When you codify your business processes, actual code is going to be needed as well. Enter Apex and heroku.
Slack is a way for SFDC to codify another part of your business processes—communication.
That said, SFDC does a lot of things that fairly give it a bad rap. Their developer experience is really bad, their apps are not that great, and lightning is still not adopted at many companies years after its release.
Are there no better ways to automate sales and marketing?
Once you start using Salesforce, do all of your leads get stuck in the platform, or can you export them and do your own analytics queries? How deep is their lock-in?
> Slack is a way for SFDC to codify another part of your business processes—communication.
It feels too freeform to be automated. It's just chat with a so-so search interface.
SFDC has one of the most robust APIs I've seen...you can export pretty much everything. I actually really enjoy working with the soql rest API, because it's simple, effective, and discoverable.
The lock-in is instead in their integrations. It is almost guaranteed that there won't be another platform that has all of the integrations you need, so you stick with SFDC. You add more integrations over time and the lock-in deepens.
To some extent, as a business owner or CRO, you want the data to be stuck in Salesforce. The price of Salesforce is small compared to the cost of salespeople maintaining their own relationships directly with clients -- and then potentially walking away.
The developer experience is sadistic, but Lightning is the worst. It takes forever to load basic information because it all has to cycle through JS callbacks. Try opening a link (or a bunch!) in a background tab: it doesn't load anything until you're actually looking at the tab.
I don't understand what this means at all. Let's say I make pies. My sales process is I go to grocery stores and try to get them to carry my pies. My marketing is I buy commercial time on the local tv station. How do I codify this into a SaaS product?
Salesforce is a SaaS because it’s in the cloud. The first company to take a big het on the Cloud, in fact.
If you’re still confused, then spend an hour or so reading their marketing literature and kicking the tires in their free Developer Orgs. Simple as.
The reason I don't call it a sales lead tool is that is about 10% of their use case now. They've expanded significantly and companies use them for just about everything.
Every time someone at your company uses your phone system to call a customer, it is auto-logged in Salesforce. Every email is logged. Every sale, every transaction, every interaction.
Now when "Bob the amazing Sales Guy" leaves you have a central repository of every contact he's made in every company he's worked with on your behalf. This means you build institutional knowledge instead of tribal knowledge.
So now lets say a couple years have gone by, and you want to publish a white paper on pie consumption, so you hand the project off to your research and analytics team. Thanks to Salesforce they have knowledge of every person your company has ever contacted about pies, and therefore have a great jumping off point to start with interviews for the whitepaper.
Along they way they've bought a ton of companies that do various enterprisey things. Now they're a one stop shop to run everything a business might need.