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What's Salesforce? (2019)

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Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#151

Post by kube-system »

inthewoods wrote: post #137
kube-system wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Oh I get it. But as I said in another response below, what you're describing is the stage of a contact, not separate objects (in my opinion). You could just as easily have a single object but where the status was "lead" (no company name needed) and "contact" where you add the company information and the ability to add them to an opportunity.

You’re right, it could be done that way, but for the orgs that do use leads, it would mean a lot of repetitive filtering on pretty much every business process. The difference in functional concept between a lead and a contact are great enough that processes (both software and human) between the two rarely overlap. A foreign key does all of this for free. For this reason, I think they made the right choice, especially since the orgs that do not like the concept of leads can just simply not use them.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#152

Post by thrav »

rawgabbit wrote: post #148

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), Table…

FinancialForce is an entirely different company pretending to be part of Salesforce.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#153

Post by ineedasername »

eloisant wrote: post #112
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…

Honestly most businesses think they need a lot of customization because they think they're oh-so-special, but in fact something like 1) would work great for them. I know, I've worked in consulting and built software for companies who would have been better off with an off-the-shelf solution.

Unless there is a product designed for the specific needs of their industry, then the 80% of their needs covered by a generic system still means 20% of their needs are in fact oh-so-special

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#154

Post by breput »

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.

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

This is geek poetry.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#155

Post by bmiller2 »

unixhero wrote: post #58
stevebmark wrote: post #3

This is a good article and history is Salesforce. Another shorter developer focused perspective: Salesforce is a relational database editor. You can create tables, columns, and relationships, app in a nice UI without writing code. You get automatic views and edit forms for records in the tables. And the whole thing is built on a platform where you can write custom sandboxed code to manipulate those records, or expose…

I want to add. Not 100% non transferrable. I was able to deliver a project on Service Now without any Service Now training, using my Salesforce architecture background.

Service Now is the bane of my existence. Pray tell if the behind-the-scenes code base is as bad as the experience.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#156

Post by rtpg »

Salesforce is uniquely amazing in that its development and extension environment is extremely close to the dreams of Smalltalk developers and the like. Loads of extensibility and introspection possible on basically every view of your system.

Yeah it’s slow but honestly you’re spending most of your time looking at the data and writing it up, the slowness doesn’t matter that much in the long run imo.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#157

Post by fellowniusmonk »

kube-system wrote: post #127
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 b…

Agree. I've built CRM's for multiple industries now, starting prior to any interaction with salesforce.

There are many reasons to keep leads out of contacts, messy imports and the unstructured nature of what a "lead" can be are big ones, traceability, unauthenticated data capture issues and ease in reporting are a few others.

It's always less of a kludge to have a system that keeps them separate but lets you seamlessly convert or associate a lead object into a contact object, when it makes sense (for lead objects that have sufficient similarity to a contact), and has an option to bypass the lead table and create a contact directly.

In my experience trying to shoe horn into a _contact only_ abstraction creates more problems because the abstraction is too simplistic or even flat incorrect for many businesses.

edit: From a sales agent "user" perspective you do often want to hide these abstractions from the UI depending on the industry and/or lead type, too many systems force their users into unnecessary duplication of effort.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#158

Post by rvanmil »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #133
rvanmil wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, it’s their business priorities which result in engineering that leads to bad software. What I’m saying is you can choose to not buy into one of those uber-programmable enterprise platforms and instead (let someone) build fast and user friendly specific software just for your needs. All of the customization and dynamic crap can go out of the window that way, which will allow engineers to make things fast and…

>What I’m saying is you can choose to not buy into one of those uber-programmable enterprise platforms and instead (let someone) build fast and user friendly specific software just for your needs. the problem is not everyone can afford a IT dept with software programmers that can build out custom software. If IT is not their core most companies seek out software that is already out there with somewhat decent reputati…

> the problem is not everyone can afford (a IT dept with) software programmers that can build out custom software.

Agreed, though isn't this often just a problem at a strategic level? C-level doesn't understand digital transformation, so there is no strategy and no budget, or they think they can just buy it with platforms like Salesforce.

Having custom software built is only getting cheaper because our development tools are getting more and more powerful and managed cloud infrastructure is extremely compelling due to removing most of the ops from devops and being cheap at the same time, so costs could hardly be an argument anymore, right?

But yeah, there's always the risk of hiring a firm that has a quality problem, or uses terrible tools to build software in the first place (which is what I was referring to with the joke in my first comment in this thread).

Enterprise software is a minefield, how can we fix that? :)

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#159

Post by e3bc54b2 »

40four wrote: post #144
kradroy wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> intended users of Salesforce are most certainly the sales team.

Alas, intended users are seldom the ones writing checks. As the old saying goes, decision to go with Oracle happens on golf course, not meeting room.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#160

Post by ed_elliott_asc »

rvanmil wrote: post #101
rsj_hn wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree, it’s their business priorities which result in engineering that leads to bad software. What I’m saying is you can choose to not buy into one of those uber-programmable enterprise platforms and instead (let someone) build fast and user friendly specific software just for your needs. All of the customization and dynamic crap can go out of the window that way, which will allow engineers to make things fast and…

Salesforce was brought in by many sales teams, initially, because the internal systems were too slow to write and the sales teams could just setup salesforce and get going!
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