The lock-in to the platform appears to be very fierce. Are there viable routes to exit Salesforce if anyone ever needed to?
(Note: I’m not saying Salesforce is doomed or anything, just the layoffs got me thinking in that direction theorically).
-Rootstock -Accounting Seed -FinancialForce
That said, I design ERP integrations for a living. SF based ERPs are consistently the lowest quality and most limited ERPs we deal with. I would highly recommend that any finance professional seriously considering implementing a SF based ERP take the following steps:
-Burn a large pile of money -Tell 2-5 of your finance employees to waste 30% of their work hours for 3-6 months -Implement an non-SF based ERP
The end results will be identical.
I'd like to ride along on an ERP integration some day.
I've been a part of a scaling start-up and it just feels like the kludge of tools small teams buy would be better served by a more integrated system. So I'd like to see what a big implementation looks like and figure out what pieces might be usable for small teams.
Wish I could take people on a ride-along, but because of the financial/business data involved it’s just not possible.
That said, I’m a big believer in going with what is popular. You’ll get more features, better support, better docs, and a community to ask questions to. And most importantly, more software will integrate with it. This is crucial. The last thing you want is your finance team having to manually key data from your satellite systems into your ERP.
Never ever let someone sell you on a niche ERP.
Other than industry, the big deciding factor is how big you are. SAP targets the Enterprise market. These ERPs are absurdly complex systems, and you’d only want one if you are big enough to have dedicated ERP consultants/admins.
That said, for general small businesses I would recommend: -Quickbooks Online -Xero
When you outgrow those, you’ll have a better idea what you want. Oracle NetSuite and Sage Intacct are pretty common next steps for digital companies.
This is a big question though. I finish with this hard-earned wisdom: enterprise software is only as good as whoever is implementing and administrating it. A good VAR makes all the difference in the world.
This offers a strategy to read old SFDC data BI tools or in parallel with using a new CRM.
However the real SFDC lock-in is around business process. If your global Sales or Support team lives in SFDC it’s not easy to retrain them to another system.
Not my area, but I was under the impression Salesforce was trying to pinch continual-export by jacking up prices on bulk data exports.
Perhaps increased limits are bundled into other license costs.
Their pricing and permissions models are both hard to understand too :)
I've only been exposed to it on ad hoc projects, but I've heard customers say they limit the amount of what they stream into their warehouses for (reasons).
I wouldn't be surprised if their pricing model hits it, even obliquely. They've built a nice "Salesworld" toll-bridged garden. Everything sales needs must be transferred in. Everything sales has that everyone else needs must be transferred out. :/
But I think the business model behind it is you hire a "Salesforce consultant" to steer your integration with the understanding that you can replace a small team of developers doing a home-rolled solution with a single developer who runs your SF integration. And Salesforce slurps up 60% of the labor cost savings and you keep the 40% and declare success.
Really so much problematic SaaS (or PaaS) stuff all boils down to crude hacks to work around labor shortages.
Currently, we are moving forward with Odoo, which has its own quirks but has better functionality than Salesforce IMO. No transition is fun, but an ETL from SF to Odoo is very doable (odooable), and the feature sets are pretty equivalent.
HubSpot is not a replacement for hugely complex organizations that needs to dump tens of millions or more into a Salesforce instance (software + labor), but for mid-size and below it's great.
There are many things I admire about Salesforce.
But, we decidedly don't want to become like Salesforce when we grow up. We have been committed to SMBs for 16+ years now, and not planning to change that anytime soon.
They have grown through a lot of M&A, we built our platform from the ground-up for SMBs.
There is room in the market for both Salesforce and HubSpot to succeed. Salesforce for large enterprises (the Fortune 1000) and HubSpot for SMBs.
I just left Salesforce a bit ago for HubSpot (see my other comment in this thread), and as someone with a bit of a "kool-aid allergy", so to speak, I've been pleasantly surprised by HubSpot's willingness to say "this is what we're good at, and we're going to stick to being really good at that", even when the alternative is potentially really lucrative (but massive pain).
There are a number of ways that life at HubSpot has been a huge improvement to me, but chief among them is that the _employees_ still matter more than the raw "maximum possible profit, screw everything else" focus that I constantly saw at Salesforce, and the "we don't have to eat every single market (poorly) just because others have tried to do so (poorly)" mentality is evidence of that, IMO.
Please keep being that!
And to the grand-parent commenter, I'm _very_ leery of anything that sounds unpleasantly familiar, and probably overly-cynical about large tech companies at this point...and so far I've found pleasant surprises at HubSpot, and I don't see desire (at least yet — it's been only 6 months for me) to be like Salesforce.
Why worry about the company having economic issues, unless it means degraded service or it getting shut off?
How is this different than any other SaaS?
This is good, especially for small new teams at startups that want to shop different tools before having a lot of stuff to move around.
All SaaS aspires to be sticky because investors told them to be that way. Almost all SaaS with institutional investors has to make stickiness noises. But it is easier for some than others.
If not Open Source, it should use open standard APIs and data models, with free or cheap data export.
If you don't like it, administer your own database.