6 ms·

Salesforce may have been a lean, mean sales ops tool back in 2004, but as the company has grown through acquisition and its own sales force has hugely expanded,

by eitally 12y ago

Salesforce may have been a lean, mean sales ops tool back in 2004, but as the company has grown through acquisition and its own sales force has hugely expanded, it's platform is just not viable for many potential customers. 1) Implementation absolutely requires assistance from an integration partner. 2) Developing on top of it is an exercise in patience and futility. Their dev platform & APIs are inconsistent and half-baked. 3) You can't just license a la carte. No matter what you think you need, you end up being quoted and convinced you need the kitchen sink instead. 4) It is prohibitively expensive compared to pure focus CRMs like SugarCRM, and doesn't have nearly the engineering polish (I can't believe I'm saying this) of things like Microsoft Dynamics. 5) If you aren't a multi-thousand user customer, Salesforce's sale folks don't take you seriously and it's hard to feel like you mean anything to them. I have never received such poor support, and this includes other companies famous for poor support (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle). It's like they're still pretending to be a lean, mean, sexy startup when they're firmly in enterprise territory, yet they refuse to behave in ways appealing to enterprise customers. Moreover, they have spawned a whole slew of SAAS providers whose sole purpose is to interface other things into Salesforce (like 4Bridge from 4Thought, which connects Eloqua (lead generation on the web) to Salesforce. Sure, Salesforce has some huge customers -- at Dreamforce a few years ago, Cisco claimed to have something like 30,000 seats and Dell had 20,000 -- but that's not the entirety of the market. To me, Salesforce is the embodiment of the perception that many SAAS companies exist solely to support other SAAS companies, and that they bring little to no value to anyone.

kyllo 12y ago
If you aren't a multi-thousand user customer, Salesforce's sale folks don't take you seriously and it's hard to feel like you mean anything to them. That's because it's just as expensive for them to close a deal with and support your small-to-medium-sized org, but the revenue they make from you is an order of magnitude less than they'd earn from closing a Fortune 500. This is the reason for the valley in between low-touch SaaS for small businesses (pick a monthly rate plan, pay with a credit card) and high-touch enterprise SaaS (face-to-face pitch and negotiations, sign service contracts, cut a purchase order)
- eitally 12y ago
  I should have been clearer. If you are a F500 consumer products company (includes pharmas), you likely have several-to-many thousand CRM users. If you are an F500 services company, you may only have a few hundred CRM users. Even being an F500 company, you don't get the time of day. This is unsettling for large corporations used to dictating the rules of engagement with vendors. In these kinds of situations, it often works out a lot better to deal with a middleman, like Blue Wolf (in the case of Salesforce) or Cloud Sherpas/Appirio in the case of Google Apps, etc).
startupfounder 12y ago
> To me, Salesforce is the embodiment of the perception that many SAAS companies exist solely to support other SAAS companies, and that they bring little to no value to anyone. Make something people want. If they require assistance, have a half-baked API, sell you the kitchen sink, are prohibitively expensive and they are printing money selling sales software they are the definition of making something people want. > it's platform is just not viable for many potential customers It might not be what you want, but let's not lose the forest in the trees. To build a billion dollar company you have to sell a product that is not viable for many potential customers. Not all phones are Apple and not all sales software is Salesforce. The size of a company doesn't allow or disallow it to be lean and mean, just as both a 7' and 5' tall athlete can be lean and mean on the court.
- smt88 12y ago
  > If they require assistance, have a half-baked API, sell you the kitchen sink, are prohibitively expensive and they are printing money selling sales software they are the definition of making something people want. Life doesn't work in simple axioms like this. You're clearly not familiar with "enterprise software" if you think value = sales. I'd wager that the vast majority of SalesForce users despise it. That means it's delivering less value than something that's efficient and gets out of their way. "SalesForce" is now listed as a skill on resumes, which means it is the opposite of usable! So companies buy it, and you could argue that companies "want" it and get "value" out of it, but sometimes it's still not that rational. SalesForce has great salespeople, and it's a huge company. Sometimes just being the biggest will get you deals because it guarantees you'll be around and can offer enterprise-level support.
  - mattmanser 12y ago
    In my experience, I don't think users hate it. In fact, every time I talk to someone about salesforce and go "what, about that interface, huh? How bad is Salesforce!". They look at me like I'm a little loopy. It's basically a lot better than the thing they used to have, which was nothing. And they can use it on their phone. And it hooks up to Outlook. And it does X, Y and Z other useful things that make their life easier. The difference is that you and I can look at Salesforce and realize it's a mess of legacy and outdated interface ideas, that SOQL and Apex really fucking suck, so, so bad. But for users it's better than the Excel spreadsheet that kept getting out of synch, or the painfully clunky google sheet or whatever. I mean, every time I look at salesforce it's a disgrace. Something as simple as basic filtering by related object values on Views is impossible. Or that the Notes hide the note behind a popup instead of showing the note in table view. Or that you can't change the layout of the entity homepages. Or that bizarre news feed interface. And yet they've built a thing which tries to automatically get the twitter or linked in profile. It just screams of bad, bad, here-be-dragons core code which no-one dares touch.
mbesto 12y ago
You just described SAP.
- column 12y ago
  At first I was thinking the same thing, but you can definitely go a-la-carte with SAP (one could argue there is no other way), and it is totally possible (and largely done) to build your own reasonably competent and market-priced team to maintain it. Come to think of it, SAP does provide added value when it is well-managed and tailored to your business. SAP is quite an unique beast.
  - mbesto 12y ago
    Well, you can definitely go a-la-carte with SF.com too, the point is that the sales people push you into kitchen-sinking it. SAP sales does this too, and usually leads to what we used to call "shelfware". I cannot tell you how many companies I worked with that had unused licenses laying around. (funny - most companies I met have no idea how many licenses to purchase..."oh we want the finance module. So we have 1,000 people in finance so gimme ummm 1,000 licenses") Also, both SF.com and SAP will add value if you use and maintain them properly. The biggest difference with Salesforce is that you don't have to manage a data center.
bengali3 12y ago
> "Implementation absolutely requires assistance from an integration partner." > "If you aren't a multi-thousand user customer, Salesforce's sale folks don't take you seriously" Thanks for the breakdon. I strongly agree with both above, which I think leaves plenty of opportunity for those purely focused on SMBs where companies like Hubspot have stated they will stay. Ever heard of a 'Salesforce Developer'? I put that in the same category as 'Websphere developer', 'Dynamics CRM developer' or other 'Huge Headache Engineer'. When the market needs a specialist for your tool (ie one who is familiar with the half-bakery) then how is one NOT leaving opportunity behind? Thanks
- Domenic_S 12y ago
  > Ever heard of a 'Salesforce Developer'? Yes, and the good ones charge obscene amounts of money. A good niche if it interests you.
  - bengali3 12y ago
    yup, a great niche. Possibly even one of the best bang for buck certifications.
- matchagaucho 12y ago
  "Salesforce Developer/Architect" here. My enterprise domain knowledge is far more valuable than my technical skills, and Salesforce is just a more fluid vehicle for delivering this value compared to traditional on-premise solutions from Oracle, SAP, and IBM. Sure, the upstart CRM vendors have better UIs, but they aren't the real competition. Salesforce is executing a classic innovators dilemma strategy of acquiring these upstarts (desk.com) and allowing them to operate independently in the SMB space as an on-boarding ramp to the enterprise-scale solution.
limeyx 12y ago
Yup. We moved from Zendesk to "Desk.com" for "better integration of customer issues with salesforce" Great idea (i guess) but Desk.com sucks pretty badly so we ended up with worse responses to customer issues...

by eitally 12y ago

kyllo 12y ago

If you aren't a multi-thousand user customer, Salesforce's sale folks don't take you seriously and it's hard to feel like you mean anything to them. That's because it's just as expensive for them to close a deal with and support your small-to-medium-sized org, but the revenue they make from you is an order of magnitude less than they'd earn from closing a Fortune 500. This is the reason for the valley in between low-touch SaaS for small businesses (pick a monthly rate plan, pay with a credit card) and high-touch enterprise SaaS (face-to-face pitch and negotiations, sign service contracts, cut a purchase order)

eitally 12y ago
I should have been clearer. If you are a F500 consumer products company (includes pharmas), you likely have several-to-many thousand CRM users. If you are an F500 services company, you may only have a few hundred CRM users. Even being an F500 company, you don't get the time of day. This is unsettling for large corporations used to dictating the rules of engagement with vendors. In these kinds of situations, it often works out a lot better to deal with a middleman, like Blue Wolf (in the case of Salesforce) or Cloud Sherpas/Appirio in the case of Google Apps, etc).

startupfounder 12y ago

> To me, Salesforce is the embodiment of the perception that many SAAS companies exist solely to support other SAAS companies, and that they bring little to no value to anyone. Make something people want. If they require assistance, have a half-baked API, sell you the kitchen sink, are prohibitively expensive and they are printing money selling sales software they are the definition of making something people want. > it's platform is just not viable for many potential customers It might not be what you want, but let's not lose the forest in the trees. To build a billion dollar company you have to sell a product that is not viable for many potential customers. Not all phones are Apple and not all sales software is Salesforce. The size of a company doesn't allow or disallow it to be lean and mean, just as both a 7' and 5' tall athlete can be lean and mean on the court.

smt88 12y ago
> If they require assistance, have a half-baked API, sell you the kitchen sink, are prohibitively expensive and they are printing money selling sales software they are the definition of making something people want. Life doesn't work in simple axioms like this. You're clearly not familiar with "enterprise software" if you think value = sales. I'd wager that the vast majority of SalesForce users despise it. That means it's delivering less value than something that's efficient and gets out of their way. "SalesForce" is now listed as a skill on resumes, which means it is the opposite of usable! So companies buy it, and you could argue that companies "want" it and get "value" out of it, but sometimes it's still not that rational. SalesForce has great salespeople, and it's a huge company. Sometimes just being the biggest will get you deals because it guarantees you'll be around and can offer enterprise-level support.
- mattmanser 12y ago
  In my experience, I don't think users hate it. In fact, every time I talk to someone about salesforce and go "what, about that interface, huh? How bad is Salesforce!". They look at me like I'm a little loopy. It's basically a lot better than the thing they used to have, which was nothing. And they can use it on their phone. And it hooks up to Outlook. And it does X, Y and Z other useful things that make their life easier. The difference is that you and I can look at Salesforce and realize it's a mess of legacy and outdated interface ideas, that SOQL and Apex really fucking suck, so, so bad. But for users it's better than the Excel spreadsheet that kept getting out of synch, or the painfully clunky google sheet or whatever. I mean, every time I look at salesforce it's a disgrace. Something as simple as basic filtering by related object values on Views is impossible. Or that the Notes hide the note behind a popup instead of showing the note in table view. Or that you can't change the layout of the entity homepages. Or that bizarre news feed interface. And yet they've built a thing which tries to automatically get the twitter or linked in profile. It just screams of bad, bad, here-be-dragons core code which no-one dares touch.

mbesto 12y ago

You just described SAP.

column 12y ago
At first I was thinking the same thing, but you can definitely go a-la-carte with SAP (one could argue there is no other way), and it is totally possible (and largely done) to build your own reasonably competent and market-priced team to maintain it. Come to think of it, SAP does provide added value when it is well-managed and tailored to your business. SAP is quite an unique beast.
- mbesto 12y ago
  Well, you can definitely go a-la-carte with SF.com too, the point is that the sales people push you into kitchen-sinking it. SAP sales does this too, and usually leads to what we used to call "shelfware". I cannot tell you how many companies I worked with that had unused licenses laying around. (funny - most companies I met have no idea how many licenses to purchase..."oh we want the finance module. So we have 1,000 people in finance so gimme ummm 1,000 licenses") Also, both SF.com and SAP will add value if you use and maintain them properly. The biggest difference with Salesforce is that you don't have to manage a data center.

bengali3 12y ago

> "Implementation absolutely requires assistance from an integration partner." > "If you aren't a multi-thousand user customer, Salesforce's sale folks don't take you seriously" Thanks for the breakdon. I strongly agree with both above, which I think leaves plenty of opportunity for those purely focused on SMBs where companies like Hubspot have stated they will stay. Ever heard of a 'Salesforce Developer'? I put that in the same category as 'Websphere developer', 'Dynamics CRM developer' or other 'Huge Headache Engineer'. When the market needs a specialist for your tool (ie one who is familiar with the half-bakery) then how is one NOT leaving opportunity behind? Thanks

Domenic_S 12y ago
> Ever heard of a 'Salesforce Developer'? Yes, and the good ones charge obscene amounts of money. A good niche if it interests you.
- bengali3 12y ago
  yup, a great niche. Possibly even one of the best bang for buck certifications.
matchagaucho 12y ago
"Salesforce Developer/Architect" here. My enterprise domain knowledge is far more valuable than my technical skills, and Salesforce is just a more fluid vehicle for delivering this value compared to traditional on-premise solutions from Oracle, SAP, and IBM. Sure, the upstart CRM vendors have better UIs, but they aren't the real competition. Salesforce is executing a classic innovators dilemma strategy of acquiring these upstarts (desk.com) and allowing them to operate independently in the SMB space as an on-boarding ramp to the enterprise-scale solution.

limeyx 12y ago

Yup. We moved from Zendesk to "Desk.com" for "better integration of customer issues with salesforce" Great idea (i guess) but Desk.com sucks pretty badly so we ended up with worse responses to customer issues...