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What's Salesforce? (2019)

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Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#141

Post by rsj_hn »

beachy wrote: post #121
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…

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 pa…

I worked in a startup in the B2B space a while back, and it's amazing how much big customers can push you around and demand features. The salesguys would promise something and then a week later we'd have the feature in a special patch build for them. I heard Cisco did the same thing, and by the time they got big they had hundreds of special branches for different groups of customers. It was a mess.

Then I worked for a couple of big B2B companies (currently work for one) and it's basically the same thing except that two weeks becomes 6 months. But given how small the market is, you are still doing customization to drive deals. I think a big part of the appeal of developing these frameworks is so your own support staff can add the feature in without changing the core code. I'd imagine this would be the case for all the big B2B players. No way do any of these companies survive just selling off the shelf, and I have some admiration for the support guys that parachute into Penn State or the Foo Department of Bar or Nestle and help manage a whole massive deployment or roll out some brand new feature. They are working nights and weekends and I'm sure there's a lot of good war stories there.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#142

Post by mym1990 »

inthewoods wrote: post #111
mym1990 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether Salesforce intended it or not, the platform has moved far beyond just Sales. In the multitude of cloud products currently available, almost all of them use the Contact object as something other than a lead. So I guess from my point of view, a Lead can always be a Contact that is captured/not, but a Contact may not necessarily be a "lead", in the traditional sense of word anyways. Given that Salesforce is the…

The way I think about it is that Lead is a stage of a Contact, not a separate object.

And that is totally valid, but I’m guessing there were some architectural decisions behind splitting it into its own object in order to give it support from other customizations and processes. But in this case it would be impossible to make everyone happy =/

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#143

Post by sumedh »

fersarr wrote: post #124

"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.

I guess Salesforce was pure software while Bloomberg was hardware plus software.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#144

Post by 40four »

kradroy wrote: post #128
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.

I’m not sure I understand your point? My understanding is the intended users of Salesforce are most certainly the sales team.

And I say this out of experience with using it as part of a sales team at a car dealership I worked at years ago. Every sales person in the company was expected to log all the customers they interacted with, track phone numbers & other info, set reminders to makes sales calls, make notes of what you talked about in said sales calls, et cetera, et cetera. And management was adamant that we did these things.

And for good reason. Sales is a very data driven industry, so to your point yes, it’s great for upper management to be able to track & aggregate all of the data company wide.

It’s been too long since I used it for me to really remember or comment on the performance of the software. But if it’s as bad as the OP is saying that’s a real problem. If you have a whole sales team using this, and performance issues are constantly slowing them down and wasting time, that’s something that should seriously be addressed.

I guess you’re saying though that they just don’t care if the sales team experience sucks? As long as management gets their data?

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#145

Post by dylan604 »

bigfudge wrote: post #83
dylan604 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let's hope it's not something laughably simple as adding indexes to their tables! I mean, that's like something I'd forget and I don't even play a DBA on TV

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#146

Post by rawgabbit »

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…

Salesforce owns Marketo now. My company is using it along with our Salesforce org. Integration is pretty seamless. Although we do have to train users on how to write in Microsoft SQL Server 2016 which is what Marketo is using apparently.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#147

Post by rawgabbit »

Lornedon wrote: post #119

I'm a pretty new Salesforce admin, and so far it has been a horrible experience. Apart from its horribly sluggish user experience, developing for it as also very frustrating. You can't restore backups! You can export your data, but there's no way to import it, because you can't set the object Id or autonumbered fields (like the case number, which gets communicated to the customer). They used to provide an extremely e…

You have to buy a specialized backup product like Ownbackup or Spanner. These in turn, utilize Salesforce's bulk apis. Salesforce does not let anyone touch the underlying databases.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#148

Post by rawgabbit »

Where I work, we are planning to ditch our very expensive web portals and mobile apps to go all-in with Salesforce. We plan to build several Salesforce lightning communities to be used as our front-end portals. Salesforce will convert these communities to mobile apps as part of our contract. Along with the base Salesforce org, we have Marketo (marketing), Service Cloud (customer support), Financial Force (ERP), Tableau (BI), Tableau CRM/Einstein Analytics (analytics), B2B, and Mulesoft. The only products I question are Financial Force, B2B, and Mulesoft as they are very expensive for what you get.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#149

Post by sarora27 »

rawgabbit wrote: post #146
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…

Salesforce owns Marketo now. My company is using it along with our Salesforce org. Integration is pretty seamless. Although we do have to train users on how to write in Microsoft SQL Server 2016 which is what Marketo is using apparently.

It’s actually Adobe that owns Marketo now.

Source: former Adobe employee

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#150

Post by beachy »

rsj_hn wrote: post #141
beachy wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

I worked in a startup in the B2B space a while back, and it's amazing how much big customers can push you around and demand features. The salesguys would promise something and then a week later we'd have the feature in a special patch build for them. I heard Cisco did the same thing, and by the time they got big they had hundreds of special branches for different groups of customers. It was a mess. Then I worked for…

Yes, it takes special fortitude to fight off the demands of your precious new mega-customer, be they a Cisco or whoever. Sometimes they'll really screw your product up if you let them. (Though sometimes also they'll give you those jewels of requirements that you really needed).

It's a sliding scale. You have to pander to them to some degree - there's no choice. But it takes grit to refuse to e.g. branch your core code or otherwise compromise your architectural integrity.

The problems are when the sales team does not appreciate the downstream costs of just letting this one patch in. And when you're a struggling startup, sometimes they're right and the social proof of the deal (and the revenue) make it a good choice to compromise your principles this once.

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