Ask HN: Why is Salesforce still successful? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is Salesforce still successful?

12 pointsiFelix11 comments

I was looking for a good CRM and Salesforce seemed like the unquestioned leader.

We’ve had a meeting with a sales rep in their luxurious offices at the foot of the Eiffel tower. Despite 2 hours of phone interview before, the sales rep had no understanding of our business and the product demo was extremely disappointing.

The platform is not user friendly at all and the transition to the new ‘lightning experience’ makes it even more terrible, forcing the user to go back and forth between the two interfaces and to cope with outdated documentation.

They have a large number of complex solutions with as many different pricing plan and limitations, a closed platform, no big enthusiasm around the community, a high pricing (130€/user/month for the sales product only). They claimed to be the “most innovative company in the world” but want customers to sign a 24-month contract. They do not provide any help in setting up the platform. And I could keep going…

To me it seems that Salesforce is buying growth by investing heavily on sales and very little in product development. The only benefit of Salesforce over its competitors comes from its monopoly position. Salesforce remains the only platforms to have integrations with the software we use (integrations which they did not develop themselves of course).

I had a quick look at their financial statements which reassured my opinion: negative earning, growing capital surplus, growing goodwill… In the annual report, the company is fond of separating out "non-GAAP" earnings to show adjusted positive income. But the reality is that long periods of GAAP losses means the company should not be worth 46$Bn.

In the SaaS industry ‘fast eats big’. Salesforce can only afford so many acquisition of overpriced start-ups and hopefully someone will come with a great product that they can’t kill in the egg.

Why do you use Salesforce? Can you recommend a cheaper and better alternative?

Someone will disrupt Salesforce but it will take real innovation in how information systems are built and interact with each other. A few years ago, when "cloud" wasn't as buzz worthy necessary in marketing copy as it is today, Salesforce's main marketing message was "No-Software". Anyone who has used SF (Or Netsuite, or I assume any ERP systems customization features) knows that those customization features are such a pain in the ass that hiring expensive consultants to set it up for you was the only sane option for actual companies. So No-Software was actually "Spend months getting your specs correct and getting some self appointed SF expert to set things up for you and then be at the mercy of their support staff when it all goes wrong because no one actually knows what the hell was built in the first place".

No one has actually solved the "No-Software" problem yet. We arn't living in that utopia yet where I can build a business IT system without writing a line of code or wanting to kill myself (Building Customizations in SF/Netsuite will do this to you). Someone will figure out, and then SF along with all the legacy apps, along with all the old ERP systems will finally be left in the dust.

I'm finding things like a combination of something like Podio, Zapier and other integrations are what are going to finally unseat salesforce.

I've spent the last 3 years searching for a really good CRM solution. I've tried many, many different suites including the well known names and the not so well known ones.

If your requirements are fairly simple you might like SalesWise. Slick UI and minimal data entry although a little sparse on feature set and integrations but that will get better during the course of the year. The biggest takeaway for me in all this time has been that ultimately you have to build your own CRM that adapts to your workflow. That doesnt mean you have to code it ground up though. The 3 platforms that seem really promising in this area -- depending on your needs -- are AirTable, Pipefy and Podio. Check out their pre-made templates.

We just spent a year getting off of Salesforce. Our account was closed Friday. I feel a huge weight lifted off my shoulders.

Also, I say "year", but it was really 2 months to write our own CRM system that exactly fits our workflow and then another 2 months making sure we had all of our data synced out of Salesforce and correct.

Bad things about Salesforce - the UI is terrible. - development of anything custom is slow and cumbersome - their API limits are strict and not very well documented. If you go over your limit you are locked out until the next hour and there seems to be some hourly limit on calls you can make even if you have those requests available. You can only send 1000 email messages a day programmatically. Etc. - Support is an absolutely terrible experience. They give you none of the tools you need to debug your own problems, they have 8+ hour response times for urgent requests. You have to go through 2 levels of support before you can even get to someone who can help you. You can only have 1 support contact for your entire org and God help you if they are on vacation when you need support. The list goes on. - I can develop the same features in our own rails app at least 10x faster than I can in Salesforce and I've spoken to some other people with similar experience (team of 2 rails devs outpacing a team of 10 Salesforce devs on the same features significantly)

Things to do if you do go with Salesforce. - always always always keep the canonical source of your data in house. Sync things up to Salesforce with the API and back with outbound messages (which don't get called in triggers, so try to avoid using those too). There will come a day when you want to leave Salesforce and if your data is half in house and half in Salesforce you'll spend 6 months trying to get them synced correctly. - try /not/ to build too many custom workflows in Salesforce. They are hard to develop, hard to test, extremely more limited than a "normal" we app. - make sure you stay on top of your API request usage and be ready to ask Salesforce for more ($300 for 10,000 more requests a year iirc) because it will take them 12+ hours to actually increase your limit even if you explain to your rep that you're going to lose more business in the next hour then you pay Salesforce per year. They just can't make that change quickly. - find a quality experienced Salesforce developer to teach your team about developing for Salesforce. It's a huge tangled mess and professional guidance is critical.

Basically, if you have a competent engineering team think really really hard about choosing Salesforce. Most of Salesforce is simply handling a few database tables and basic workflows. Any engineering team should be able to handle that. If you really can't live without that one integration try to use Salesforce as lightly as possible. It will save you lots of time, frustration, stress, and heartache later.

Thanks for the insightful answer. I will definitely keep this in mind. Problem is that we are a young startup and engineering teams need to focus on product development. Before the meeting we were thinking of using Salesforce as our main data source but this is no more a question. I guess we'll go with a temporary light integration.

We chose Salesforce when we were tiny too, and it worked ok for 2-3 years and then it became a huge liability.

I definitely understand the feeling that the main product is top priority, but if you are building a company to last your internal tools are going to play a huge role in your success. As an example, by writing our own CRM to match our process instead of the slow, crappy, hard to use, hard to maintain thing we built in Salesforce we basically immediately got a 3-4x increase in our sales teams production. It took 2 engineers 2 months to build that, but if we had started with our own system in the beginning it would have grown organically with us and we wouldn't have had to spend that time all at once. Oh, and your going to have to spend time developing in Salesforce if you do any more than their out of the box experience and that is going to take 2-10x as long as just doing it yourself anyway.

I'm sure Salesforce is right for some teams. But a small agile startup is diametrically opposed to how Salesforce makes you work, imo at least.

We used Salesforce because it was forced upon us. We initially had an in-house solution and there were issues extracting data for the sales team. Probably the brand name itself and the fact that the sales team were familiar with it led the management team to go with it. In the end, we wasted countless developer hours trying to integrate it with our systems.

"Salesforce remains the only platforms to have integrations with the software we use"

If you identified the software you need to integrate with, it might be easier for people to suggest alternatives to Salesforce that would be useful to you.

Sure, thanks. We use Front [1] and need something that integrates with a soft phone (we use Aircall [2] but we could switch to something else).

[1] https://frontapp.com [2] https://aircall.io

As someone who recently started working at a place that relies on Salesforce, I too cannot believe how prevalent it is. I feel like we could accomplish basically everything SF does on a Shared spreadsheet, Streak and Google Drive.

If you are a ruby shop, I'd look at fatfreecrm:

https://github.com/fatfreecrm/fat_free_crm

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