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What's Salesforce? (2019)

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Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#81

Post by jzoch »

jjeaff wrote: post #70
tinyhouse wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't argue they are qualified to be called a software company. They make money from software after all (at least partly). But they are not a software company in the sense that they don't build technology. Their specialty is buying and selling software and investing in software companies (check one of their 10-K filings). For me personally they are not a software company since building software is not their core bu…

So do they really not do any development in house to speak of? Or do you just mean it isn't their core competency?

they have many many software engineers this guy is lying

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#82

Post by hubspotthrow »

clairity wrote: post #65
hubspotthrow wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I was specifically responding to someone who couldn't find a salesforce replacement because they all wanted to manage the back office. So it seemed relevant rather than shilling in my eyes. Sorry to hear your team dislikes Hubspot.

from gp: > "...they currently like Pipe...something" probably pipedrive. it's pretty good for small sales (and some marketing) groups to manage their pipelines. easy to get up and running and fairly flexible for what it is. it's not going to replace salesforce though. hubspot is a mid-market marketing automation product, sitting between little pipedrive and huge salesforce. it's also pretty decent for what it is, hel…

Note that the person I originally responded to (hopefully helpfully) is different than the person who took offense.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#83

Post by bigfudge »

dylan604 wrote: post #67
adzm wrote: post #2

I understand the appeal of Salesforce, though in my experience it is just as clunky and slow as the software it replaced. I'm sure there are configurations that are not that way, but it's a horrible part of my day to day experience using it as a customer support module. Comments take 4 seconds to add. Opening a case in a new tab is 30 seconds or more. Comments and feeds load progressively, slowly, making it nearly im…

Is it heavy JS load on the client side, or slow processing on server side that causes this sluggishness?

I think it’s probably both. The api and db querying are dog slow too.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#84

Post by bigfudge »

adwww wrote: post #78
acidburnNSA wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To use Django like this you need'd at least a handful of Django devs writing the models, frontend views, and api views as code.

Sounds cheaper than a SF license + consultant tbh.

You would likely get something faster and nicer to use too, but you can’t just do it once ... you need to keep moving because otherwise the team shrinks and you lose the expertise to make even smaller changes. That stagnation is what kills a lot of custom systems.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#85

Post by texasbigdata »

Spooky23 wrote: post #45
howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Everytime I've been hired into an executive role I've cancelled our Salesforce subscription and productivity has gone up." ... Great observation. But what did you replace it with?

I did something similar at a smaller scale migrating away from Oracle to the Excel spreadsheets in SharePoint that fed everything anyway. Lol

I heard moving into a new home and then immediately burning it down to camp in the back yard is great for the maximizing your Daily Steps KPI also. This conversation of "what I did":"what the outcome was":"what the goal was":"what the organization needs to win" seems a bit imprecise.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#86

Post by Firehawke »

JCM9 wrote: post #25

The trouble with Salesforce is that it’s turned into the very thing they set out to replace. It’s big, unwieldy, clunky, and frustrating to use. It’s “SaaS” which was an upgrade on what they replaced initially, but seems like they’re increasingly the ones bound to be “disrupted.”

Scope creep from hell.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#87

Post by Spooky23 »

texasbigdata wrote: post #85
Spooky23 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did something similar at a smaller scale migrating away from Oracle to the Excel spreadsheets in SharePoint that fed everything anyway. Lol

I heard moving into a new home and then immediately burning it down to camp in the back yard is great for the maximizing your Daily Steps KPI also. This conversation of "what I did":"what the outcome was":"what the goal was":"what the organization needs to win" seems a bit imprecise.

In my case, the upstream ERP was there for historical reasons and literally wasn’t used beyond a few reports. The old system wasn’t modified with the business as it grew.

We obviously didn’t stay with excel :)

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#88

Post by pjmlp »

rsj_hn wrote: post #76
rvanmil wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Choose 3 and then watch the consultants build the custom software using a low/no code platform. Now you are still in the slow and poor user experience and no customization options and more expensive and worse support ;-) I think it’s pretty sad that enterprise software is mostly stuck the way you describe. There are companies willing to invest in fast and user friendly custom software though; the company I work for i…

All companies in this space start out fast and user friendly, but to gain additional customers in this space they need to add more features. See my first item. Then they either fail or end up an uber-platform. Again, this has nothing to do with your company, it is just the nature of the market, and it's funny when someone gets an idea to start a "lean", "fast" product as if no one else had thought of that before. Rea…

You forgot the other part, to make business in the enterprise it matters more to talk to the right people than what the software actually does, and the large majority of such companies see anything IT related as cost center.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#89

Post by inthewoods »

I've used Salesforce at every company I've worked at for the last 8 years. Here are my observations:

- There is a special place in hell for the person who made the decision to have leads and contacts as separate objects. It creates all kinds of complexity. Some may have a need to work with leads but for clean reporting, you almost have to dump leads. Most B2B companies I know don't use the lead object and autoconvert everything to Contacts. But it has always seemed like a bad decision to have both.

- There is a long line of companies that have tried and are trying to disrupt Salesforce - none have succeed and my take is that this is because of the ecosystem and app exchange. That makes it very challenging to overcome.

- Salesforce has made improvements in their interface (Lightning is, by most counts, an improvement), but an entire industries exists to make up for the shortcomings of Salesforce. Sending emails directly or programmatically is pain, so we have Outreach and Salesloft. Entering data is too slow - so there's Dooly. Their marketing reporting stinks - so there is Fullcircle and Bizible. They own Pardot, yet somehow still can't top Marketo, Hubspot or Eloqua - which is a pretty amazing fail imho. And the Pardot integration really doesn't add a ton of value over other solutions. But as noted above, this weakness is also a strength because you've got a huge ecosystem.

If I'm starting a company right now, I'd probably go with Hubspot because there is just enormous power in the simplicity of having all of the data for both marketing and sales in a single system. Not that Hubspot doesn't have it's own issues, but reporting has always been a huge problem at every company so if I can't avoid this pain even a little, I'd consider it a big win.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#90

Post by joshribakoff »

JCM9 wrote: post #25

The trouble with Salesforce is that it’s turned into the very thing they set out to replace. It’s big, unwieldy, clunky, and frustrating to use. It’s “SaaS” which was an upgrade on what they replaced initially, but seems like they’re increasingly the ones bound to be “disrupted.”

Retool recently released “modules”, and it made me think the same thing, that this is one step closer to the thing they’re trying to replace.

Resolving merge conflicts in json (which is what defines a retool app) is another area where the benefits of “yes code” become more obvious. “No code” is not something I’m convinced is good. I personally think embracing code (but making it optional) leads to a platform more developers would enjoy

To pick on salesforce a bit, notice how the example of how to define the drop down they are using XML. That’s not “no code”, it’s just a constrained form of coding. Basically any library or framework that embraces code can also offer higher level abstractions just like Retool or Salesforce, without having to have the “no code” part to solve the problem. “No code” is also tangential to being a saas product, these tools could work more like codesandbox than dreamweaver or frontpage, for example.

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