Salesforce yields to activist pressure with harsh new policies for engineers
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Secondly, their business model has attempted to diversify from just being about sales but fundamentally they are long the economy in general. If the economy is struggling, the appetite for “sales enablement” and collaboration-type tooling is going to wither. Some of the products they acquired (Tableau, Slack in particular) are pretty cool but came at a hefty price tag that is going to be tough to recoup as the environment generally gets tougher and their competition (free and paid) increases.
I don’t think either engineering or sales productivity is going to solve this and if there’s some magic there I’m pretty skeptical that BCG would find it.
I agree. But this Titanic has many more years to very slowly sink, because large enterprises take forever to migrate away from Salesforce.
And the Salesforce sales teams are even better than Oracle at selling a crap product at high prices. That will buy them a lot of time.
One thing about Salesforce (anecdotally) is that CRM systems are painful to put in place because they require people to change. They promise that once the processes/workflows are redesigned this “digital transformation” of the business will result in various benefits. This gives Salesforce an army of free sales people at the big consulting firms who essentially sell this transformation project and salesforce as an side-effect.
However people don’t want to change. For this reason at every org where I’ve worked where there has been a big project to put in a CRM system (not just Salesforce - I’ve seen it with Siebel as well) there is a huge painful project to get the CRM system in and afterwards there is massive management pressure to try to force people to use the CRM system in place of existing processes (typically using email to pass around spreadsheets). This pressure is because the benefits of the CRM don’t typically accrue to the people who have to put data into the system. Typically they accrue to the managers of those people. So CRMs often end up out of date, full of duplicate records, bad data etc rather than the perfect repository of institutional knowledge they are billed as.
The promise of the new gen I listed above is because they operate on the data sources (rather than requiring the people to change their existing flows) the analytical insights can come from existing systems and processes without as much organisational pain. It remains to be seen whether they end up as sticky in the long term.
How is this different from any B2B SaaS product?
So the tradeoff is most b2b saas products which are special-purpose tend to be easier to deploy and more directly suitable for their purpose vs salesforce being a "do-everything but maybe not that well" solution.
[1] https://www.ncino.com/ have built an entire business out of getting salesforce to do this
Huh, so SalesForce, up to this point had, no idea on how to measure if their salespeople or developers were doing anything useful?
That seems implausible so I assume this is just about reducing headcount without having to pay the costs of laying people off. Or am I being too cynical?
At least, that’s how a lot of MBB consulting is.
That their short term desire for a brief bump in profit regardless of long term cost has an impact on the executive management of the company is more an indictment of the ineffectiveness of that company than anything else. The use of consultants to launder their incompetence is a BS activity - I've never heard of any consultants in these circumstances doing anything other than say that the executives are awesome, and that all the employees have too many rights and need to be put in their place and/or fired, as close to the bounds of legality as possible.
The “poverty” narrative a lie, a rehashing of the old “savages” narrative. It goes hand in hand with this idea that "poor" countries need the western world’s help. No they don’t. Has forced indebtedness helped them? No. And most of their people did not even get a say in the matter of becoming indebted. Advertising of nonprofits and the like is still littered with posters of white men kissing little black babies. It’s quite strange.
In fact, America as a culture is quite new and though it has many good qualities, seeds which can be watered to make for a better future, at present it has become especially barbaric, which is of course not news. These other “impoverished” countries generally have much more historic and developed cultures, ways of handling themselves, etc.
Also, it’s not like “capitalism” was proven and tested before “it” came to be. It has been an incredibly complex process. And it’s not that “it” even will be replaced at some single moment. It’s always a process, and this particular process is already underway.
Notwithstanding that, the social problems arising from extreme inequality (with its roots in a type of capitalism that lacks empathy for people) are very real. I see them all the time in homeless people living beside the freeway when I visit LA or under the underpasses in SF. Here in the UK there is a growing group of working people who have had to choose between heating and eating this winter[1]. I’m not sure they feel like they have been elevated out of poverty.
[1] The guardian has been running a series of “Heat or Eat Diaries” where people document this situation eg https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/14/heat-o...
Don't forget to blink once in a while, might not be seeing things clearly.
We might disagree on the relative importance of the concessions required, but I hope we can all agree that there is simply no perfect system (yet).
Usually “only works in theory” is applied to the other economic systems which tend to sell high on the idea of equality, but devolve into the same problems of haves and have-nots.
Or, at least, of those that we can remember we’ve tried—- where our memory consists strictly of… the set of written artifacts that have survived all the way until today. Subject to interpretation, and with a built-in bias for the more recent.
What percent of all human organizational structures in history exists in that memory? How many exist in dig sites buried beneath the oceans, where the coastlines once stood? How many were written down on something temporary, such as, say, paper, and were destroyed before we could read them?
I think this is why people feel strongly that there could be a better approach. We haven’t explored much of the space at all. Though any unexplored option would be very risky to try at scale, of course, and perhaps there lies the rub.
US railroads have entered the chat
I don't get what you're saying. I didn't even know railroads were people, but you learn something new every day, I guess.
The times we live in.