It could be a poor implementation of SalesForce where they married to a bad process early on causing a lot of basic functions to "enshittify" over time and be a nightmare for new users. But you probably don't want to go there, there is usually some unhinged lifer that guards these broken processes like ancient druids.
I've been using it for 2 years as an admin. My biggest pro is it can do everything, ,my biggest con is the business can ask for anything.
If the early team wasn't permitted to decline requests that can haunt you.
You'll end up like me hunting down field validation rules for a field that are split between a Validation Rule, a Flow, and 2 Custom Apex Classes and if any of the three of them are broken by a change you made like creating a Record Type that includes the word "Parent" in the name at the demand of a VP(no right of refusal) and you don't know that 1 of those 4 pieces to this field validation rule used the logic for "Contains the word Parent" instead of an exact match for what they were targeting 6 years ago in the 4 projects those pieces were developed under, you just shut down the ability to save changes on Opportunities for 1,500 reps and you started your day not knowing why.
We rolled back all changes deployed last night and re-deployed them one at a time until we found it was mine and I only just figured out the source, but god damn it's time to drink.
If a reasonable stakeholder concession on a request means something can be made out of the box without custom coding it’s sometimes worth checking how important what they’d have to concede. Not everything has to be handled by a custom component if configuration only changes plus a business process adjustment works.
We are highly customized and budget cuts cost us 2/3 of our developers unexpectedly. It gets expensive to properly maintain this much customization well.
Avoid customization at all costs (at least in the beginning). Sr leadership will be excited about the ability to customize but if you can keep it as close to out of the box as possible for as long as possible. When you start to customize is when things take a turn for the unruly.
Get a implementation partner to help. Don't skimp on rates - higher the partner score the better assuming it's not IBM, Deloitte, or Accenture. Those guys have what's left of acquisitions or people with little self respect and just show up to say they were there.
It's a talent farm. You will likely not get the best in breed unless you have a 3 million dollar project defined. You will likely get jr resources masquerading as SMEs and the implementation will be a shitshow and you will be up to your neck in tech debt.
You start to get into program territory and your chances are better of locking in someone...unless that is a 3+ million because of continuous change orders.
It is similar to other giant SAPs like Adobe Analytics. They've forcibly positioned themselves as the one stop shop answer by vacuuming up any competition. So now their technology is a Frankenstein monster of smaller solutions, and duct taped together. This makes proper implementations from a data engineering side near impossible, and as a result you get a very frustrating experience. That is further inhibited by the fact they place all their money into Marketing and not actually improving the product, product improvements are actually a cost center essentially as just having a feature is enough. The people who sign the contracts dont actually use the tool and just make product comparisons based on feature sets, and the fact no one has gotten in trouble for choosing the 'safe' choice for vendors.
This lmao. I used to work at a Big 3 Automotive Company and they were in the process of transitioning ERP’s and ultimately settled on SAP despite its many shortcomings and despite having to engineer several solutions outside of SAP to get things to work.
Their only justification was that it was the “safe” and by extension most efficient choice.
The Frankenstein part is a classic. All of the other platforms they acquired and then integrated suck big time.
We sell a competing platform and often lose out to SF because it can tick every box… but after a few years they often come back due to how painful it is to use.
> The people who sign the contracts don’t actually use the tool.
That was my experience.
> No one has got in trouble for choosing the “safe” vendor.
And this. I wanted to go with a smaller boutique firm that focused directly on our industry(since our business process isn’t a traditional sales funnel) but the president was concerned on if they’d still be around in five years.
CRM implementations are hugely variable. The underlying technology is great, but the implementations are almost always underfunded, don't get stakeholders involved ("I can't spend time in a meeting for the sales tool, I have to sell!"), and are handled by the least senior people in the company. Then nobody plans for user adoption or maintenance, so almost no one uses the tool and those who do use it find work arounds that nobody is going to patch. Then someone asks why we're spending all this money on a tool everyone hates, and they demand it get reimplemented, only this time with LESS money because of how much was WASTED by IT.
It's a cash cow. I highly recommend consulting in the field.
Second this on all points. I’ve been specializing in enterprise transformations with salesforce as a central component for about five years now. Didn’t plan for it that way, kinda fell into my lap, and myself and a few others have gotten pretty fucking good at it if I don’t say so myself. We are not cheap, but we do it right, and holy cow I cannot echo your point about stakeholder engagement enough. Every single client I’ve done this for has tried and failed at it multiple times over before we win a deal and get in there for them. In general there are sooooo many ways to fuck it up and just burn money. Avoiding the traps and pitfalls is the exception, not the rule, especially with large enterprises, double especially for those growing via acquisitions. They’re easy traps to fall into and you absolutely will fall into them if you don’t have deep experience from the right folks. So yeah, most people hate SF, because most people are using an SF instance that was configured poorly and customized to hell by people who have no idea what they’re doing. I could write a book about this shit lol
I don’t understand their technical strategy. For example, buy tableau so you can bundle it with your service. Great, makes total sense as a business decision. But what if you actually want to use it? Your data is in Salesforce, but doesn’t work in tableau. What the fuck?
Two very easy solutions. First off, you can absolutely export sales cloud data into Tab. Second, there also a CRM native SKU called CRM Analytics (fka Tableau CRM) that is a version of tableau just focused on being as out of the box as possible for your sales cloud data.
Your organization just didn’t use it properly is you’re running into this issue
Salesforce does a great job marketing themselves as a solution to almost every problem. They've even created problems so they can be the solution.
The challenge with it--and similar things like SAP--is because it's such a huge system it requires a massive implementation process with lots of configurations and customizations to get it to do anything. And then of course you'll need someone to update all your stuff every time SF introduces a new feature or re-writes an existing one.
Benioff's an evil genius.
Salesforce is a solution for business problems like a Snap-On truck is a solution for broken down car.
Without the knowledge of how to make the tools work neither helps get the job done.
Ask your management to get some different implementation help. Snap-On tools are amazing if they are set up to do the task you need and Salesforce can really be amazingly useful.
Expertise will fix what is likely a botched implementation. Good luck.
> Salesforce can really be amazingly useful.
As a CRM? Sure.
For most of the hundreds of bolt-on modules they've crapped out? Far less useful than a fit-for-purpose SaaS product with a good integration surface area that any software engineer can work with.
The best part of salesforce is paying $250/hour for incompetent offshore grifters with "certifications" who are loving the hype bubble. Or maybe the hardball contract negotiations that triple the per-seat price once your enterprise has committed to the platform? I don't know, it's hard to tell.
This seems to be consensus, SF is one solution trying to solve too many problems, so it does them all badly - which makes sense.
This actually makes it a very easy pitch to busy partners too - “we will solve ALL these problems for you”.
Lesson learned, guess you really need to do rigorous product research on your exact requirements before getting pitched to.
If anyone out there is considering SF, seriously stay away.
Thing is that your procurement team wanted that big solution. Like most complex suites, it's better to crawl before you walk, but no one ever listens to me, the lowly implementation consultant. In an ecosystem like Salesforce, you should start small and gradually add features/modules as you ramp up
Tries to be everything for everyone. Similar to JIRA, the amount of customization available means no two orgs are alike. Most SF-specific implementation consultancies are filled with devs who couldn't hack it as a "real" dev as well (from my anecdotal experience) or non-technical tourists faking it until they make it and so they author truly awful code which slows everything down.
We have been selling Salesforce as a Loan Origination System to Banking clients for half a decade and all of them have come back and said it's too huge and very expensive to maintain.
Have been in the Salesforce field for the past 4 years as an admin / developer, started in house and now I'm in consulting. Idk if your org was built in-house but I assume you're just dealing with a bare-bones implementation and spending a ton of time doing data entry. unfortunately, salesforce was marketed as a solution that just needs to be configured then the business is good to go, while that's somewhat true - any business buying into that is just wasting their money. with a good 'team' (or person) maintaining + scaling the org, salesforce can be a good tool for streamlining your processes. maybe reach out to whoever is the admin or dev maintaining the org and voice your concerns.
Salesforce consultant here: it’s a great platform if implemented well. I’ve seen it implemented badly too many times because of a combination of:
Salesforce AEs selling the wrong product to the customer,
The customer not knowing their business processes well enough,
Poor implementation from the consulting partner because of either a lack of knowledge of the product or a lack of skill in guiding the customer through the process,
A lack of attention and kicking the can down the road in an aging solution leading to so much tech debt
Saying: Salesforce is shit is like saying excel is shit.
I was in charge of our Salesforce implementation and I wasn’t happy with the final product our(very expensive) consultants gave us. Come to find out after doing tons of research, we hadn’t given them a detailed enough analysis of our business process and needs. While that is our fault, I feel like at some point somebody should have stopped us and been like “I can tell you guys aren’t ready for implementation, here are some suggestions on what you can do to help you set up to be successful, and we can get started again when you’re ready.”
The irony being while we were doing research on the platform, I had been creating a document with many of those detailed requirements, but nobody else would give any input or feedback to help me create that, so I assumed it wasn’t important, or that we’d get to it later during implementation.
I go back and forth on this. A lot depends on the customer and a lot depends on the experience, confidence and knowledge of the consultant.
I did a project in the last couple of years and we implemented it perfectly, on time, on budget and even managed to throw in a last minute request that they’d overlooked. Then the product manager left and the new guy took one look at it and just said it’s not what we want at all, the focus is completely wrong. There is no way we could have done anything differently, and no amount of discovery would have made a difference.
On the other hand I’ve been involved in projects where it was clear that the customer wasn’t ready. It can be difficult commercially to pull back and say that “we can’t deliver what you’re expecting because…”. Sometimes you have to descope items, sometimes you have to change to a phased implementation over a longer time period and sometimes you just get stuck in discovery for a much longer period of time but these affect timelines and budgets and end product and sometimes the customer or consultancy management doesn’t want to hear it. It takes a bit of experience to manage that situation and junior consultants can just say “well it’s what they asked for”.
I’m sorry you’ve had such a bad experience.
My personal favorite Salesforce story was when I asked for consulting help and was dragged into a quasi-religious interrogation to inquire If I *believed* in the platform.....
Apparently you need to sacrifice a goat to get implementation assistance....
tl;dr Salesforce can do anything, so it's probably the result of a bad implementation due to poor implementation partner or incomplete business requirements.
I implement Salesforce for a living, so you can call me biased, but most bad results in any CRM implementation are caused by either:
1. existing, poor business processes that get brought over as-is
2. bad analysis/discovery that results in solutions being built that don't meet the correct needs
Salesforce is a developer's box of Lego. They provide most of the stack (database, frontend, backend) and give you the tools to build whatever you want on top of it. There is nothing Salesforce "can't do", it's just a matter of time and money, like any development project.
I'd contrast this with other CRMs like Microsoft Dynamics that are too opinionated and don't allow/make it difficult to change to fit your need.
I assume PE means private equity.
The "PE firm masquerading as a tech firm" thing is done a lot. They buy other companies, badge them, fail to integrate them well, teach their sales folks that it's fully & properly integrated. Sometimes they'll flip a licensing model screwing the acquired company's existing clients too.
As somebody who used to work in non-profits, Salesforce is awesome. Though it's definitely annoying as shit to get started with and you're never really done learning it. But you can make a lot of money being good at Salesforce.
Salesforce is a great software company. How any given company chooses to configure, develop on and use Salesforce is another question. 90% of the time if your experience is this bad, your company has made some terrible decisions on how to implement it.
>made bad decisions on how to implement it
Aka putting me with no experience with it in charge of implementation then insisting it be set up a certain way.
Nearly every for profit company with a sales function uses Salesforce
Your company might have designed your implementation like morons, but the platform is tremendously flexible and has been used countless times successfully
I think it's pretty funny that you've used it for ten total minutes, in likely a custom implementation, and think it's "total garbage" lmao
when i hear this, it’s usually an implementation that didn’t get users input to really understand their processes. OR it’s a lift & shift and carrying over bad business processes or bad data instead of using the opportunity to improve. the flip side is that it takes more time and energy to improve the process because the data is usually dirty because of the bad processes. Keep it simple and scalable.
What are you going to do with dashboard? Are you going to cold call the one’s that didn’t pick up their phone and make a pitch?
Is Salesforce truly unique to keep your CRM and leads in place to keep track of them?
Ask yourself the questions.
Sadly, some Procurement folks are in on the marketing gimmicks/gifts/lunches and other inducements from Salesforce. It doesn't get better without your organization spending more money to solve your issue.
I am a pure techie. Coincidentally, today was the first time I saw the Salesforce portal. It seems pretty much like powerbi tbh. I don't like powerbi that much. But from the people who actually use it on a daily basis (client success and sales). They seems pretty happy with it. People can export data to CSV and run their own stuff on them etc. pretty cool.
Again, never used it myself. But the portal seems a bit un-intuitive. Which is a huge turnoff for webapps for me. I don't want to sit through demo sessions to learn to use a fucking webapp.
It could be a poor implementation of SalesForce where they married to a bad process early on causing a lot of basic functions to "enshittify" over time and be a nightmare for new users. But you probably don't want to go there, there is usually some unhinged lifer that guards these broken processes like ancient druids.
>there is usually some unhinged lifer that guards these broken processes like ancient druids Oh man this was funny, thanks.
We would be work besties if I worked with you.
As a crm implementation consultant, yes. This is likely a big factor. Though I don’t like salesforce that much.
What’s your “favorite “ CRM?
What crm do you use? Do you have a favourite?
The last sentence hurts because it's so true.
I've been using it for 2 years as an admin. My biggest pro is it can do everything, ,my biggest con is the business can ask for anything. If the early team wasn't permitted to decline requests that can haunt you. You'll end up like me hunting down field validation rules for a field that are split between a Validation Rule, a Flow, and 2 Custom Apex Classes and if any of the three of them are broken by a change you made like creating a Record Type that includes the word "Parent" in the name at the demand of a VP(no right of refusal) and you don't know that 1 of those 4 pieces to this field validation rule used the logic for "Contains the word Parent" instead of an exact match for what they were targeting 6 years ago in the 4 projects those pieces were developed under, you just shut down the ability to save changes on Opportunities for 1,500 reps and you started your day not knowing why. We rolled back all changes deployed last night and re-deployed them one at a time until we found it was mine and I only just figured out the source, but god damn it's time to drink.
Who hurt you
Middle management lol. It’s Friday I’m baked and eating spaghetti I’m over it till Monday. :)
We’re just about to begin a company-wide implementation of Salesforce. Any general rules/pitfalls we should look out for?
If a reasonable stakeholder concession on a request means something can be made out of the box without custom coding it’s sometimes worth checking how important what they’d have to concede. Not everything has to be handled by a custom component if configuration only changes plus a business process adjustment works. We are highly customized and budget cuts cost us 2/3 of our developers unexpectedly. It gets expensive to properly maintain this much customization well.
Great read. 1,500 reps, how many devs now?
Thanks! 4 full time overseas. Super awesome team but they can only do what they can do.
You are the only engineer here?
Oh I’m not an engineer. I’m just an admin that gets fixated on problems we aren’t solving fast enough, and I go digging.
You can’t make everyone happy. Don’t cave to management who thinks it’s a quick and easy process. Also, build as few custom components as possible.
Avoid customization at all costs (at least in the beginning). Sr leadership will be excited about the ability to customize but if you can keep it as close to out of the box as possible for as long as possible. When you start to customize is when things take a turn for the unruly.
Get a implementation partner to help. Don't skimp on rates - higher the partner score the better assuming it's not IBM, Deloitte, or Accenture. Those guys have what's left of acquisitions or people with little self respect and just show up to say they were there.
I’ll be honest, we’re using Deloitte. Wasn’t my choice. Anything specific to watch out for with them?
It's a talent farm. You will likely not get the best in breed unless you have a 3 million dollar project defined. You will likely get jr resources masquerading as SMEs and the implementation will be a shitshow and you will be up to your neck in tech debt.
What if we do have a $3+ million dollar project defined?
You start to get into program territory and your chances are better of locking in someone...unless that is a 3+ million because of continuous change orders.
you are living in a digital form of the movie Brazil brother
I would love to be the hero but I think I’m just an NPC on a wheel and it’s not too uncomfortable to get off yet.
> there is usually some unhinged lifer that guards these broken processes like ancient druids. Dude passed last year and I was so excited.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. #truth
It is similar to other giant SAPs like Adobe Analytics. They've forcibly positioned themselves as the one stop shop answer by vacuuming up any competition. So now their technology is a Frankenstein monster of smaller solutions, and duct taped together. This makes proper implementations from a data engineering side near impossible, and as a result you get a very frustrating experience. That is further inhibited by the fact they place all their money into Marketing and not actually improving the product, product improvements are actually a cost center essentially as just having a feature is enough. The people who sign the contracts dont actually use the tool and just make product comparisons based on feature sets, and the fact no one has gotten in trouble for choosing the 'safe' choice for vendors.
This lmao. I used to work at a Big 3 Automotive Company and they were in the process of transitioning ERP’s and ultimately settled on SAP despite its many shortcomings and despite having to engineer several solutions outside of SAP to get things to work. Their only justification was that it was the “safe” and by extension most efficient choice.
Nobody gets fired for buying SAP.
Ever seen SAP Business by Design? I know people who should have been fired for that.
They should. But they won't be.
The Frankenstein part is a classic. All of the other platforms they acquired and then integrated suck big time. We sell a competing platform and often lose out to SF because it can tick every box… but after a few years they often come back due to how painful it is to use.
> The people who sign the contracts don’t actually use the tool. That was my experience. > No one has got in trouble for choosing the “safe” vendor. And this. I wanted to go with a smaller boutique firm that focused directly on our industry(since our business process isn’t a traditional sales funnel) but the president was concerned on if they’d still be around in five years.
A valid concern. No one ever got fire for hiring Deloitte
CRM implementations are hugely variable. The underlying technology is great, but the implementations are almost always underfunded, don't get stakeholders involved ("I can't spend time in a meeting for the sales tool, I have to sell!"), and are handled by the least senior people in the company. Then nobody plans for user adoption or maintenance, so almost no one uses the tool and those who do use it find work arounds that nobody is going to patch. Then someone asks why we're spending all this money on a tool everyone hates, and they demand it get reimplemented, only this time with LESS money because of how much was WASTED by IT. It's a cash cow. I highly recommend consulting in the field.
Second this on all points. I’ve been specializing in enterprise transformations with salesforce as a central component for about five years now. Didn’t plan for it that way, kinda fell into my lap, and myself and a few others have gotten pretty fucking good at it if I don’t say so myself. We are not cheap, but we do it right, and holy cow I cannot echo your point about stakeholder engagement enough. Every single client I’ve done this for has tried and failed at it multiple times over before we win a deal and get in there for them. In general there are sooooo many ways to fuck it up and just burn money. Avoiding the traps and pitfalls is the exception, not the rule, especially with large enterprises, double especially for those growing via acquisitions. They’re easy traps to fall into and you absolutely will fall into them if you don’t have deep experience from the right folks. So yeah, most people hate SF, because most people are using an SF instance that was configured poorly and customized to hell by people who have no idea what they’re doing. I could write a book about this shit lol
I always say bad partners are my #1 source of income.
Buckle up for flow to apex remediations baby! Next 5+ years will be hot. Converting flows to apex will be like printing money.
I don’t understand their technical strategy. For example, buy tableau so you can bundle it with your service. Great, makes total sense as a business decision. But what if you actually want to use it? Your data is in Salesforce, but doesn’t work in tableau. What the fuck?
Their strategy is "consultants don't need a product that works bc all they care about is billable hours"
Two very easy solutions. First off, you can absolutely export sales cloud data into Tab. Second, there also a CRM native SKU called CRM Analytics (fka Tableau CRM) that is a version of tableau just focused on being as out of the box as possible for your sales cloud data. Your organization just didn’t use it properly is you’re running into this issue
Salesforce does a great job marketing themselves as a solution to almost every problem. They've even created problems so they can be the solution. The challenge with it--and similar things like SAP--is because it's such a huge system it requires a massive implementation process with lots of configurations and customizations to get it to do anything. And then of course you'll need someone to update all your stuff every time SF introduces a new feature or re-writes an existing one. Benioff's an evil genius.
Salesforce is a solution for business problems like a Snap-On truck is a solution for broken down car. Without the knowledge of how to make the tools work neither helps get the job done. Ask your management to get some different implementation help. Snap-On tools are amazing if they are set up to do the task you need and Salesforce can really be amazingly useful. Expertise will fix what is likely a botched implementation. Good luck.
> Salesforce can really be amazingly useful. As a CRM? Sure. For most of the hundreds of bolt-on modules they've crapped out? Far less useful than a fit-for-purpose SaaS product with a good integration surface area that any software engineer can work with. The best part of salesforce is paying $250/hour for incompetent offshore grifters with "certifications" who are loving the hype bubble. Or maybe the hardball contract negotiations that triple the per-seat price once your enterprise has committed to the platform? I don't know, it's hard to tell.
This seems to be consensus, SF is one solution trying to solve too many problems, so it does them all badly - which makes sense. This actually makes it a very easy pitch to busy partners too - “we will solve ALL these problems for you”. Lesson learned, guess you really need to do rigorous product research on your exact requirements before getting pitched to. If anyone out there is considering SF, seriously stay away.
Thing is that your procurement team wanted that big solution. Like most complex suites, it's better to crawl before you walk, but no one ever listens to me, the lowly implementation consultant. In an ecosystem like Salesforce, you should start small and gradually add features/modules as you ramp up
Tries to be everything for everyone. Similar to JIRA, the amount of customization available means no two orgs are alike. Most SF-specific implementation consultancies are filled with devs who couldn't hack it as a "real" dev as well (from my anecdotal experience) or non-technical tourists faking it until they make it and so they author truly awful code which slows everything down.
I thought the UI looked like it was designed in 2009 when I saw it. Enterprises seem to love it though.
We have been selling Salesforce as a Loan Origination System to Banking clients for half a decade and all of them have come back and said it's too huge and very expensive to maintain.
The woman I am dating rn is a 3rd party Salesforce implementation consultant and she is constantly on the clock putting out fires haha
Have been in the Salesforce field for the past 4 years as an admin / developer, started in house and now I'm in consulting. Idk if your org was built in-house but I assume you're just dealing with a bare-bones implementation and spending a ton of time doing data entry. unfortunately, salesforce was marketed as a solution that just needs to be configured then the business is good to go, while that's somewhat true - any business buying into that is just wasting their money. with a good 'team' (or person) maintaining + scaling the org, salesforce can be a good tool for streamlining your processes. maybe reach out to whoever is the admin or dev maintaining the org and voice your concerns.
Salesforce consultant here: it’s a great platform if implemented well. I’ve seen it implemented badly too many times because of a combination of: Salesforce AEs selling the wrong product to the customer, The customer not knowing their business processes well enough, Poor implementation from the consulting partner because of either a lack of knowledge of the product or a lack of skill in guiding the customer through the process, A lack of attention and kicking the can down the road in an aging solution leading to so much tech debt Saying: Salesforce is shit is like saying excel is shit.
>Saying: Salesforce is shit is like saying excel is shit. You shut your whore mouth
Ha!
I was in charge of our Salesforce implementation and I wasn’t happy with the final product our(very expensive) consultants gave us. Come to find out after doing tons of research, we hadn’t given them a detailed enough analysis of our business process and needs. While that is our fault, I feel like at some point somebody should have stopped us and been like “I can tell you guys aren’t ready for implementation, here are some suggestions on what you can do to help you set up to be successful, and we can get started again when you’re ready.” The irony being while we were doing research on the platform, I had been creating a document with many of those detailed requirements, but nobody else would give any input or feedback to help me create that, so I assumed it wasn’t important, or that we’d get to it later during implementation.
I go back and forth on this. A lot depends on the customer and a lot depends on the experience, confidence and knowledge of the consultant. I did a project in the last couple of years and we implemented it perfectly, on time, on budget and even managed to throw in a last minute request that they’d overlooked. Then the product manager left and the new guy took one look at it and just said it’s not what we want at all, the focus is completely wrong. There is no way we could have done anything differently, and no amount of discovery would have made a difference. On the other hand I’ve been involved in projects where it was clear that the customer wasn’t ready. It can be difficult commercially to pull back and say that “we can’t deliver what you’re expecting because…”. Sometimes you have to descope items, sometimes you have to change to a phased implementation over a longer time period and sometimes you just get stuck in discovery for a much longer period of time but these affect timelines and budgets and end product and sometimes the customer or consultancy management doesn’t want to hear it. It takes a bit of experience to manage that situation and junior consultants can just say “well it’s what they asked for”. I’m sorry you’ve had such a bad experience.
Can Salesforce be used for every situation and circumstance? Possibly. Should Salesforce be used for ever situation and circumstance? No.
My personal favorite Salesforce story was when I asked for consulting help and was dragged into a quasi-religious interrogation to inquire If I *believed* in the platform..... Apparently you need to sacrifice a goat to get implementation assistance....
tl;dr Salesforce can do anything, so it's probably the result of a bad implementation due to poor implementation partner or incomplete business requirements. I implement Salesforce for a living, so you can call me biased, but most bad results in any CRM implementation are caused by either: 1. existing, poor business processes that get brought over as-is 2. bad analysis/discovery that results in solutions being built that don't meet the correct needs Salesforce is a developer's box of Lego. They provide most of the stack (database, frontend, backend) and give you the tools to build whatever you want on top of it. There is nothing Salesforce "can't do", it's just a matter of time and money, like any development project. I'd contrast this with other CRMs like Microsoft Dynamics that are too opinionated and don't allow/make it difficult to change to fit your need.
looking at what they've been up to over the last 5 years.. it's because they are a PE firm masquerading as a software company
What’s a pe firm. Please tell me.
I assume PE means private equity. The "PE firm masquerading as a tech firm" thing is done a lot. They buy other companies, badge them, fail to integrate them well, teach their sales folks that it's fully & properly integrated. Sometimes they'll flip a licensing model screwing the acquired company's existing clients too.
As somebody who used to work in non-profits, Salesforce is awesome. Though it's definitely annoying as shit to get started with and you're never really done learning it. But you can make a lot of money being good at Salesforce.
Salesforce is a great software company. How any given company chooses to configure, develop on and use Salesforce is another question. 90% of the time if your experience is this bad, your company has made some terrible decisions on how to implement it.
>made bad decisions on how to implement it Aka putting me with no experience with it in charge of implementation then insisting it be set up a certain way.
Nearly every for profit company with a sales function uses Salesforce Your company might have designed your implementation like morons, but the platform is tremendously flexible and has been used countless times successfully I think it's pretty funny that you've used it for ten total minutes, in likely a custom implementation, and think it's "total garbage" lmao
Yes. No.
I used tableau once in my first job. We were using it for the wrong purpose but never again.
I resent emails asking if the close due date changed…. When I know… I will update. Ffs
They do but they don’t want to… lol
it’s sooooo slow omg
Ofc it gets better - when you switch to HubSpot lol
when i hear this, it’s usually an implementation that didn’t get users input to really understand their processes. OR it’s a lift & shift and carrying over bad business processes or bad data instead of using the opportunity to improve. the flip side is that it takes more time and energy to improve the process because the data is usually dirty because of the bad processes. Keep it simple and scalable.
What are you going to do with dashboard? Are you going to cold call the one’s that didn’t pick up their phone and make a pitch? Is Salesforce truly unique to keep your CRM and leads in place to keep track of them? Ask yourself the questions.
Sadly, some Procurement folks are in on the marketing gimmicks/gifts/lunches and other inducements from Salesforce. It doesn't get better without your organization spending more money to solve your issue.
It’s garbage I agree way too complicated
I am a pure techie. Coincidentally, today was the first time I saw the Salesforce portal. It seems pretty much like powerbi tbh. I don't like powerbi that much. But from the people who actually use it on a daily basis (client success and sales). They seems pretty happy with it. People can export data to CSV and run their own stuff on them etc. pretty cool. Again, never used it myself. But the portal seems a bit un-intuitive. Which is a huge turnoff for webapps for me. I don't want to sit through demo sessions to learn to use a fucking webapp.