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What's Salesforce? (2019)

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Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#51

Post by rsj_hn »

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.

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 choice of adding 2 orders of magntitude to the cost, and decreasing quality by 1 order of magnitude, or some other combination of this. That leaves you with a few options:

1. Don't allow businesses to customize at all, make them fit to you. That can work with something like ADP, but little else. A lot of the cool B2B startups think they can displace incumbents by just building cool, fast software, and then they are perplexed why they can't gain marketshare when every other customer has some bespoke use case they don't support.

2. Build a general uber-programmable platform that businesses can customize themselves -- now you are in the "slow", "poor user experience" territory but at least it works and is cheaper than option 3

3. Hire consultants to write bespoke products from scratch for each business. That's the old IBM Services model.

So if your baseline is Microsoft Office, then the performance/user experience of your favorite online B2B platform is going to be terrible. But if your baseline is IBM Services, then it's a godsend.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#52

Post by paulcole »

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

How many times are we talking about here, like 2 or 20? And why did you end up leaving those roles?

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#53

Post by truetraveller »

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.

That was funny!

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#54

Post by nitwit005 »

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…

A lot of the value is the access control part of that. You can set up a role hierarchy and/or groups and only see the records you're supposed to have access to when you query. Plus configuration of what fields different user types have access to.

The downside of that is it means every query, no matter how simple, is a join against multiple internal tables to enforce those rules.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#56

Post by 1123581321 »

hubspotthrow wrote: post #22
leeoniya wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in my experience, every vendor we looked at who competes with salesforce is not interested in your business unless they are allowed to take over your entire backoffice. for example, we only wanted it for the CRM and order ingestion via manual entry & API, and that was okay, while other vendors insisted on also taking over our inventory management, invoicing, fulfillment, etc, rather than allowing us to simply integra…

Give Hubspot a gander. We want to handle your entire front office. But we're also perfectly content just handling customer data and gdpr requests for you.

I will say that I feel better about our clients underusing a $2500/quarter HubSpot account than I do about our clients wasting $100k+ on Salesforce Pardot.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#57

Post by anyfactor »

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.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#58

Post by unixhero »

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.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#59

Post by Spooky23 »

fizx wrote: post #49

Workday is also a CRUD app-builder, but for HR professionals. What other typical company functions have this sort of provider? Conversely, what other company functions need this sort of provider?

Every function. Shipping/receiving, field service, mailing, facility management.

Cruddy apps like Servicenow and Salesforce are goldmines for process management. All you need to do is be marginally better than Oracle/etc.

Re: What's Salesforce? (2019)

#60

Post by iratewizard »

t0mas88 wrote: post #43
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…

It's slow and the UI is stuck in 1999 unless you pay extra for what they sell as the more modern UI, which takes you from 20+ years behind to only like 5 years outdated.

Lighting is free. The only time you have to pay more is to get custom pieces of your system built in classic rebuilt. In what ways are lightning's UI "5 years outdated?"
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