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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like it could be disrupted by focusing on a subset of the market and growing up into something without the baggage?

A calcified org like that can't move fast.

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That's already happening, and it's causing further fragmentation, so now companies are investing in "IPaaS" tools to merge their data. Which creates even more non-transferable knowledge. It seems customer and marketing data is a mess because marketers will invest in every shiny new tool that promises "actionable insights" from a mountain of data. As terrible as Salesforce may be, it's not as bad as Salesforce + Segment + Informatica + Looker + Lotame + etc.... But that's the world digital advertising has created. Anything for an extra click.

Each extra tool provides a date for a date when marketing will be useful. As a pm I was told that we couldn’t advertise because our marketing integration wasn’t done.

A CMO can go from shop to shop delivering nothing but broken ad tech integrations with the job of fixing the mess from the last person.

You're right and I think people have tried but nobody has made a killer product yet. Everyone is either trying to copy Salesforce or too niche.

in my experience, every vendor we looked at who competes with salesforce is not interested in your business unless they are allowed to take over your entire backoffice. for example, we only wanted it for the CRM and order ingestion via manual entry & API, and that was okay, while other vendors insisted on also taking over our inventory management, invoicing, fulfillment, etc, rather than allowing us to simply integrate with the minimal set of APIs which we needed to sync our systems with theirs.

Give Hubspot a gander. We want to handle your entire front office. But we're also perfectly content just handling customer data and gdpr requests for you.

I will say that I feel better about our clients underusing a $2500/quarter HubSpot account than I do about our clients wasting $100k+ on Salesforce Pardot.

I was pretty sure Firebase was in a position to kill Salesforce’s platform, but I guess they never sold it as business platform (plus Google wood never be able to execute human Sales and Support at Salesforce scale)

I think Zendesk has taken over the CRM part of Salesforce.

Man, I would use Zendesk just because they have better UI, SF UI is very crowded.

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