Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What's Salesforce? (2019)

retool.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 206 posts

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#121

Post by beachy »

rsj_hn wrote: post #51
vbsteven wrote: post #27

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…

Someone told me way back in time that in the ERP sales process, your two top answers are:

Q: Can your system do X?

A: Yes (doesn't matter what the question is, or that an entire add-on would have to be built that could never be cost justified).

Q: As a company we do things like this, will your system work?

A: Yes, our product works with your process, no matter what it is.

I have observed this to be true. Customers particularly love the second one, so telling someone that they must change their process to work with your super simple un-customizable product can often be a deal-breaker.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#122

Post by tootie »

vbsteven wrote: post #27
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…

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.

Once an enterprise reaches a certain level of scale that amount of complexity is almost unavoidable. Tools like Salesforce and JIRA are great for providing the needed flexibility within guard rails and a shared vernacular.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#123

Post by paulcole »

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #30
lbj wrote: post #14

Salesforce is amazing, in the sense that it truly lives up to its name. Everytime I've been hired into an executive role I've cancelled our Salesforce subscription and productivity has gone up. Its clunky, slow and overly complex if you ask me. But their success cannot be denied, thus they must have an amazing salesforce.

"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?

This is classic new-hire behavior.

Come in, shake things up by changing a big system to put their stamp on things, (no telling if productivity would’ve gone up if nothing had happened, e.g. company was already growing), then bounce to the next executive gig before the honeymoon wears off.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#124

Post by fersarr »

"So he gave Salesforce simple subscription pricing that scaled according to usage. In 1999, it was $50/user per month. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) was born." I would say that the Bloomberg terminal was an earlier example of a SaaS.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#125

Post by timoth3y »

Salesforce is this generation's Lotus Notes.

It's incredibly powerful software that when implemented well, can streamline processes, provide easy access to information, and make teams really efficient.

However, it rarely seems to be implemented well.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#126

Post by spaetzleesser »

vbsteven wrote: post #27
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…

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.

I am going through this right now in a project. A lot of configurations break the database model and can't be really modeled by the database so you end up doing a lot in code which is way slower. Seems we need a type of database that can support these super-flexible customizable data models better. Maybe something where the data model and stored procedures written in a language like C#, Java or JS are understood by the database and optimized.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#127

Post by kube-system »

inthewoods wrote: post #89

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…

The intended difference between contact and lead is that a contact is someone who you have some sort of a business relationship with -- either you are trying to sell them something, you are working with them, or have worked with them in the past. Leads are supposed to be wholly separate from that -- they might be a person, they might be a company, they might just be a rumor.

They way leads is originally intended to be used, is that you'd dump a bunch of garbage into that table -- b2c data from web forms, incomplete records, mass-imported lists from affiliates/events/etc -- and then it would be the job of sales to sort through it to find the records that are of any value. You wouldn't turn them into a contact until it was determined that there was an opportunity to sell them something.

But, leads as a concept really don't make sense in some industries. In many b2b industries, by the time you interact with anyone at a company, it's already well determined who you are and what product you're interested in. This is properly entered as a contact/opportunity.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#128

Post by kradroy »

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…

You're not the intended user of Salesforce. The UIs and flows you use are mostly data entry funnels for the true user: management and executives. You didn't pay for the software; they did. "End-user" satisfaction is low on the product feature list.

Every time your client slows down, somewhere an executive was promoted.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#129

Post by chad_c »

aik wrote: post #103
rsj_hn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Love this comment. My company is rebuilding our EHR software right now to make it more customizable among other things. Know any good resources on making the right architectural and product decisions to protect against or prevent this eventual fate?

Fix the business processes first or you risk codifying bad business processes in the platform.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#130

Post by kube-system »

anyfactor wrote: post #57
lbj wrote: post #14

Salesforce is amazing, in the sense that it truly lives up to its name. Everytime I've been hired into an executive role I've cancelled our Salesforce subscription and productivity has gone up. Its clunky, slow and overly complex if you ask me. But their success cannot be denied, thus they must have an amazing salesforce.

The world of CRM is so weird. I worked with Real Estate Agency (<20 employees) and they were looking into CRMs. After trying out half a dozen CRMs they ended up commissioning a custom one. There is no single CRM out there that is designed for you.

Most CRMs (and especially Salesforce) have seen every business model under the sun and are customizable to fit any business process that you can write an ERD for (i.e. literally anything).

Oftentimes when people think they need a completely custom solution, it's because they're getting caught up on the default naming conventions and/or default sales processes (which are customizable in basically every mainstream CRM).

I would agree that no CRM is designed specifically for anyone -- that's the whole reason why any of the remotely good ones are built with configurability and customization in mind. The out-of-box-experience with most CRMs is always a traditional "product sales" paradigm, simply because that's the most common. You can definitely customize it to work with other types of models though.

Post reply on HN