What Sales Tracking Software for Small Business to Choose?

IMHO, Salesforce sales tracking software. You shouldn’t read further. I’m biased and love this sales tracking software. Period.

But in case you’re looking for a more in-depth answer, well, this article might be for you.

Before we begin, let me clarify one important thing: I’m an interested party. I get paid to help people configure, set up, and educate them about Salesforce tracking software. So, before you dive into this story, keep that in mind. However, everything I say here is my honest opinion.

The Journey of Love & Hate

My first encounter with Salesforce sales tracking software happened when I was 18 years old. My parents owned a small business that was (and still is) involved in manufacturing clothing. We used Salesforce to track leads from trade shows and keep all customer data and supplier contacts in one place.

It was a very basic sales tracking tool —no opportunities tracked, no quotes, no products. Nothing. Only Accounts, Contacts, and Leads. Doesn’t look like the best sales hub, right?

When I first saw the system, my initial thought was, “Oh boy, that’s an ugly thing.”

By the time I started my career, the internet already had many different solutions for managing customer relationships, and most of them looked pretty fresh, had friendly interfaces, and generally appeared very modern.

Compared to those, Salesforce looked outdated. And I didn’t like it.

I began researching alternatives. I had no idea why I needed them—I didn’t have any specific CRM goals or targets in mind. I was just looking for a solution to see what problems it solved during the sales process and whether I had those problems too.

I tried several other CRMs, but I never went beyond the initial exploration phase. It wasn’t because Salesforce was better—no, Salesforce still looked terrible compared to them. It was just a matter of priorities. I had sales to make.

Then I left. I decided I wanted to go my own way and joined a construction company.

Once I joined the construction company, my career progressed, and about a year later we faced a problem—we needed a CRM software.

Immediately, I remembered that my only real experience had been with Salesforce tracking software. I gave it a second look and was shocked. I no longer saw an old, clunky interface. Instead, I saw a well-designed, well-thought-out system. In that year, Salesforce had released what is called the “Lightning interface.”

It was a brand-new interface, with a completely revamped philosophy. But I didn’t love it right away. The problem was that the user interface was still complex and required a lot of customization.

So, I started researching again. I participated in so many demos and created so many trial accounts that at one point, I felt like I was working for an IT project rather than a construction company. Little did I know how right I was.

I compared every aspect of every system, and Salesforce neither looked the best nor the worst. But what set Salesforce apart was how easily I could find an answer to almost any question I had.

Whatever I searched for on Google, I’d be directed to their forum, Trailhead, or documentation. The amount of information available on virtually any issue was so vast that it felt much safer to take a chance on this system than on anything else. So I made up my mind—let’s give Salesforce a try.

I rushed to my boss, did a demo, and he asked me to make a comparison of various systems. I literally created a chart where Salesforce dominated, and that sealed the deal. The decision was made in favor of Salesforce.

Fast forward, after implementing Salesforce at that construction company, I realized I actually enjoyed working on implementation projects more than selling. This was the turning point in my career and the reason I’m writing this article.

It’s Not the Best. It’s Average!

After working as a Salesforce consultant for many years, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that Salesforce is not the best CRM software or the best sales software by any means.

It doesn’t have a free version, and even a paid one has its limitations—some of which are so absurd that… well, I’ll just leave that without further comment.

It’s not the most technologically advanced system, and it’s certainly not the fastest.

But the worst part? It’s not even the cheapest. In fact, it’s on the premium end of CRM systems.

So, why would you choose Salesforce over any other CRM? Because despite its flaws, it’s an all-in-one solution that can handle everything from the sales team’s performance to customer relationship management, marketing, sales pipeline management and even sales data analytics. Salesforce’s ability to integrate multiple business functions into one platform makes it a strong contender for big and small businesses looking to track sales performance and streamline their sales operations.

Let me ask you one question: which search engine do you use? Let me guess—Google. There’s a 1 in 20 chance you use Bing, but most likely, it’s Google.

And the reason you use Google is because it became the default search engine. It used to be the best, but is that still the case? I know there are better alternatives for specific tasks, yet Google is still the go-to platform. It’s universal. If it’s on the internet, you’ll find it with Google.

So, is Google still the best? Probably not. It’s average. But that’s the reason you choose it—it’s consistently average.

The same applies to Salesforce. Over the years, it has simply become the “default” option for most companies when it comes to leveraging sales software.

The Positive Side

I can’t think of a digital product on the market today that doesn’t integrate with Salesforce. Whether you need to send emails, collect web forms, manage lead generation, track packages—whatever you can imagine doing—there’s a very high chance Salesforce offers an integration, either out of the box or through a pre-built app that’s ready to use. Salesforce’s integration capabilities are extensive and versatile, making it a strong choice for sales automation.

Take Facebook ads, for example. Currently, there are only two CRM software systems available as lead targets, and Salesforce is one of them.

Or take a look at Zapier, the app that allows you to build complex automations between different platforms. It has fantastic integration capabilities with Salesforce, allowing you to build solutions with almost zero development costs for most of the internet.

The Negative Side

Since Salesforce has become the default option, it has grown so large that, at times, it doesn’t seem to care about some aspects of the user experience. Over the past few years, I’ve noticed that Salesforce is more focused on attracting new customers by developing competitive advantages in newer areas like AI and through acquiring companies and integrating their functionality into the platform. Unfortunately, this shift in focus sometimes comes at the expense of customer satisfaction, as existing users may feel neglected while the company prioritizes expansion and new features over refining the core user experience.

This shift has come at a cost. Some standard sales tracking features have been sitting untouched for years without any attention from developers. For example, the Approval Processes in Salesforce are awful. They get the job done, but I’ve seen newer, better options from third-party developers.

There are plenty of examples like this, from the simple ability to add an HTML email signature (a feature requested since 2008) to more advanced issues like the outdated way Salesforce handles Quotes by default.

Still, I believe it’s an acceptable trade-off.

Philosophy

Let me give you a sneak peek into the philosophy of Salesforce—something that the entire industry has only started to adopt in recent years.

As I see it, Salesforce’s philosophy is built on two pillars: simplicity of solutions and low code.

Solution Simplicity

This means that Salesforce promotes a way of adopting CRM software where you only use the bare minimum number of fields, but ensure 100% of those fields are utilized, reported on, and automated where possible to effectively track key metrics.

Here’s a recent example from one of my ongoing clients. Just this morning, I was discussing an issue where my client wasn’t updating Opportunity Close Dates and Amounts. The reason? A simple lack of discipline and processes.

Yet the client asked me if we could automate their quotes. My answer was no—we couldn’t automate the quotes because they weren’t fully using the functionality that had already been developed. From a technical standpoint, everything was ready, but the functionality hadn’t been adopted yet.

I postponed developing the new quoting process indefinitely to give them time to digest what they already had.

This doesn’t mean that every Salesforce partner works this way, but it is the approach that Salesforce promotes and has been advocating for years.

Keep it simple, keep it clean, and don’t over-systematize your company. Stick to the basics. And I absolutely love that philosophy—it just works so much better.

Low Code

The second pillar I absolutely adore about Salesforce is its low-code approach. In every certification exam and every document they release, consultants and developers are constantly reminded to look at the existing functionality before developing anything new. 

This is actually why you might need a consultant in the first place—Salesforce has so many reporting and sales analytics features and functions that you often won’t even know certain capabilities exist and could be leveraged for your business, including the ability to track key performance indicators (KPIs) or sales forecasting.

What’s even more important is that any feature available out of the box or provided by Salesforce partners is maintained by Salesforce or those partners. 

What I mean is that you don’t need to have an in-house professional dedicated to updating code and redesigning solutions just because a feature in your organization becomes outdated.

To be fair, sometimes it still happens with Salesforce—there are so many partners, and occasionally some may leave the market, forcing you to search for an alternative. 

Still, this is incomparably less effort than managing a bunch of custom-coded solutions. And by the way, effort equals costs—in case you didn’t catch that between the lines.

Universality

Which camera is better—a mirrorless Canon or the iPhone camera? Let me give you a hint—it’s the one that’s always with you.

While a large Canon camera can deliver excellent image quality, it’s heavy and bulky to carry around, whereas an iPhone is always readily available in your pocket.

The situation with Salesforce and other customer service software systems is similar. There are other CRM systems that can technically perform better for very niche tasks, but Salesforce is the Swiss army knife of CRM systems. 

It offers a wide variety of reporting and analytics features and will likely have the one feature you need most at the moment. And, chances are, you won’t even have to code anything.

Moreover, Salesforce can support virtually any type of business process, from repetitive tasks and sales automation to customer relationship management, inventory tracking, and financial reporting. This flexibility allows small businesses to streamline sales processes and improve customer satisfaction by addressing their specific needs. And if it doesn’t, it’s relatively easy to customize.

Availability of Knowledge for Your Sales Team

Imagine you’ve just bought a new, high-tech coffee machine for your home, excited to brew the perfect cup on a Saturday morning. You try to set it up, but you run into a complex issue—maybe the machine throws an error code, or the instructions are too vague. 

Naturally, you go online, hoping to find a quick fix. You search Google, but to your frustration, there’s no forum post, no troubleshooting guide, no YouTube video addressing your specific problem.

You’re stuck. It’s the weekend, and the company’s customer support team isn’t available until Monday. Without that one critical piece of information, you’re left with an expensive coffee machine you can’t use. Now, you have to wait two full days just to get the issue resolved.

This scenario highlights how frustrating it is when information isn’t readily available. Now, imagine the opposite in a Salesforce environment. The community, documentation, and resources are so vast and responsive that solutions to almost any problem are just a few clicks away. The Salesforce ecosystem ensures you’re never stuck waiting for answers like you are with that coffee machine on a Saturday.

As most small business owners, you want to be able to solve minor issues yourself without hiring expensive sales professionals. Not only does that save money, but it also prevents wasted time and energy—resources you’d rather spend growing your business and refining your sales strategy to increase sales revenue.

Community of Developers

Now we come to probably the most important reason you should choose Salesforce for sales metrics tracking: its community.

Salesforce has the largest community of developers, consultants, business analysts, and a wide range of professionals who can help you with any challenge. This extensive network is a significant advantage, as sales tracking software helps leverage this collective expertise to address specific needs and optimize performance.

This doesn’t mean you have to hire someone every time. It means you can ask a question and get an answer.

Competitors of Salesforce can’t even come close to matching this community. It’s like comparing iOS and Android. You might have the resources to develop your own mobile operating system, but all the money in the world can’t buy you a community of developers who will grow your platform and develop apps for it.

This is Salesforce’s competitive advantage, and it’s something you should seriously consider. It’s arguably the most important factor when choosing a system for a small company.

If you were a large corporation, you’d have the budget to hire a sales team—or several sales and marketing teams—to develop custom functionality, access expert knowledge, and build solutions tailored specifically to your business to optimize sales strategies.

But as a small business, you’re not in that situation. However, you do have the privilege of tapping into the vast, commonly available knowledge of the Salesforce ecosystem and implementing it into your CRM. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t know of any other ecosystem that comes even remotely close to Salesforce in this regard.

Let me put it another way: you don’t want to buy a phone that no one else has because it’ll be a nightmare to find a case for it. Since it’s not a popular iPhone, none of the manufacturers would bother making a case for it, and you’d end up without one. Can you relate to that?

Ecosystem of Products

There’s another aspect that simply can’t be ignored: Salesforce has a vast ecosystem of ready-to-use products that can go live within weeks of purchase.

Of course, some disclaimers apply here. You need to be cautious with definitions of an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), careful with planning, and patient when listening to users who feel certain features are lacking. All of that is true, but what’s also true is your ability to quickly test technology with low costs and high speed.

Let me give you a few examples.

Customer Portal for Better Sales Performance

Salesforce has many different clouds, each responsible for a specific area of functionality. One of them is the Experience Cloud, which helps you build custom websites that access sales data from your CRM system.

For example, you might want to enhance customer relationships and give them the ability to register complaints, download invoices, or provide partners a space where they can submit new leads. All of this can be done with Salesforce’s drag-and-drop builder—clicks, not code.

One of my clients approached me with a question: he wanted to try a customer portal but was hesitant due to a tight budget. He didn’t want to invest too much in case the idea didn’t pan out.

So, we created a simple portal using Salesforce’s template and rolled it out to 12 of their top customers as a pilot project. The result? It was a total success, with some major feedback that helped pivot the initial plans for the customer portal.

The following year, they came back to us and ordered a fully-fledged self-service B2B Commerce webstore, where their customers were able not only to provide self-service but also to place orders. And yes, every customer had custom pricing and a custom set of products available for purchase, enhancing customer relationships and overall satisfaction. This solution integrated seamlessly with their sales tracking tools, covering the entire sales cycle and providing valuable insights into customer interactions.

Complex Quoting

Another example comes from a client in Northern Europe who was facing a bottleneck in their estimating department.

They’re in the roofing business, and as they scaled their sales teams, they hit a major problem—their estimation process couldn’t keep up.

Since they sell roofs, they needed to provide customers with relatively complex quotes that required a bit of engineering for each project. This took time, and while the sales reps were bringing in new leads, the estimating team couldn’t keep up. As a result, many opportunities were stuck in the quoting phase, making it difficult to manage leads efficiently and move them through the sales pipeline stages.

They already had Salesforce, and we could see in the detailed reports just how many opportunities were held up in this phase.

We implemented Salesforce’s advanced quoting tool, CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote). CPQ allows for “guided selling,” where users are led through a series of questions that guide them to suggested products.

In this case, we agreed with the business to slightly decrease the precision of each quote for the sake of speed. If a customer agreed to the pre-quote, then an estimator would step in to provide a more detailed quote.

This solution worked really well. Considering they had around a 30% conversion rate, we reduced the load on the sales department by 70%, while allowing the business to hire more sales reps and increase overall sales capacity. By optimizing the sales cycle through better quoting processes, they managed to accelerate their sales team’s performance and improve overall sales process efficiency.

Other Examples

These are just a few examples of how Salesforce can resolve seemingly complex administrative tasks using the sales tools readily available on the platform. The possibilities are vast, and this is why Salesforce has become such an all-in-one solution for big and small businesses across industries.

But can other platforms do the same? In some cases, yes. Some platforms might even provide more specialized features or give you an edge in certain areas, especially when it comes to niche solutions. However, what many of them lack is the overall flexibility that Salesforce offers.

You never know where your business may end up or what your future technology needs will be. That’s why flexibility is crucial. What I haven’t highlighted enough is how many times we’ve built MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) for clients using Salesforce, only to see those initial ideas fail. And that failure was a good thing—it saved our clients from investing millions in technology solutions that would have otherwise gone unused. In these cases, Salesforce allowed us to quickly test ideas, pivot, and course-correct without sinking too much time or money into dead-end projects, all while refining sales forecasts and optimizing sales performance.

This adaptability is one of Salesforce’s greatest strengths. It’s not just about solving today’s problems—it’s about being able to handle whatever the future brings, and Salesforce provides a level of flexibility that allows businesses to grow and evolve, adapt to specific sales processes, and improve sales efficiency without being tied down by rigid systems.

Final Word

Once again, this is just my personal opinion based on years of experience with Salesforce sales management software, both in my own business and through the work I’ve done with clients. I don’t claim to have the only right answer when it comes to choosing sales software, and I’m not saying Salesforce is the perfect solution for everyone. But I use Salesforce every day for lead management and managing sales operations for my own company (the company whose website you are currently reading), and I wouldn’t be promoting something I don’t fully believe in.

If you’re still on the fence or simply want more insight, I’m always happy to offer advice, share my opinion, or just listen. Feel free to get in touch—leave your contact information in the form, and let’s connect and talk about your current or future sales. Whether you have specific questions or just want to discuss your sales tracking software options, I’d love to help.

And don’t forget to find me on LinkedIn, follow me there, and subscribe to my monthly newsletter for more insights and tips.

On that note, have a great day or night—whatever time it is when you’re reading this—and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Cheers,
J.