18 ms·

What's Salesforce?

619 points by dvdhsu 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
benbristow 7y ago
Nice article. Always wondered what SalesForce actually was and why it's so popular. Now I know.
emers0n 7y ago
Awesome post! Next up -- what's MuleSoft? That's another big one where I'm not really sure what problems they're really solving.
- ecnahc515 7y ago
  Sorta like "If this, then that", but made for the enterprise uses. It's an enterprise service bus.
- niftich 7y ago
  In the Mule ecosystem, you use a drag-and-drop flow builder of canned components to build flows that typically ingest events, do something to them, and possibly write someplace. Almost anywhere, you can also inject your custom code. You deploy these flows in their engine, where they're kept alive. You can self-host the engine, but they also offer it in their cloud. Then you can choose to frontend it with a HTTP API that you build in their builder, and choose to put it in your organization's private store, or the public store for others to use. There's management dashboards too. There's hundreds of other products or product combinations that could be described in the same sort of vague language, but MuleSoft ships and supports a particular environment and a particular collection of tools that does it pretty well. Ultimately, the goal of all of these is the reduction of the effort around every other piece besides the parts that are custom to your unique circumstances.
- newsoul2019 7y ago
  I believe they are in EAI - Enterprise Application Integration space. Broadly speaking this is a "swiss army knife", if you want to take a CSV file from an FTP site and load it into a relational database, then do queries off a table and POST JSON to a webhook, It can do any of those things.
- ylbss 7y ago
  Depends on what part of Mulesoft your talking about. Traditionally it offered an Enterprise Service Bus solution but has been moving to an interesting collaborative API Management/Development solution over the past couple years. They really sell the idea of using an API network to hook up your integrations and then use Mulesoft's product to manage it.
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  Corporate Zapier in a nutshell, just much more powerful.
dvdhsu 7y ago
Hi, I'm one of the authors of the post. As an engineer, I've always wondered what Salesforce was. It seemed like a clunky, expensive piece of legacy software that the "business people" always used. Since starting a SaaS company myself (Retool; https://tryretool.com https://tryretool.com), I now understand a lot more, hah. Salesforce, basically, is the source of truth for your customer, for the business-side of things (sales, marketing, operations, etc.). So the stuff we would typically store in our databases (company name, users, how much they pay us, etc.) is stored inside of Salesforce. And Salesforce gives you a bunch of views that a typical company would need — views to update the close date of a contract, the value of a contract, to take notes on a call, etc. The cool thing about Salesforce is how customizable it is — you can change the database models (e.g. "add a column to the `Leads` table"), as well as change the front-ends themselves (e.g. "I want to display this data in this view"). I've previously used a lot of SaaS (e.g. Slack, Intercom, etc.) and it's always frustrating because I can't customize the views (e.g. in Slack, maybe I want to add a button to mute + clear all the notifications for this channel). Salesforce lets you customize all that, which, frankly, is really cool. To some extent, Salesforce is like a new way of programming. Instead of writing code, you let non-technical people change models and UIs (and to some extent, controllers). Happy to answer any questions! If you all think the essay could be improved in any way, LMK too :) (Edit: added blurb about SFDC being a new way of programming, in response to a comment downstream.)
- yomansat 7y ago
  Retool is a great idea! Really love the concept and well done for spotting the common repetitive part of generating internal tools!
- jiveturkey 7y ago
  You didn't stress the most important part well enough: > But when you bolt on other apps and 3rd-party APIs, it gets close to programming without code: a new way to build software. SFDC is worth $100B not because it's a CRM. It's worth that much because it's a CRM platform. The "what it does" is not nearly as important as the ecosystem/platform aspect of it. "What it does" has no moat. Platforms have a moat. That's the value of SFDC in a nutshell. You could help highlight this by drawing attention to it earlier, and also by boldfacing the sentence just before my quote where you say "platform".
te_chris 7y ago
I was a sceptic, but it’s actually great. The amount of powerful stuff you can do with it, with process builder, platform events and flows, e.g. is incredible. Still super annoying in a lot of ways, but it doesn’t really make any sense to manually build out that stuff, to me anyway
nwatson 7y ago
I have extended family (two brothers, two nieces, one niece's husband, one nephew) all into Salesforce.com/SFDC development. Four of them successfully ran a SFDC consulting business for several years with many good clients and lots of junior and senior developers and architects (I joined briefly after leaving SF Bay Area but decided I should go back to building products). The business ran into family-business-squabble problems between two of the principals and dissolved ... however they all stayed in the SFDC game and have done very well, making significantly more (even considering they're contracting) on long-term stable contracts than their software experience would net them at established SF Bay Area companies ... and they all live in much lower cost-of-living areas. I don't think the SFDC game will go away any time soon, either. There are probably some interesting SFDC development niches, but I would have struggled to maintain interest.
- stallmanite 7y ago
  As an outsider these descriptions sound like Avon or Mary Kay or Amway.
  - mattmanser 7y ago
    Salesforce is awful to develop in. The worst designed language, terrible tools, poor feedback, inscrutable gotchas. An abhorrent mix of the worst parts of Java with the worst parts of SQL. Everything is utterly rubbish, there is absolutely nothing positive about it. But it's great to put your sales process on for a slightly techy person. Sort of the modern equivalent of access. Needless to say, that means no developer wants to touch it with a bargepole. So if you're prepared to put up with all that, you can make a lot of money doing ridiculously simple things.
  - ziziyO 7y ago
    It's cult-y for sure. The money is there for the taking, much in the way a COBOL programmer can name their price.
ABeeSea 7y ago
In my experience, Salesforce is replacing emailed excel files and “excel as a database” en masse. It’s kind of interesting to watch these migration of business processes from manual excel to manual salesforce. And it’s not just sales people.
incomplete 7y ago
wow, great article! i work for a university and our admin group needs a "killer app" for tracking students, researchers, faculty, industry partners, events, and a bunch of other little things... i've been doing my best to try and explain to them what SF is capable of but it's been tricky as i don't have any first-hand experience w/it. i've forwarded the article off to them and the entire group had a collective "ah-ha!" moment. thanks for putting this together. :)
- rchaud 7y ago
  When I was applying to grad schools in 2016, the online applications all sat on top of a Salesforce build. It's clunky to build on for sure, but there has to be trade-offs when you're using a pre-designed "lego blocks" type system to build an app. You can sign up for a free SF developer account, which gives you access to a dummy account that can support 2 users. Go to Salesforce Trailhead, their training site and look at the modules to figure out which one might help you create a prototype you can use as a proof of concept for your team.
  - incomplete 7y ago
    dope. thanks, i'll do that now.
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  We came second pitching Salesforce to a uni in the UK,which was supposed to cover all these aspects you mentioned.If you interested,drop me a message,I can guide you towards the right direction.The company we lost against did about 400 implementations for universities and schools.
chasd00 7y ago
It should be called "everythingforce" instead of Salesforce. The features have grown so wide and deep that even CRM is just a small sliver of what Salesforce is. It has its own server side language ( APEX ), a front end framework (Lightning), a community builder/site hosting thingy ( Community Cloud ), and "custom objects" and relationships (think a user defined schema ). If you wanted to you could use Salesforce as a hosting platform for any web application.
- pssdbt 7y ago
  Yep, and the problem with that in my experience is it's enough rope for companies to hang themselves with. I've seen multiple cases of using Salesforce for things/applications for things that belong outside of it. I'm only a little sour about it :D
  - jbf1001 7y ago
    I am in the process of dealing with that myself. In my case, the leadership of our company was convinced by a consulting firm that Salesforce is capable of anything, including acting as IaaS for a huge SaaS application we are building. The result being that we have to make very expensive work arounds for API call limits. The hard part about this is that it might function eventually, so "there is no reason to switch until we KNOW for sure". Salesforce can do a lot, but it can NOT do IaaS. Use AWS, GCP, or literally anything else if you want a 100% customizable autoscaling application with in depth monitoring. EDIT: Pardon my cry for help, but if anyone has any business targeted material to present these ideas to company presidents who don't have a clue in the world, I implore you to point me to it.
    - mntmoss 7y ago
      You might have some success with Wardley mapping[0] as a way of presenting the scenario and strategy and getting some buy-in. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardley_map https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardley_map
    - yxhuvud 7y ago
jvagner 7y ago
My own experience in e-commerce was that Salesforce came in to a couple of companies I worked at and it wasn't a fit. Which was weird. I recently looked for a platform for CRM, invoicing, project management and communication, and Salesforce didn't really have anything out of the box (or within a reasonable distance of a read-to-go-box) for that either. There was little off-the-shelf available... not even starter packs, which I found a bit curious. Ended up going with Accelo, which I think of as one level up from a bare Salesforce install. My conclusion.. albeit not entirely informed, is that I probably am happiest never working in a company, or with a client, that's oriented around Salesforce processes.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  I was tricked into doing SFDC development for a while, about eight years ago. I had a background in more “traditional” application development: Java on the back end and Javascript on the front end. Working in Salesforce was honestly a pretty miserable experience. Everything you do in it is metered; you have a limit on the number of DB calls you can make in an hour, a limit on how many bytes you can access in an hour, a limit on how many rows you can save… it’s almost as bad as AWS, but nowhere near as manageable because you can’t tell if you’re going to hit a limit until you hit it in production. At least back then, there was no interactive debugger for Apex, and no test client for SOQL (their “almost SQL but not SQL” query language), so any debugging you wanted to do was done using print statements. And of course, you couldn’t run anything locally - everything had to be copied up to their servers in order to something as trivial as test a form validation. I slogged through it for about 3 years before I finally gave up on it - although it does a good job of making simple things like creating input forms for database object easy, it makes harder things like an actual business workflow impossible (it’s noteworthy that even the CRM functionality wasn’t implemented in “pure” Apex/VisualForce because it was too limiting even for the thing that Salesforce was designed for).
- amyjess 7y ago
  From the impression I got reading OP's article, Salesforce is intended mostly for companies that can hire a dedicated Salesforce admin (or two) who can really set everything up exactly to your company's specifications, which means that smaller companies that don't have the resources to do that would be better off with one of the less-flexible CRMs/ERPs out there.
jdm2212 7y ago
Thank you! I've been wondering about what the heck Salesforce is for ages :) Seems like a lot of enterprise software boils down to integrating enterprise data for a some domain, mapping it to an ontology, and then building a plugin framework, dashboards, alerts and workflow management on top of that. (I don't mean to imply it's easy, just that it's a successful general template if you happen to have domaine expertise in a domain without a dominant existing SaaS player.)
- deleted 7y ago
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legitster 7y ago
I work in the sales and marketing world, and the best way describe Salesforce is it's the infrastructure sales is built on. Especially in the B2B world, it's just as big and heavy hitting as any of the other FAANG companies, if not more. And I want to stress how big and clunky SFDC is even for people familiar with it. I am sure everyone and their mother can build a faster, more elegant CRM. But that misses the point. It's infrastructure. The fact that it's legacy is the feature! I'm sure we can design more elegant roads and pick smarter rail gauges today, but having consistent and interchangeable standards is important to build on. It's enough for a company to constantly track their changing market, they don't need to risk losing customers because they upgrade the CRM every couple of years.
- exceptione 7y ago
  As a non-salesperson I would like to ask: what do you mean with infrastructure? FAANG is just about de facto monopolies too big to compete with, so I don know what parallel you draw on.
  - ForHackernews 7y ago
    Netflix has major competitors in Hulu, Amazon Prime and Unnamed Disney Category-Killer.
  - rafd 7y ago
    I think "infrastructure" in that every other app that might integrate with a CRM has a salesforce integration. Also, you can expect sales hires to know salesforce.
- somethoughts 7y ago
  My 2 cents is that its kind of like Microsoft Word or Excel but for Sales and Marketing teams. Nobody uses all the features of Microsoft Word or Excel which makes them super complicated and feeling clunky but take any one feature out and you'll have an angry subset of vocal customers who absolutely depend on that feature.
cubecul 7y ago
There is a TON of money in Salesforce. I'm rolling it out at our company right now and it's mind-boggling how many associated costs there are when you want the Salesforce connector for your existing tools: * Data enrichment service plugging into Salesforce? Extra $10-20K/annually * NPS service piping responses in? Upgrade for an extra $8K * Preloading account data? There are like 5-10 sources you can have, each one with a different purpose, each one a potential $25K/annually * How about a note-taking app that lets you modify Salesforce fields in the app? Another $40/user/month * Hiring a consultant? $150-200/hr, and it'll take 100 hours to get it done All that's on top of the $150/user/month Salesforce Enterprise list price
- kyleblarson 7y ago
  It's first and foremost a sales company, and that shows in the way they nickel and dime you for EVERYTHING. And by nickels and dimes, I mean thousands of dollars per month.
  - PopeDotNinja 7y ago
    Sounds like a good business model, assuming it pays for itself.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    I'm just imagining a powerpoint slide that says "Yes we'll screw you over; after all you're the customer!" and a bunch of salesbros around the conference table muttering "well they have a point there..."
- geggam 7y ago
  :) Someone has to pay for that thing sticking out of San Francisco
- fabian2k 7y ago
  I've no experience with this area, but the $150 per user and month seem pretty high to me. How many people would typically need that kind of access? Only Sales, or even more parts of the company?
snarf21 7y ago
Salesforce is fine if you use it for its intended purpose like e-commerce. Just don't try to use it as an AWS replacement for an application platform just because "all your data will be in the same place". Everything is a tool, just pick the right one for the job.
- teh_klev 7y ago
  This ^^^ We use Salesforce for some stuff because we don't need the overhead of AWS/Azure etc. It's quick (and some might say "dirty") but it suits certain types of work we do. And customers are happy. It's all about paying the bills.
wnevets 7y ago
has salesforce figured out how to do an arbitrary number of objects yet? For example a customer with as many addresses they want? I was told by very expensive salesforce "experts" that wasn't possible a few years ago. You actually needed to hardcode address_1_zip, address_2_zip, address_3_zip and so on.
- jbf1001 7y ago
  I've been doing some Salesforce dev for a company for about 6 months and as far as I know, this is really still the case. There are ways to do a type of reference that mimics foreign keys and sql joins, but it is terribly convoluted and therefore confusing.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ironchef 7y ago
  Easy enough ... set a related list on the SObject. So ... if a contact should have N Addresses... create an SObject called "ContactAddress" .. and have a relatedlist from contact to N ContactAddress.
  - csunbird 7y ago
    This is the correct way to do it, but this also means you are going to add another custom object to "objects needs to be documented and maintained by your team" list.
    - chasd00 7y ago
      more importantly, it means one less custom object available based on your license. For example, there's nothing stopping you from making 100 custom object available to Customer Community licensed users. However, with the license you get 10 and when they randomly audit your instance find you at +90 the bill will be shocking to say the least. Pay up or get your instance turned off and lose everything.
nocubicles 7y ago
How long does implementing Salesforce takes usually, lets say in a company with 10 users(salespeople?)? I have implemented 10-13 SAP Saas ERP systems in last couple of years and the projects are around 2-4 months with 1-2 consultants working on the project for a company of ~50 users. But ERP is much wider then just CRM, it includes all business processes. Can Salesforce be self implemented by the company or is consulting needed? ERP cannot be self implemented, definitly needs consulting both on configurating the system and also changing companies business processes. Its still amazing how Saas EPR can be implemented in this short time given it used to take atleast 1 year due to the need of setting up infrastructure and all over more complexity.
- nik736 7y ago
  What would you say makes it faster to implement a SaaS ERP compared to an on premise one?
  - nocubicles 7y ago
    Well for starters the product is smaller and not that extendable. So it means when typically with on-prem you start developing and customizing the software to fit it into company procedures then with Saas ERP company needs to fit into ERP processes. The UI is based on HTML and therefore users like it more and are not that hesitant to start using it and less training is needed. Public API-s that you can just take and make integrations, no need for allowing access through firewall etc. There are many more but these are just some that I can think of right now.
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  If it covers just sales and there's no complex requirements,you'd be up and going in a couple of weeks,maybe in 3 if there's lots of back and forth. However,if there are plans to implement CPQ or some integrations,then it'd be much longer. CRM can be self implemented, however if the company doesn't have a dedicated resource I would not recommend it, especially if there's any potential for growth,as it's very yeasy to make a spaghetti crm as well..
- chance_state 7y ago
tvanantwerp 7y ago
I've implemented Salesforce twice for non-profits doing fundraising. It's probably a great B2B sales platform, but it's not that customizable for purposes outside what was intended. And it's not clear why some bits are customizable and others aren't. I don't consider myself a Salesforce expert, so maybe I'm just showing off my ignorance here, but this is a conversation I've had to have: Fundraiser: "Can we have a custom database of Thing X that interfaces with everything else?" Me: "Sure, no problem." Fundraiser: "And can we rename this default field from 'Widget' to 'Doodad'?" Me: "Nope. Impossible. Whenever you see 'Widget', just imagine it said 'Doodad'." I still recommend Salesforce to non-profits, for the same reason Churchill recommends democracy: it may be the worst CRM, but it's better than all the others that have been tried.
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  Well,you were wrong,you can change them: https://success.salesforce.com/answers?id=90630000000gwQ2AAI https://success.salesforce.com/answers?id=90630000000gwQ2AAI Kristin Flewelling's comment has the correct answer.
- chance_state 7y ago
  cosmodisk's reply is correct. To add to it a bit: Your experience is not uncommon. I think Salesforce GREATLY oversells the "clicks not code" stuff. They're good at selling to a certain segment within organizations that thinks of themselves as savvy but don't really know anything about what it takes to launch a CRM for an organization (not saying this is you, just in general from what I've seen). I've seen projects blow $1M+ in grant money on adopting Salesforce that have virtually nothing to show for it because the projects were badly managed and poorly resourced. It's unfortunately more common in the non-profit space, too.
G4BB3R 7y ago
I worked 2 months for a IT company that uses 100% salesforce. It was the worst experience of my life. The tool can be great for the sales team and others, but keep things separated, salesforce shouldn't be used by programmers.
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  What did you use it for? Let me guess: instead of Jira?
  - chance_state 7y ago
    Salesforce eats their own dogfood. They use an app built on the force.com platform for managing all development work on their CRM product. The app, free to install in your own instance and use: https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=a0N30000000ps3jEAA&channel=featured https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listing...
    - cosmodisk 7y ago
      Was reading about it quite recently and tbh was a little bit surprised, especially knowing that behind the scenes is one massive JAVA superjob with millions of lines of code...It must take some effort to maintain the whole thing..
    - chasd00 7y ago
      Also, they use SF for Dreamforce planning end to end. I've seen it, it's pretty freaking amazing. I was convinced they were going to release a "Conference Cloud" product after I saw what they had done for organizing Dreamforce.
      - thrav 7y ago
        Real Estate, Investor Relations, HR, Anything with an Approval Process... If you ever have a chance to attend a “Salesforce on Salesforce” session, take it. Or better yet, just ask for one if you’re a customer and want to see how they do a thing.
cosmodisk 7y ago
I kind of built my career on it. While reading some forums, including some threads on HN, I see a lot of misconceptions about Salesforce. When it started,it used to be purely software for sales and how to manage leads,deals and contacts. However it's been around for 20 years and now it covers much more. For instance,I work for a company that delivers training to thousands of people every year.The entire business runs on Salesforce.The sales manage their leads(tens of thousands) and interactions with them(calls,emails,sms), while operations book the courses, customer service manage complaints, finance team tracks products, invoicing,and vendor manager tracks their performance, contracts and etc. At any given time I can go on Salesforce and see how much money the company made,what are the issues, how's marketing doing and etc. Alternatively to this kind of unified system is a mish mash of number of applications, endless Excel spreadsheets and bottomless email server. Since I joined, the company tripled revenues,yet we have same number of people managing training and customer service...The sales reps pulling in twice as much of revenue. I know there are a lot of developers here on HN: even if you don't want to use Salesforce platform,you can leverage free developer edition for rapid prototyping.You could literally mock up things within hours,including interface,database and sometimes even automations. For those who are planning to hire sales people: the absolute majority of decent ones( especially in the US and to some degree in the UK) most likely used it in their previous jobs and it is very likely they will expect it in your company as well. What companies use it? All of them,including Google,Amazon,Coke, Shell, Barclay's and etc..
- DaveWalk 7y ago
  +1 to developers on HN: if your dream is to have a company with a sales team, it's great practice to get to know CRM softwares early and in-depth. Every seasoned salesperson will need a functioning CRM to do good work...and the best salespeople will get held back by a malfunctioning/nonexistent CRM.
  - trisomy21 7y ago
    Do you have any recommendations on where to get a solid introduction to the most popular/prominent CRM tools? I’m really curious to dive deeper.
jefflombardjr 7y ago
Salesforce is essentially a database as a service with some fancy admin panels and prebuilt web interfaces. The tech is proprietary, and not that fun to work with. [0] As someone who has worked extensively with Salesforce, the cult like fanbase is annoying. I'll be the first to admit the tech is underwhelming and in many cases nowhere near other modern technology.[1][2][3] But, I still 100% recommend Salesforce to companies when they ask about it. Why? Data liability. Yes Salesforce is expensive - but you are outsourcing the responsibility of dealing with sensitive data to Salesforce. This is something that they should market more heavily in imo. (at least to sw engineers and CTOs) Realistically many companies are not properly equipped to deal with data, let alone sensitive data. Salesforce may have started out as a CRM, but now it is a solution to that problem. CTO's now have someone to point the finger at if shit hits the fan on an Equifax level. This alone is worth big $$$. [0] - https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#most-loved-dr... [1] - https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.apexcode.meta/apexcode/apex_gov_limits.htm https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.apexcode.m... [2] - https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2018/05/summer18-rethink-trigger-logic-with-apex-switch.html https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2018/05/summer18-reth... [3] - https://developer.salesforce.com/page/Multi_Tenant_Architecture https://developer.salesforce.com/page/Multi_Tenant_Architect... [4] - https://trust.salesforce.com/en/ https://trust.salesforce.com/en/
- jsm 7y ago
  > The tech is proprietary, and not that fun to work with. > As someone who has worked extensively with Salesforce, the cult like fanbase is annoying. I'll be the first to admit the tech is underwhelming and in many cases nowhere near other modern technology. True. But Salesforce allows fairly non-technical people to build fairly robust applications with very limited CS training. If I were interested in getting a technical job but had no experience, I'd consider becoming a Salesforce administrator as a way to get paid to learn to code on the job. [1] You can build something that is complex and scalable without any programming experience. And what you build will be supported for the next ten years. It's not a terrible proposition for most businesses - especially outside of the Silicon Valley bubble. [1] https://bluecanvas.io/blog/2017-07-25-getting-paid-95k-to-learn-to-program https://bluecanvas.io/blog/2017-07-25-getting-paid-95k-to-le...
vbsteven 7y ago
It has its uses in enterprise environments but it takes a special kind of business-y person to setup, configure and maintain. I worked at a small startup with at its peak 30 people (of which 10 in sales/marketing) and we implemented Netsuite which is a similar ERP suite bought by Oracle. It took 2 expensive consultants a couple months to setup and I believe it did CRM, invoicing, accounting, taxes, prospecting, email signups and newsletters, customer support, inventory tracking and probably a few more things. Every time we wanted to change some process we had to bring the consultants back in. In my eyes it was too expensive and too early in the startup process to be implementing something like that.
dboreham 7y ago
It's the new SAP isn't it? And SAP was the new Oracle And Oracle was the new AS/400 And...
- nocubicles 7y ago
  I think SAP is like 15 years older then Oracle.
shadowtree 7y ago
It's a platform that has multiple very successful companies riding on top of it. The largest built a 20bn+ market cap co out of it, in 12 years. SFDC is far more capable than people think.
kyrieeschaton 7y ago
Salesforce has begun retroactively restricting the products you can sell if you're using their platform, which makes moving to Salesforce a very risky proposition. https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/30/18645722/salesforce-ban-retail-customers-selling-semi-automatic-guns-rifles https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/30/18645722/salesforce-ban-r...
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  I appreciate it's a hot potato in the US, however in my opinion these kind of thigs should only be sold to military,in which case no CRM is required,as there are only a handful of countries as potential clients.I used guns for many years and can't see a single reason why anyone would need it for personal use.
  - steve19 7y ago
    That is not at all how the defense industry works. The military invented modern procurement, of which sales is an important part. There might only be a handful of countries any one country will sell to (50-75) but each country will have multiple armed forces, potentially hundreds of police departments, government agencies etc. etc. Then there are private companies that may be allowed defence related tech, such as non lethal area denial equipment for shipping or oil in hostile areas.
  - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
    >I appreciate it's a hot potato in the US, however in my opinion these kind of [things] should only be sold to military You "used guns for many years" - OK, I suppose that makes you an expert on self defense choices in the US. The DoD released a report that found the AR pattern rifle to be the absolutely most appropriate personal defense weapon that exists today - why do you or SalesForce get to decide what is appropriate for my personal protection? The only real question here is why would I ever want my CRM company to make decisions like that for me or anyone else? Should I want my CRM company to care at all what I'm selling? Why would you ever assume it stops at things you personally don't like?
pbreit 7y ago
Retool looks super neat but I'm wondering how it works in practice. Any experience here?
- deleted 7y ago
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zulfishah 7y ago
Good article. Thanks for disentangling the jargon around Salesforce. I've always wondered why the idea of "CRM" never extends to more than the "Sales" process. What about more lightweight, easy-to-use system that someone who just opened a flower shop, or a yoga studio, could use to manage not just customers but also their employees and contractors? Why don't people use "Personal CRM" tools to keep track of conversations around the work-place, or interacting with employees? There is a lot of potential for a "contact interaction system", with many many use-cases, but I'm curious if the idea just doesn't have legs, or if it's waiting for something to popularize the concept. Personal angle: I work on such a 'contact interaction system' with an app I have in the App Store, and though I market it as "CRM", my goal is to build something that's very easy-to-use so that "anyone" can use it, for the people who are looking for a good system to manage their contact and customer interactions. I would love to figure out how to drive more traction around the idea, since it's something that's beyond the regular idea of "CRM app for sales". Any thoughts?
- thrav 7y ago
  What’s yours called? I’ve been wanting one for a while, but never been satisfied with what I find.
  - zulfishah 7y ago
    It's available for iOS and Mac. Search for Contacts Journal in the App Store. Would love your feedback.
- shakkhar 7y ago
  I believe Monica [0] is in a similar space. [0] https://www.monicahq.com/ https://www.monicahq.com/
rkido 7y ago
The way this article described Salesforce makes it sound like generic database frontend software, like a more powerful, complex, and customizable Airtable. I'd love to read a comparison of the two if anyone has used both.
- GFischer 7y ago
  The main thing with Salesforce, or SAP, or other software of the sort, is the ecosystem and knowledge that´s tied up with it. You can do most things you can do on Salesforce with generic software, but the know-how is explicit on Salesforce (think Open Source vs Microsoft). There´s also the backing, support, etc., and them being the original SAAS which I guess is the BIG part (that must have been some pretty huge savings back then). There´s a team of Salesforce devs working next to where I do, and it does look very much like any other database frontend software, but with the sales vertical. Instead of choosing Java or .NET or whatever, they go Salesforce.
- DaveWalk 7y ago
  From a business side of things, the advantage of Salesforce is that it can very easily be managed by non-devs. It has straightforward sales functions baked in: reporting, forecasting contact management. For sure, Airtable can be used as a lightweight CRM. Depending on your business, it might be all you need -- it might even be preferred if you're bootstrapping and constantly iterating early on! But Airtable falls down when your sales/marketing needs grow -- those hires probably won't have the patience to develop tools that tie into Airtable. To reference the old Jim Barksdale line, Salesforce is the "bundle" option, and Airtable is the "unbundle" one.
sixdimensional 7y ago
"Single source of truth" = loaded statement. Maybe single source of truth for a certain subset of things, but in my experience, Salesforce is absolutely not the single source of truth for an organization. I do not like that marketing pitch.
TbobbyZ 7y ago
As a Salesforce developer, I find myself feeling like I'm on a different planet compared to other developers. I can't: - develop locally. - easily backup using source control. - contribute to or create open source projects easily. There are a lot more barriers to do so compared to JavaScript or Golang communities. In addition, I'm always working with sugar-coated Salesforce tech. Apex (kinda like Java), Aura Components (crappy js framework that doesn't even come close to react). I'm happy that Salesforce is going in the right direction with their web components, but it still feels like they are 10-15 years behind.
- vips7L 7y ago
  they're moving forward on some of these fronts: develop locally: they're bringing at least front end development here. source control: easily done if you are using the DX project format. apex: still shitty aura: deprecated and replaced with LWC.
- chance_state 7y ago
  Have you looked into Salesforce DX? (https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2018/02/getting-started-salesforce-dx-part-1-5.html https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2018/02/getting-start...) >- develop locally. - easily backup using source control. - contribute to or create open source projects easily. It addresses all of these concerns nicely. I'm also a full-time SF developer and am finding the transition to DX a bit rough, to be honest.
  - thrav 7y ago
    They're getting there, but it's still beta for a reason
    - sfa_aok 7y ago
      Salesforce DX has been generally available since October 2017: https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2017/10/salesforce-dx-is-now-generally-available.html https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2017/10/salesforce-dx...
Tade0 7y ago
One of my coworkers has experience in Salesforce and recently did an introductory presentation about it. I just want to say that I'm very grateful that I don't have to have anything to do with it.
carapace 7y ago
Anybody interested in a "Computer-Aided Small Business" kind of a thing?
stcredzero 7y ago
An entire economy is built around Salesforce. For every dollar that Salesforce makes, its ecosystem generates $4. Millions of developers build apps for Salesforce’s platform, and Salesforce development is itself a lucrative niche within software engineering. So Salesforce has turned themselves into an ecosystem. No wonder they're doing well. What's the secret to turning yourself into an ecosystem? It must involve low barriers to entry and the ability to make money within the ecosystem.
teh_klev 7y ago
Sounds like I'm a Salesforce shill here, but...for some context I presently work as a developer in the charitable/volunteer sector at the moment. I'm 52, with around 30 years in the biz building all sorts of stuff in COBOL, Clipper, Java, CORBA, VB, C#....and worked with all sorts of databases. Here's my take in my current situ: Salesforce do some mighty decent things for voluntary/charitable orgs. One of them being that if you're a charitable/volunteer sector operator you get Salesforce Enterprise edition for free. Now, despite being aware of Salesforce, until about six months ago I'd never used it, and thought "oh-oh" when a project went down this route. But you know something I kinda like it. I sense some "dislike" here about Salesforce here on HN, and sure it has some road humps and other things, but it's become a developer platform, and with many developer platforms you need to spend some time learning to make it work for you. But it's not that hard. I think their docs and training material are pretty decent. We also use their SFDX bits so basically we can check in an entire org to source control and run deployments into sandboxes for testing before deploying into production. Their Visual Code tooling is pretty decent as well. Lightning, Apex, Callouts, Creating inbound REST API's...what's not to like if you can bish-bash-bosh something for a client quickly and build an working MVP? We can build a bunch of apps for these voluntary/charitable folks fairly quickly and much faster than we could with .NET/SQL (or something else) which would otherwise cost them a lot more money. I realise it's not for everyone, sometimes it feels a bit "Scientology"'ish once you're into the eco-system, but it's a tool. Use it, don't use it, it's up to you.
avodonosov 7y ago
As a joke I once wanted to register failsource.com and redirect it to salesforce.com. But it was already taken (I suspected by salesforce)
- teh_klev 7y ago
  I think you'll find that your suspicions reach somewhat naive a dead end. http://whois.domaintools.com/failsource.com http://whois.domaintools.com/failsource.com http://whois.domaintools.com/salesforce.com http://whois.domaintools.com/salesforce.com
  - avodonosov 7y ago
    Sure they didn't register it under their own name :)
    - ninju 7y ago
      Plausible deniability is the best defense
JetSpiegel 7y ago
So, it's like a wiki for sales people? With custom fields?
m3kw9 7y ago
Finally know what CRM and Salesforce really is
codeisawesome 7y ago
The people demand the same article but now for ERP.
luminati 7y ago
I see what you did there - Nice puff piece to get the Salesforce corpdev drones to start buzzing around you guys to lay the seeds to an eventual acquisition ;)
RocketSyntax 7y ago
It's ironic how much people make fun of SFDC when they literally invented SaaS and internet-driven platforms
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
> In 2008, these were consolidated into Force.com — a platform for developers to build and run apps without worrying about infrastructure. It was the first platform-as-a-service (PaaS). Heroku launched before Force.com - by a few months, if I'm not mistaken.
ncmncm 7y ago
SF has what must be the most valuable database in the world. It must be worth far, far more than their market cap. That I have not heard of anybody mining it must mean they have a really good handle on how to keep such activity secret. Because from a business standpoint it would be irresponsible not to monetize something so valuable. Anybody using it must realize that has to be going on, at some level. Maybe they only license out access to spooks -- NSA, Mossad, GRU. (What is the Chinese one called?) Those have access to unlimited cash, and know how to use spooking to get more.

What's Salesforce?

619 points by dvdhsu 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

benbristow 7y ago

Nice article. Always wondered what SalesForce actually was and why it's so popular. Now I know.

emers0n 7y ago

Awesome post! Next up -- what's MuleSoft? That's another big one where I'm not really sure what problems they're really solving.

ecnahc515 7y ago
Sorta like "If this, then that", but made for the enterprise uses. It's an enterprise service bus.
niftich 7y ago
In the Mule ecosystem, you use a drag-and-drop flow builder of canned components to build flows that typically ingest events, do something to them, and possibly write someplace. Almost anywhere, you can also inject your custom code. You deploy these flows in their engine, where they're kept alive. You can self-host the engine, but they also offer it in their cloud. Then you can choose to frontend it with a HTTP API that you build in their builder, and choose to put it in your organization's private store, or the public store for others to use. There's management dashboards too. There's hundreds of other products or product combinations that could be described in the same sort of vague language, but MuleSoft ships and supports a particular environment and a particular collection of tools that does it pretty well. Ultimately, the goal of all of these is the reduction of the effort around every other piece besides the parts that are custom to your unique circumstances.
newsoul2019 7y ago
I believe they are in EAI - Enterprise Application Integration space. Broadly speaking this is a "swiss army knife", if you want to take a CSV file from an FTP site and load it into a relational database, then do queries off a table and POST JSON to a webhook, It can do any of those things.
ylbss 7y ago
Depends on what part of Mulesoft your talking about. Traditionally it offered an Enterprise Service Bus solution but has been moving to an interesting collaborative API Management/Development solution over the past couple years. They really sell the idea of using an API network to hook up your integrations and then use Mulesoft's product to manage it.
cosmodisk 7y ago
Corporate Zapier in a nutshell, just much more powerful.

dvdhsu 7y ago

Hi, I'm one of the authors of the post. As an engineer, I've always wondered what Salesforce was. It seemed like a clunky, expensive piece of legacy software that the "business people" always used. Since starting a SaaS company myself (Retool; https://tryretool.com https://tryretool.com), I now understand a lot more, hah. Salesforce, basically, is the source of truth for your customer, for the business-side of things (sales, marketing, operations, etc.). So the stuff we would typically store in our databases (company name, users, how much they pay us, etc.) is stored inside of Salesforce. And Salesforce gives you a bunch of views that a typical company would need — views to update the close date of a contract, the value of a contract, to take notes on a call, etc. The cool thing about Salesforce is how customizable it is — you can change the database models (e.g. "add a column to the `Leads` table"), as well as change the front-ends themselves (e.g. "I want to display this data in this view"). I've previously used a lot of SaaS (e.g. Slack, Intercom, etc.) and it's always frustrating because I can't customize the views (e.g. in Slack, maybe I want to add a button to mute + clear all the notifications for this channel). Salesforce lets you customize all that, which, frankly, is really cool. To some extent, Salesforce is like a new way of programming. Instead of writing code, you let non-technical people change models and UIs (and to some extent, controllers). Happy to answer any questions! If you all think the essay could be improved in any way, LMK too :) (Edit: added blurb about SFDC being a new way of programming, in response to a comment downstream.)

yomansat 7y ago
Retool is a great idea! Really love the concept and well done for spotting the common repetitive part of generating internal tools!
jiveturkey 7y ago
You didn't stress the most important part well enough: > But when you bolt on other apps and 3rd-party APIs, it gets close to programming without code: a new way to build software. SFDC is worth $100B not because it's a CRM. It's worth that much because it's a CRM platform. The "what it does" is not nearly as important as the ecosystem/platform aspect of it. "What it does" has no moat. Platforms have a moat. That's the value of SFDC in a nutshell. You could help highlight this by drawing attention to it earlier, and also by boldfacing the sentence just before my quote where you say "platform".

te_chris 7y ago

I was a sceptic, but it’s actually great. The amount of powerful stuff you can do with it, with process builder, platform events and flows, e.g. is incredible. Still super annoying in a lot of ways, but it doesn’t really make any sense to manually build out that stuff, to me anyway

nwatson 7y ago

I have extended family (two brothers, two nieces, one niece's husband, one nephew) all into Salesforce.com/SFDC development. Four of them successfully ran a SFDC consulting business for several years with many good clients and lots of junior and senior developers and architects (I joined briefly after leaving SF Bay Area but decided I should go back to building products). The business ran into family-business-squabble problems between two of the principals and dissolved ... however they all stayed in the SFDC game and have done very well, making significantly more (even considering they're contracting) on long-term stable contracts than their software experience would net them at established SF Bay Area companies ... and they all live in much lower cost-of-living areas. I don't think the SFDC game will go away any time soon, either. There are probably some interesting SFDC development niches, but I would have struggled to maintain interest.

stallmanite 7y ago
As an outsider these descriptions sound like Avon or Mary Kay or Amway.
- mattmanser 7y ago
  Salesforce is awful to develop in. The worst designed language, terrible tools, poor feedback, inscrutable gotchas. An abhorrent mix of the worst parts of Java with the worst parts of SQL. Everything is utterly rubbish, there is absolutely nothing positive about it. But it's great to put your sales process on for a slightly techy person. Sort of the modern equivalent of access. Needless to say, that means no developer wants to touch it with a bargepole. So if you're prepared to put up with all that, you can make a lot of money doing ridiculously simple things.
- ziziyO 7y ago
  It's cult-y for sure. The money is there for the taking, much in the way a COBOL programmer can name their price.

ABeeSea 7y ago

In my experience, Salesforce is replacing emailed excel files and “excel as a database” en masse. It’s kind of interesting to watch these migration of business processes from manual excel to manual salesforce. And it’s not just sales people.

incomplete 7y ago

wow, great article! i work for a university and our admin group needs a "killer app" for tracking students, researchers, faculty, industry partners, events, and a bunch of other little things... i've been doing my best to try and explain to them what SF is capable of but it's been tricky as i don't have any first-hand experience w/it. i've forwarded the article off to them and the entire group had a collective "ah-ha!" moment. thanks for putting this together. :)

rchaud 7y ago
When I was applying to grad schools in 2016, the online applications all sat on top of a Salesforce build. It's clunky to build on for sure, but there has to be trade-offs when you're using a pre-designed "lego blocks" type system to build an app. You can sign up for a free SF developer account, which gives you access to a dummy account that can support 2 users. Go to Salesforce Trailhead, their training site and look at the modules to figure out which one might help you create a prototype you can use as a proof of concept for your team.
- incomplete 7y ago
  dope. thanks, i'll do that now.
cosmodisk 7y ago
We came second pitching Salesforce to a uni in the UK,which was supposed to cover all these aspects you mentioned.If you interested,drop me a message,I can guide you towards the right direction.The company we lost against did about 400 implementations for universities and schools.

chasd00 7y ago

It should be called "everythingforce" instead of Salesforce. The features have grown so wide and deep that even CRM is just a small sliver of what Salesforce is. It has its own server side language ( APEX ), a front end framework (Lightning), a community builder/site hosting thingy ( Community Cloud ), and "custom objects" and relationships (think a user defined schema ). If you wanted to you could use Salesforce as a hosting platform for any web application.

pssdbt 7y ago
Yep, and the problem with that in my experience is it's enough rope for companies to hang themselves with. I've seen multiple cases of using Salesforce for things/applications for things that belong outside of it. I'm only a little sour about it :D
- jbf1001 7y ago
  I am in the process of dealing with that myself. In my case, the leadership of our company was convinced by a consulting firm that Salesforce is capable of anything, including acting as IaaS for a huge SaaS application we are building. The result being that we have to make very expensive work arounds for API call limits. The hard part about this is that it might function eventually, so "there is no reason to switch until we KNOW for sure". Salesforce can do a lot, but it can NOT do IaaS. Use AWS, GCP, or literally anything else if you want a 100% customizable autoscaling application with in depth monitoring. EDIT: Pardon my cry for help, but if anyone has any business targeted material to present these ideas to company presidents who don't have a clue in the world, I implore you to point me to it.
  - mntmoss 7y ago
    You might have some success with Wardley mapping[0] as a way of presenting the scenario and strategy and getting some buy-in. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardley_map https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardley_map
  - yxhuvud 7y ago

jvagner 7y ago

My own experience in e-commerce was that Salesforce came in to a couple of companies I worked at and it wasn't a fit. Which was weird. I recently looked for a platform for CRM, invoicing, project management and communication, and Salesforce didn't really have anything out of the box (or within a reasonable distance of a read-to-go-box) for that either. There was little off-the-shelf available... not even starter packs, which I found a bit curious. Ended up going with Accelo, which I think of as one level up from a bare Salesforce install. My conclusion.. albeit not entirely informed, is that I probably am happiest never working in a company, or with a client, that's oriented around Salesforce processes.

commandlinefan 7y ago
I was tricked into doing SFDC development for a while, about eight years ago. I had a background in more “traditional” application development: Java on the back end and Javascript on the front end. Working in Salesforce was honestly a pretty miserable experience. Everything you do in it is metered; you have a limit on the number of DB calls you can make in an hour, a limit on how many bytes you can access in an hour, a limit on how many rows you can save… it’s almost as bad as AWS, but nowhere near as manageable because you can’t tell if you’re going to hit a limit until you hit it in production. At least back then, there was no interactive debugger for Apex, and no test client for SOQL (their “almost SQL but not SQL” query language), so any debugging you wanted to do was done using print statements. And of course, you couldn’t run anything locally - everything had to be copied up to their servers in order to something as trivial as test a form validation. I slogged through it for about 3 years before I finally gave up on it - although it does a good job of making simple things like creating input forms for database object easy, it makes harder things like an actual business workflow impossible (it’s noteworthy that even the CRM functionality wasn’t implemented in “pure” Apex/VisualForce because it was too limiting even for the thing that Salesforce was designed for).
amyjess 7y ago
From the impression I got reading OP's article, Salesforce is intended mostly for companies that can hire a dedicated Salesforce admin (or two) who can really set everything up exactly to your company's specifications, which means that smaller companies that don't have the resources to do that would be better off with one of the less-flexible CRMs/ERPs out there.

jdm2212 7y ago

Thank you! I've been wondering about what the heck Salesforce is for ages :) Seems like a lot of enterprise software boils down to integrating enterprise data for a some domain, mapping it to an ontology, and then building a plugin framework, dashboards, alerts and workflow management on top of that. (I don't mean to imply it's easy, just that it's a successful general template if you happen to have domaine expertise in a domain without a dominant existing SaaS player.)

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

legitster 7y ago

I work in the sales and marketing world, and the best way describe Salesforce is it's the infrastructure sales is built on. Especially in the B2B world, it's just as big and heavy hitting as any of the other FAANG companies, if not more. And I want to stress how big and clunky SFDC is even for people familiar with it. I am sure everyone and their mother can build a faster, more elegant CRM. But that misses the point. It's infrastructure. The fact that it's legacy is the feature! I'm sure we can design more elegant roads and pick smarter rail gauges today, but having consistent and interchangeable standards is important to build on. It's enough for a company to constantly track their changing market, they don't need to risk losing customers because they upgrade the CRM every couple of years.

exceptione 7y ago
As a non-salesperson I would like to ask: what do you mean with infrastructure? FAANG is just about de facto monopolies too big to compete with, so I don know what parallel you draw on.
- ForHackernews 7y ago
  Netflix has major competitors in Hulu, Amazon Prime and Unnamed Disney Category-Killer.
- rafd 7y ago
  I think "infrastructure" in that every other app that might integrate with a CRM has a salesforce integration. Also, you can expect sales hires to know salesforce.
somethoughts 7y ago
My 2 cents is that its kind of like Microsoft Word or Excel but for Sales and Marketing teams. Nobody uses all the features of Microsoft Word or Excel which makes them super complicated and feeling clunky but take any one feature out and you'll have an angry subset of vocal customers who absolutely depend on that feature.

cubecul 7y ago

There is a TON of money in Salesforce. I'm rolling it out at our company right now and it's mind-boggling how many associated costs there are when you want the Salesforce connector for your existing tools: * Data enrichment service plugging into Salesforce? Extra $10-20K/annually * NPS service piping responses in? Upgrade for an extra $8K * Preloading account data? There are like 5-10 sources you can have, each one with a different purpose, each one a potential $25K/annually * How about a note-taking app that lets you modify Salesforce fields in the app? Another $40/user/month * Hiring a consultant? $150-200/hr, and it'll take 100 hours to get it done All that's on top of the $150/user/month Salesforce Enterprise list price

kyleblarson 7y ago
It's first and foremost a sales company, and that shows in the way they nickel and dime you for EVERYTHING. And by nickels and dimes, I mean thousands of dollars per month.
- PopeDotNinja 7y ago
  Sounds like a good business model, assuming it pays for itself.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  I'm just imagining a powerpoint slide that says "Yes we'll screw you over; after all you're the customer!" and a bunch of salesbros around the conference table muttering "well they have a point there..."
geggam 7y ago
:) Someone has to pay for that thing sticking out of San Francisco
fabian2k 7y ago
I've no experience with this area, but the $150 per user and month seem pretty high to me. How many people would typically need that kind of access? Only Sales, or even more parts of the company?

snarf21 7y ago

Salesforce is fine if you use it for its intended purpose like e-commerce. Just don't try to use it as an AWS replacement for an application platform just because "all your data will be in the same place". Everything is a tool, just pick the right one for the job.

teh_klev 7y ago
This ^^^ We use Salesforce for some stuff because we don't need the overhead of AWS/Azure etc. It's quick (and some might say "dirty") but it suits certain types of work we do. And customers are happy. It's all about paying the bills.

wnevets 7y ago

has salesforce figured out how to do an arbitrary number of objects yet? For example a customer with as many addresses they want? I was told by very expensive salesforce "experts" that wasn't possible a few years ago. You actually needed to hardcode address_1_zip, address_2_zip, address_3_zip and so on.

jbf1001 7y ago
I've been doing some Salesforce dev for a company for about 6 months and as far as I know, this is really still the case. There are ways to do a type of reference that mimics foreign keys and sql joins, but it is terribly convoluted and therefore confusing.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ironchef 7y ago
Easy enough ... set a related list on the SObject. So ... if a contact should have N Addresses... create an SObject called "ContactAddress" .. and have a relatedlist from contact to N ContactAddress.
- csunbird 7y ago
  This is the correct way to do it, but this also means you are going to add another custom object to "objects needs to be documented and maintained by your team" list.
  - chasd00 7y ago
    more importantly, it means one less custom object available based on your license. For example, there's nothing stopping you from making 100 custom object available to Customer Community licensed users. However, with the license you get 10 and when they randomly audit your instance find you at +90 the bill will be shocking to say the least. Pay up or get your instance turned off and lose everything.

nocubicles 7y ago

How long does implementing Salesforce takes usually, lets say in a company with 10 users(salespeople?)? I have implemented 10-13 SAP Saas ERP systems in last couple of years and the projects are around 2-4 months with 1-2 consultants working on the project for a company of ~50 users. But ERP is much wider then just CRM, it includes all business processes. Can Salesforce be self implemented by the company or is consulting needed? ERP cannot be self implemented, definitly needs consulting both on configurating the system and also changing companies business processes. Its still amazing how Saas EPR can be implemented in this short time given it used to take atleast 1 year due to the need of setting up infrastructure and all over more complexity.

nik736 7y ago
What would you say makes it faster to implement a SaaS ERP compared to an on premise one?
- nocubicles 7y ago
  Well for starters the product is smaller and not that extendable. So it means when typically with on-prem you start developing and customizing the software to fit it into company procedures then with Saas ERP company needs to fit into ERP processes. The UI is based on HTML and therefore users like it more and are not that hesitant to start using it and less training is needed. Public API-s that you can just take and make integrations, no need for allowing access through firewall etc. There are many more but these are just some that I can think of right now.
cosmodisk 7y ago
If it covers just sales and there's no complex requirements,you'd be up and going in a couple of weeks,maybe in 3 if there's lots of back and forth. However,if there are plans to implement CPQ or some integrations,then it'd be much longer. CRM can be self implemented, however if the company doesn't have a dedicated resource I would not recommend it, especially if there's any potential for growth,as it's very yeasy to make a spaghetti crm as well..
chance_state 7y ago

tvanantwerp 7y ago

I've implemented Salesforce twice for non-profits doing fundraising. It's probably a great B2B sales platform, but it's not that customizable for purposes outside what was intended. And it's not clear why some bits are customizable and others aren't. I don't consider myself a Salesforce expert, so maybe I'm just showing off my ignorance here, but this is a conversation I've had to have: Fundraiser: "Can we have a custom database of Thing X that interfaces with everything else?" Me: "Sure, no problem." Fundraiser: "And can we rename this default field from 'Widget' to 'Doodad'?" Me: "Nope. Impossible. Whenever you see 'Widget', just imagine it said 'Doodad'." I still recommend Salesforce to non-profits, for the same reason Churchill recommends democracy: it may be the worst CRM, but it's better than all the others that have been tried.

cosmodisk 7y ago
Well,you were wrong,you can change them: https://success.salesforce.com/answers?id=90630000000gwQ2AAI https://success.salesforce.com/answers?id=90630000000gwQ2AAI Kristin Flewelling's comment has the correct answer.
chance_state 7y ago
cosmodisk's reply is correct. To add to it a bit: Your experience is not uncommon. I think Salesforce GREATLY oversells the "clicks not code" stuff. They're good at selling to a certain segment within organizations that thinks of themselves as savvy but don't really know anything about what it takes to launch a CRM for an organization (not saying this is you, just in general from what I've seen). I've seen projects blow $1M+ in grant money on adopting Salesforce that have virtually nothing to show for it because the projects were badly managed and poorly resourced. It's unfortunately more common in the non-profit space, too.

G4BB3R 7y ago

I worked 2 months for a IT company that uses 100% salesforce. It was the worst experience of my life. The tool can be great for the sales team and others, but keep things separated, salesforce shouldn't be used by programmers.

cosmodisk 7y ago
What did you use it for? Let me guess: instead of Jira?
- chance_state 7y ago
  Salesforce eats their own dogfood. They use an app built on the force.com platform for managing all development work on their CRM product. The app, free to install in your own instance and use: https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=a0N30000000ps3jEAA&channel=featured https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listing...
  - cosmodisk 7y ago
    Was reading about it quite recently and tbh was a little bit surprised, especially knowing that behind the scenes is one massive JAVA superjob with millions of lines of code...It must take some effort to maintain the whole thing..
  - chasd00 7y ago
    Also, they use SF for Dreamforce planning end to end. I've seen it, it's pretty freaking amazing. I was convinced they were going to release a "Conference Cloud" product after I saw what they had done for organizing Dreamforce.
    - thrav 7y ago
      Real Estate, Investor Relations, HR, Anything with an Approval Process... If you ever have a chance to attend a “Salesforce on Salesforce” session, take it. Or better yet, just ask for one if you’re a customer and want to see how they do a thing.

cosmodisk 7y ago

I kind of built my career on it. While reading some forums, including some threads on HN, I see a lot of misconceptions about Salesforce. When it started,it used to be purely software for sales and how to manage leads,deals and contacts. However it's been around for 20 years and now it covers much more. For instance,I work for a company that delivers training to thousands of people every year.The entire business runs on Salesforce.The sales manage their leads(tens of thousands) and interactions with them(calls,emails,sms), while operations book the courses, customer service manage complaints, finance team tracks products, invoicing,and vendor manager tracks their performance, contracts and etc. At any given time I can go on Salesforce and see how much money the company made,what are the issues, how's marketing doing and etc. Alternatively to this kind of unified system is a mish mash of number of applications, endless Excel spreadsheets and bottomless email server. Since I joined, the company tripled revenues,yet we have same number of people managing training and customer service...The sales reps pulling in twice as much of revenue. I know there are a lot of developers here on HN: even if you don't want to use Salesforce platform,you can leverage free developer edition for rapid prototyping.You could literally mock up things within hours,including interface,database and sometimes even automations. For those who are planning to hire sales people: the absolute majority of decent ones( especially in the US and to some degree in the UK) most likely used it in their previous jobs and it is very likely they will expect it in your company as well. What companies use it? All of them,including Google,Amazon,Coke, Shell, Barclay's and etc..

DaveWalk 7y ago
+1 to developers on HN: if your dream is to have a company with a sales team, it's great practice to get to know CRM softwares early and in-depth. Every seasoned salesperson will need a functioning CRM to do good work...and the best salespeople will get held back by a malfunctioning/nonexistent CRM.
- trisomy21 7y ago
  Do you have any recommendations on where to get a solid introduction to the most popular/prominent CRM tools? I’m really curious to dive deeper.

jefflombardjr 7y ago

Salesforce is essentially a database as a service with some fancy admin panels and prebuilt web interfaces. The tech is proprietary, and not that fun to work with. [0] As someone who has worked extensively with Salesforce, the cult like fanbase is annoying. I'll be the first to admit the tech is underwhelming and in many cases nowhere near other modern technology.[1][2][3] But, I still 100% recommend Salesforce to companies when they ask about it. Why? Data liability. Yes Salesforce is expensive - but you are outsourcing the responsibility of dealing with sensitive data to Salesforce. This is something that they should market more heavily in imo. (at least to sw engineers and CTOs) Realistically many companies are not properly equipped to deal with data, let alone sensitive data. Salesforce may have started out as a CRM, but now it is a solution to that problem. CTO's now have someone to point the finger at if shit hits the fan on an Equifax level. This alone is worth big $$$. [0] - https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#most-loved-dr... [1] - https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.apexcode.meta/apexcode/apex_gov_limits.htm https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.apexcode.m... [2] - https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2018/05/summer18-rethink-trigger-logic-with-apex-switch.html https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2018/05/summer18-reth... [3] - https://developer.salesforce.com/page/Multi_Tenant_Architecture https://developer.salesforce.com/page/Multi_Tenant_Architect... [4] - https://trust.salesforce.com/en/ https://trust.salesforce.com/en/

jsm 7y ago
> The tech is proprietary, and not that fun to work with. > As someone who has worked extensively with Salesforce, the cult like fanbase is annoying. I'll be the first to admit the tech is underwhelming and in many cases nowhere near other modern technology. True. But Salesforce allows fairly non-technical people to build fairly robust applications with very limited CS training. If I were interested in getting a technical job but had no experience, I'd consider becoming a Salesforce administrator as a way to get paid to learn to code on the job. [1] You can build something that is complex and scalable without any programming experience. And what you build will be supported for the next ten years. It's not a terrible proposition for most businesses - especially outside of the Silicon Valley bubble. [1] https://bluecanvas.io/blog/2017-07-25-getting-paid-95k-to-learn-to-program https://bluecanvas.io/blog/2017-07-25-getting-paid-95k-to-le...

vbsteven 7y ago

It has its uses in enterprise environments but it takes a special kind of business-y person to setup, configure and maintain. I worked at a small startup with at its peak 30 people (of which 10 in sales/marketing) and we implemented Netsuite which is a similar ERP suite bought by Oracle. It took 2 expensive consultants a couple months to setup and I believe it did CRM, invoicing, accounting, taxes, prospecting, email signups and newsletters, customer support, inventory tracking and probably a few more things. Every time we wanted to change some process we had to bring the consultants back in. In my eyes it was too expensive and too early in the startup process to be implementing something like that.

dboreham 7y ago

It's the new SAP isn't it? And SAP was the new Oracle And Oracle was the new AS/400 And...

nocubicles 7y ago
I think SAP is like 15 years older then Oracle.

shadowtree 7y ago

It's a platform that has multiple very successful companies riding on top of it. The largest built a 20bn+ market cap co out of it, in 12 years. SFDC is far more capable than people think.

kyrieeschaton 7y ago

Salesforce has begun retroactively restricting the products you can sell if you're using their platform, which makes moving to Salesforce a very risky proposition. https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/30/18645722/salesforce-ban-retail-customers-selling-semi-automatic-guns-rifles https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/30/18645722/salesforce-ban-r...

cosmodisk 7y ago
I appreciate it's a hot potato in the US, however in my opinion these kind of thigs should only be sold to military,in which case no CRM is required,as there are only a handful of countries as potential clients.I used guns for many years and can't see a single reason why anyone would need it for personal use.
- steve19 7y ago
  That is not at all how the defense industry works. The military invented modern procurement, of which sales is an important part. There might only be a handful of countries any one country will sell to (50-75) but each country will have multiple armed forces, potentially hundreds of police departments, government agencies etc. etc. Then there are private companies that may be allowed defence related tech, such as non lethal area denial equipment for shipping or oil in hostile areas.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  >I appreciate it's a hot potato in the US, however in my opinion these kind of [things] should only be sold to military You "used guns for many years" - OK, I suppose that makes you an expert on self defense choices in the US. The DoD released a report that found the AR pattern rifle to be the absolutely most appropriate personal defense weapon that exists today - why do you or SalesForce get to decide what is appropriate for my personal protection? The only real question here is why would I ever want my CRM company to make decisions like that for me or anyone else? Should I want my CRM company to care at all what I'm selling? Why would you ever assume it stops at things you personally don't like?

pbreit 7y ago

Retool looks super neat but I'm wondering how it works in practice. Any experience here?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

zulfishah 7y ago

Good article. Thanks for disentangling the jargon around Salesforce. I've always wondered why the idea of "CRM" never extends to more than the "Sales" process. What about more lightweight, easy-to-use system that someone who just opened a flower shop, or a yoga studio, could use to manage not just customers but also their employees and contractors? Why don't people use "Personal CRM" tools to keep track of conversations around the work-place, or interacting with employees? There is a lot of potential for a "contact interaction system", with many many use-cases, but I'm curious if the idea just doesn't have legs, or if it's waiting for something to popularize the concept. Personal angle: I work on such a 'contact interaction system' with an app I have in the App Store, and though I market it as "CRM", my goal is to build something that's very easy-to-use so that "anyone" can use it, for the people who are looking for a good system to manage their contact and customer interactions. I would love to figure out how to drive more traction around the idea, since it's something that's beyond the regular idea of "CRM app for sales". Any thoughts?

thrav 7y ago
What’s yours called? I’ve been wanting one for a while, but never been satisfied with what I find.
- zulfishah 7y ago
  It's available for iOS and Mac. Search for Contacts Journal in the App Store. Would love your feedback.
shakkhar 7y ago
I believe Monica [0] is in a similar space. [0] https://www.monicahq.com/ https://www.monicahq.com/

rkido 7y ago

The way this article described Salesforce makes it sound like generic database frontend software, like a more powerful, complex, and customizable Airtable. I'd love to read a comparison of the two if anyone has used both.

GFischer 7y ago
The main thing with Salesforce, or SAP, or other software of the sort, is the ecosystem and knowledge that´s tied up with it. You can do most things you can do on Salesforce with generic software, but the know-how is explicit on Salesforce (think Open Source vs Microsoft). There´s also the backing, support, etc., and them being the original SAAS which I guess is the BIG part (that must have been some pretty huge savings back then). There´s a team of Salesforce devs working next to where I do, and it does look very much like any other database frontend software, but with the sales vertical. Instead of choosing Java or .NET or whatever, they go Salesforce.
DaveWalk 7y ago
From a business side of things, the advantage of Salesforce is that it can very easily be managed by non-devs. It has straightforward sales functions baked in: reporting, forecasting contact management. For sure, Airtable can be used as a lightweight CRM. Depending on your business, it might be all you need -- it might even be preferred if you're bootstrapping and constantly iterating early on! But Airtable falls down when your sales/marketing needs grow -- those hires probably won't have the patience to develop tools that tie into Airtable. To reference the old Jim Barksdale line, Salesforce is the "bundle" option, and Airtable is the "unbundle" one.

sixdimensional 7y ago

"Single source of truth" = loaded statement. Maybe single source of truth for a certain subset of things, but in my experience, Salesforce is absolutely not the single source of truth for an organization. I do not like that marketing pitch.

TbobbyZ 7y ago

As a Salesforce developer, I find myself feeling like I'm on a different planet compared to other developers. I can't: - develop locally. - easily backup using source control. - contribute to or create open source projects easily. There are a lot more barriers to do so compared to JavaScript or Golang communities. In addition, I'm always working with sugar-coated Salesforce tech. Apex (kinda like Java), Aura Components (crappy js framework that doesn't even come close to react). I'm happy that Salesforce is going in the right direction with their web components, but it still feels like they are 10-15 years behind.

vips7L 7y ago
they're moving forward on some of these fronts: develop locally: they're bringing at least front end development here. source control: easily done if you are using the DX project format. apex: still shitty aura: deprecated and replaced with LWC.
chance_state 7y ago
Have you looked into Salesforce DX? (https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2018/02/getting-started-salesforce-dx-part-1-5.html https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2018/02/getting-start...) >- develop locally. - easily backup using source control. - contribute to or create open source projects easily. It addresses all of these concerns nicely. I'm also a full-time SF developer and am finding the transition to DX a bit rough, to be honest.
- thrav 7y ago
  They're getting there, but it's still beta for a reason
  - sfa_aok 7y ago
    Salesforce DX has been generally available since October 2017: https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2017/10/salesforce-dx-is-now-generally-available.html https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2017/10/salesforce-dx...

Tade0 7y ago

One of my coworkers has experience in Salesforce and recently did an introductory presentation about it. I just want to say that I'm very grateful that I don't have to have anything to do with it.

carapace 7y ago

Anybody interested in a "Computer-Aided Small Business" kind of a thing?

stcredzero 7y ago

An entire economy is built around Salesforce. For every dollar that Salesforce makes, its ecosystem generates $4. Millions of developers build apps for Salesforce’s platform, and Salesforce development is itself a lucrative niche within software engineering. So Salesforce has turned themselves into an ecosystem. No wonder they're doing well. What's the secret to turning yourself into an ecosystem? It must involve low barriers to entry and the ability to make money within the ecosystem.

teh_klev 7y ago

Sounds like I'm a Salesforce shill here, but...for some context I presently work as a developer in the charitable/volunteer sector at the moment. I'm 52, with around 30 years in the biz building all sorts of stuff in COBOL, Clipper, Java, CORBA, VB, C#....and worked with all sorts of databases. Here's my take in my current situ: Salesforce do some mighty decent things for voluntary/charitable orgs. One of them being that if you're a charitable/volunteer sector operator you get Salesforce Enterprise edition for free. Now, despite being aware of Salesforce, until about six months ago I'd never used it, and thought "oh-oh" when a project went down this route. But you know something I kinda like it. I sense some "dislike" here about Salesforce here on HN, and sure it has some road humps and other things, but it's become a developer platform, and with many developer platforms you need to spend some time learning to make it work for you. But it's not that hard. I think their docs and training material are pretty decent. We also use their SFDX bits so basically we can check in an entire org to source control and run deployments into sandboxes for testing before deploying into production. Their Visual Code tooling is pretty decent as well. Lightning, Apex, Callouts, Creating inbound REST API's...what's not to like if you can bish-bash-bosh something for a client quickly and build an working MVP? We can build a bunch of apps for these voluntary/charitable folks fairly quickly and much faster than we could with .NET/SQL (or something else) which would otherwise cost them a lot more money. I realise it's not for everyone, sometimes it feels a bit "Scientology"'ish once you're into the eco-system, but it's a tool. Use it, don't use it, it's up to you.

avodonosov 7y ago

As a joke I once wanted to register failsource.com and redirect it to salesforce.com. But it was already taken (I suspected by salesforce)

teh_klev 7y ago
I think you'll find that your suspicions reach somewhat naive a dead end. http://whois.domaintools.com/failsource.com http://whois.domaintools.com/failsource.com http://whois.domaintools.com/salesforce.com http://whois.domaintools.com/salesforce.com
- avodonosov 7y ago
  Sure they didn't register it under their own name :)
  - ninju 7y ago
    Plausible deniability is the best defense

JetSpiegel 7y ago

So, it's like a wiki for sales people? With custom fields?

m3kw9 7y ago

Finally know what CRM and Salesforce really is

codeisawesome 7y ago

The people demand the same article but now for ERP.

luminati 7y ago

I see what you did there - Nice puff piece to get the Salesforce corpdev drones to start buzzing around you guys to lay the seeds to an eventual acquisition ;)

RocketSyntax 7y ago

It's ironic how much people make fun of SFDC when they literally invented SaaS and internet-driven platforms

simonebrunozzi 7y ago

> In 2008, these were consolidated into Force.com — a platform for developers to build and run apps without worrying about infrastructure. It was the first platform-as-a-service (PaaS). Heroku launched before Force.com - by a few months, if I'm not mistaken.

ncmncm 7y ago

SF has what must be the most valuable database in the world. It must be worth far, far more than their market cap. That I have not heard of anybody mining it must mean they have a really good handle on how to keep such activity secret. Because from a business standpoint it would be irresponsible not to monetize something so valuable. Anybody using it must realize that has to be going on, at some level. Maybe they only license out access to spooks -- NSA, Mossad, GRU. (What is the Chinese one called?) Those have access to unlimited cash, and know how to use spooking to get more.