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What's Salesforce? (2019)

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Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#91

I'm just waiting for Salesforce to be disrupted. It has become so large and all encompassing that it is hard to get into for the lower end. Seems like a ripe area for a low end competitor but I haven't seen anything great yet.

Having evaluated dozens of CRMs to replace my company's internally built system, here's my five cents: - Salesforce is slow, expensive after adding add-ons, costly to customize, and visually unappealing. The older and less tech-friendly workers I've surveyed found it painful to use. The same might be said of many Salesforce competitors, including MSFT Dynamics and Netsuite. SugarCRM also has many of the same failings…

SOHO: Small Office / Home Office (I had to look it up)

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#94
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had similar experiences with Netsuite and to a lesser extent Jira. So many layers of configuration options and hooks make everything super extensible, but it comes at a a cost and that cost is usually performance.

Yup, the "enterprise" software space is generally incredibly expensive and buggy and a poor user experience, and there is nothing anyone has ever been able to do about it, as firms want custom code just for them, and so the development/maintenance cost can't be leveraged over millions of customers all getting the same software like the B2C space. So given that the market is 3 orders of magnitude smaller, you have a c…

no, they just do it horribly - there is no reason to tank perf. it's a system built by consultants, for consultants - aka the people that don't know how to actually do it.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#95

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…

I would love to have a chat with you - my company is in the middle of trying to decide on what route to go right now. We’re on Zoho right now and trying to make it work. Available for a chat?

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#96
post #76
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…

honestly if 'fast' is your metric - they'd not be on windows

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#97
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like it could be disrupted by focusing on a subset of the market and growing up into something without the baggage? A calcified org like that can't move fast.

I think Zendesk has taken over the CRM part of Salesforce.

Man, I would use Zendesk just because they have better UI, SF UI is very crowded.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had similar experiences with Netsuite and to a lesser extent Jira. So many layers of configuration options and hooks make everything super extensible, but it comes at a a cost and that cost is usually performance.

Netsuite is stuck 30 years ago at least. So painful and insanely slow. It’s like having dial up again.

Which ERP isn't?

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#100
post #70

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?

As a former employee (and not one acqui-hired) I don't know how you could say they're not a "software company", but I did say something similar during my time that I still stand by which is they're not really a "tech company" in the way Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon/Google/Apple are. They do have a few thousands of in-house devs working on "core" products, and lots of other devs from various large acquisitions (e.g. Heroku) mostly separated from that, there's a good deal of tech and some smart engineers, but I'd still call them a marketing or sales company instead. This distinction is mostly only relevant to programmers in that it describes and predicts an internal mindset for how problems are approached and how budgets are allocated. It's hard to describe without examples I don't really want to get in to, but as an illustration you could make an axis with one end being clearly a tech company like Facebook and the other being not a tech company like Walmart (despite Walmart having some impressive tech/smart engineers). Salesforce sits quite a bit further away from the tech end than people think.
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