Hacker News Reader

Comment by cdevs | Hacker News Reader

Anything that any salesman or customer service employee mentions that plugs into salesforce. A mail button for sales force ? A print button for salesforce ? A make my phone call customer button inside salesforce button? Oh sweet only $20 per month per salesman....so we have 50 people on salesforce so only 1,000 a month, only $12,000 a year? This should help get us out of dept so fast !!! FML.

View on HN

I'm guessing you weren't pushing for Salesforce, but out of interest, did your company evaluate any other CRM platforms? If so, do you know why they chose Salesforce?

You would incur the same type of thing in Dynamics. It's a hit or miss trying to figure out if a feature is even possible and how to implement on your own. There really isn't an open-source collection like you would hope. Subscription or dev. consultant?

There's not an open-source CRM I'm aware of that's a strong enough competitor to Salesforce, however there are much cheaper options available. Are you in the market for one?

They bought into it when they were a tiny company over 7-8 years ago and barely used it for a few years, a few yeas ago me and some other devs joined and said why do you have this and why spend this much money for storing a customers email and some notes when we you also have 2 other systems doing the same thing. We tried to pull them away and build a small system for their small needs but that's when they dug the hole ten times deeper with numerous integration. No matter how big or small the integration the prices add up quickly. They were a company with out developers at one point and still never learned to ask if we can do something vs buying into mailchimp or salesforce plugin. No matter what the CEO wants he's afraid to take away the salesmans costly toys.

Interesting, I have no direct experience with salesforce but I have heard numerous people discuss similar things as either consultant centric services or outright business models. Is this that common?

Honestly leaving salesforce is a piece of cake if it weren't for the ecosystem of other tools and integrations. A few years back I did a simple export of all our salesforce data and made a demo of a salesforce clone and if that wasn't good enough it was easy to import into sugar crm. 1 out of 40 salesman complained it wasn't exactly the same so they stayed and went full force with plugins and now it's a web of plugins that's harder to escape. As soon as a salesman sees a ad for "this plugin will make your life easier and your job " it's done, they setup a demo with our CEO and beg for it like it's a Christmas pony.

I think it's a two step process. First, install SuiteCRM, second, replace all those salesforce plugins with a single SuiteCRM developer who can craft custom plugins.

This has the added benefit that you can then sell those SuiteCRM plugins to other businesses.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com