is so 2008. Customer relationship management (CRM) software has been making marketers, sales teams, and managers’ lives easier for years. Today we have a faceoff between two industry giants to help you determine which CRM system is best for your business. Salesforce and Infor CRM are two of the best options on the market, offering a wide array of helpful functionalities to their users.
We’ve created this introductory Infor vs Salesforce comparison chart to help make your decision a little easier.
Features Comparison
Infor CRM is an award-winning, state-of-the-art technology solution that enables businesses to fully optimize the value of their most important corporate asset — customer data. Infor CRM’s exceptional usability and versatile configuration capabilities allow rich, personalized user experiences, helping companies to ensure adoption and productivity.
Salesforce CRM is also an award-winning solution created by Salesforce as part of its extensive sales and marketing solutions under the Salesforce brand including separate systems for analytics, marketing, service and more. This software helps users track all customer information and interactions in one location to follow more leads.
Find out how Salesforce vs Infor stack up in individual features:
Customer Targeting
Infor CRM’s intuitive dashboards offer varied customer targeting abilities
This feature helps users develop marketing strategies to better target the intended audience for a product or service.
Infor’s CRM platform records and presents data on every occasion a customer interacts with your business, making analyzing specific marketing tactics much easier. Key metrics Infor collects include share of wallet, products per customer, average revenue per user, and on-boarding conversion rates.
Infor CRM offers a 360-degree view of all the aspects relating to your customers and prospects. With the standard fields and interoperability with ERP systems available from this CRM, marketers can track lead demographics. By utilizing the knowledge gained from studying these attributes, users can then configure targeted marketing campaigns.
Salesforce Sales Cloud helps users track all customer information and interactions in one location to follow more leads. The lead management, marketing automation, sales data and partner management apps let you to follow these leads until they are ready for conversion.
Selecthub’s analysts found that Salesforce has a less comprehensive presentation of this collected lead data. Users can still create and execute marketing campaigns. They just have to work from general marketing strategies developed for the targeted customer demographic rather than from specific customer data.
Campaign Analysis
Campaign analysis collects data about marketing campaign metrics and presents it to users as a cohesive report.
Infor offers easy-to-navigate dashboards to display campaign summaries, analysis, reports and radar. Users can also pull metrics on lead sources, lead segmentation and contact segmentation. These dashboards support data discovery which promotes additional view discovery. Users can view groups of all campaigns, open campaign activities and overdue campaign activities to stay on top of your marketing activity.
The application also provides robust data analytics and assessment of key performance indicators to allow business to attain a deeper understanding of individual, team and business performance. Businesses and organizations can utilize this data to implement strategic decisions that impact bottom lines in positive ways.
Companies can analyze campaign effectiveness using either the statistics on the campaign record or by preparing campaign reports in Salesforce. The campaign statistics are automatically recalculated every time users save data on a campaign. When users convert a lead into an opportunity, the campaign that was most recently associated with that lead will automatically pass over to the opportunity.
Salesforce offers custom fields to organize campaigns into hierarchies for viewing. This CRM solution also allows users to get insights from varied, real-time customer data. With this data, users can create critical reports, sales forecasts, and territory models.This promotes easy user analysis, but does not generate automated reports. It also has a less user-friendly and comprehensive interface.
Lead Generation
Salesforce Sales Cloud’s contact management module helps keep leads organized and primed for nurturing.
Often the problem with lead generation is the disconnect between marketing technology and the CRM system that causes delays in response times and ultimately close rates. That’s why it’s crucial for your super busy sales professionals that you have a way of getting that lead from your acquisition campaign immediately into their CRM lead queue. Ideally, of course, with an alert on their phone. These platforms offer unique options for streamlining this process.
Infor CRM offers a lead qualification feature that allows users to segment them into categories and focus on nurturing the most highly qualified leads. The contact management capabilities also allow that data to be recorded with the lead’s account for future reference by sales teams. Plus, users can customize their own lead scoring qualifications to personalize their customers’ experience.
Salesforce provides lead tracking and content management functions. Users can track which campaign converted a lead and view customer activities. Salesforce aims to provide mobile-friendly campaigns to draw more leads from smartphone sources. It focuses on leading these leads directly into the sales funnel by providing mobile alerts for sales team members.
Both platforms will help deliver aggressive and targeted marketing campaigns to generate leads, but Salesforce falls behind Infor here by offering little customization and no lead filter capabilities.
Opportunity Management
This feature lets the user focus on the most promising opportunities and leads to achieve sales goals.
Infor offers capabilities for users to track probability of close, performance of products, lead sources, lead status and competitors. It also allows organizations to generate sales proposals automatically reflecting native customer currency.
After a lead enters the funnel, Infor allows users to tag an opportunity to a sales phase. Each stage is associated with a probability of that opportunity converting to a sale. Managers can review the probabilities assigned to each opportunity and adjust as necessary. This provides an insightful way to utilize customer information. Organizations can make the most of every sale with this knowledge and guide their team to create trustworthy customer connections.
Salesforce is intuitive when managing aspects of customer buying trends: it tracks sales and opportunities throughout the whole pipeline process. It allows leaders to track leads better by having a lead workspace to track, update and close leads.
Users can manage opportunities easily through dashboards with easy drag-and-drop components and view all lead information in a single interface.
Both offer great opportunity management functionality, but the fairly hands-off approach of Salesforce can’t beat what Infor can do.
Custom Reports
Creating daily, weekly and monthly reports for your organization is incredibly important to keep track of things like finances
Infor CRM offers a reporting solution for custom and pre-built reports. It also offers an advanced dashboard capability. This solution can generate charts, grids, input parameters, images and other information relevant to the report. Users can create interactive reports that allow the end user to explore the data through an operational-report format. With Infor, users can schedule reports to run at specific times and distribute completed reports via a batch process.
Infor CRM Pivot Reporter, a powerful yet easy-to-use reporting and analysis tool, offers a simple solution. Now, any Infor CRM user can quickly create custom ‘pivot-style’ reports without any special report writing or database skills. Create pipeline reports grouped by sales person or team, marketing lead source and campaign status reports, support ticket metric reports and more.
Simply drag and drop fields from Infor CRM or modify one of more than 20 sample reports to meet your unique reporting needs. Reports update instantly after dragging additional fields or changing captions. You can also export reports to Excel with a single click for additional analysis.
Users with the “Manage Custom Report Types” permission can define custom report types that extend the types of reports from which all users in their organization can create or update custom reports. When a user creates a custom report in Salesforce, the program auto-fills some fields to assist with report generation. Custom fields can be added, hidden or filtered to narrow the field of the report. Then that information is displayed in a robust real-time dashboard.
A developer can edit a custom report type in a managed package after it’s released, and can add new fields. Subscribers automatically receive these changes when they install a new version of the managed package. However, developers can’t remove objects from the report type after the package is released. If you delete a field in a custom report type that’s part of a managed package, and the deleted field is part of bucketing or used in grouping, you receive an error message.
With Infor CRM, you control both the pre-built or custom reports that you design to fit your needs. Salesforce has good reporting abilities, but misses the ease of use and comprehensiveness found with Infor. It also has less flexibility overall and is harder to learn to use.
Business Intelligence
The ability to digest massive quantities of data is something companies need in a competitive landscape.
Infor provides a visual analyzer, advanced analytics and Birst tool options. All three features dive deep into your analytics and identify your most sought-after products. Then they determine who is most likely to make a purchase next. By monitoring these types of customer movements, you’re able to respond quicker to changes that occur on the market.
The visual analyzer and advanced analytics provide analytical capabilities including drilling, pivoting, filtering, statistical analysis, what-if parameter-driven analysis, forecasting/predictive, advanced visualizations and many more features. Non-IT users and developers can create new content, manipulate existing content and do many complex analysis activities with the Spotfire Professional tool, which is provided to all Advanced Analytics customers.
Salesforce offers the paid add-on QlikView which provides opportunities to bolster sales, track marketing campaigns and improve lead nurturing. QlikView for Salesforce delivers BI advantages with rapid time to value, ease of use and minimal or no reliance on IT for near-real-time analytics. Using QlikView, Salesforce customers can drive higher levels of sales efficiency and effectiveness.
The platform from Salesforce also measures pipeline trends across the entire sales cycle and analyzes customers and prospects across multiple dimensions and data sources. Users can plan and track more effective marketing campaigns and linked sales activities, as well as increase demand generation, cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
Both offer comprehensive options, but Infor’s BI packs more of a punch and doesn’t cost the user extra.
Industry Business Process Support
This refers to whether an application supports core business processes like procurement, logistics, product development and manufacturing, human capital management, etc.
Infor CRM does more than just improve relationships between businesses and their consumer base. This well-rounded CRM tool has all the essential applications and functionalities to help businesses succeed in today’s competitive landscape.
Infor was designed to be flexible and allow for modifications if needed to support specific functionality requests, as well as a customized business process. The environment has strong add-on functionality that makes some of these features easier to complete. Easy integration of the system makes it a breeze when setting everything up with existing software. You’ll be able to make wiser choices when it comes to procurement, product development and more.
Salesforce CRM (Sales Cloud) puts everything you need at your fingertips any time, anywhere. With a robust collection of modules to choose from, collaboration across your organization and a better sales pipeline isn’t only possible, it’s easy.
Salesforce offers its unique Process Builder to users so they can easily create records, emails and tasks in just a few steps. If customers aren’t satisfied, you can easily shift gears to boost customer satisfaction and get them interested in what you’re trying to sell. Salesforce’s CRM software streamlines and automates business processes, providing deep analysis and insight into important sales and client data.
Infor takes this round as well, as it offers more customization and ease of use, as well as a higher level of automation.
Who Won?
Both these CRM platforms have their pros and cons, and the right software for you depends on your business size and needs. That being said, our analysts found that Infor CRM consistently out-performed Salesforce Sales Cloud.
