SF pitches their platform as essential tools for businesses and facilitating cross team collaboration/communication.
But in reality, I have only seen maybe 1-2 teams using a subset of their platform then using legacy equipment to manage other parts of their business and customer relationships.
SF seems more like a flex than an actual essential tool.
We were acquired and forced to integrate Salesforce into our product onboarding and user management.
They ended up having to hire a dev just for this project, it still wasn't done after 2 years. I left shortly after the "MVP" was launched.
Early on I wondered how our new parent company ended up with 8 Salesforce devs... and boy did I learn how.
8 devs was an entire team in my mind, our Epic + Cerner EHR team was 6 people working on significantly more complicated items...
Somewhere a higher-up decides SF is the way to go, and then it's use and implementation is mandated for everyone in the org. They need to justify that cost somehow.
I worked on a small side-project for a major South African bank recently, and they closed a MASSIVE deal with SF a couple of years back. At some point we wanted to employ a customer support desk, because we had a legit need for it. In 30 minutes I had FreshDesk set up and running and working, with custom email domains and a ticketing system and everything. A week later it was shut down because we were not allowed to use anything but SF. It's been 2 years, and the salesforce replacement system is still not live, and the team's forced to support customer directly over the phone or email.
Then when the SF contract isn’t renewed, you get to spend another 2-3 years ripping it out, migrating out data, re-writing contracts with other vendors.
Future work is guaranteed
Still, there's a reason people keep using it. Salesforce is basically a pseudo ERP at this point.
I believe that reason is that they've figured out quality matters not at all when you're pitching to C-levels.
Salesforce's view of this: lock-in.
Wait, is that not what Salesforce is? I thought it was supposed to be a more modern SAP alternative with "cloudy" vibes.
Not quite there just yet.
Salesforce has commerce, OMS, CPQ, reporting (Tableau). Just missing the WMS (warehouse management system) and I think we should be there…
Quite the cluster we have going on.
I am a long term redmine user not even using source code version control features or e-mail integration. One org adopted a supported fork with an updated UI.
I haven’t found anything that can replace redmine for me, and the 16 year old UI is a bonus at this stage it is so functional without any gimmicks
Some of my more memorable projects were standing up very large front-end and backend process for US state governments during the pandemic. When you heard “contact tracing” a LOT of that was done on SF. I did entire fully integrated vaccine information management systems on Salesforce because legacy systems couldn’t adapt to the specifics of the COVID vaccine in time. I think back on it fondly but hope I never have to work like that again.
For small companies Salesforce is just too expensive both in terms of licensing and implementation to be worth it.
/pretty sure I got Dr. Mandy Cohen her job at the CDC ;)
On another note, during the pandemic I built a vaccine signup website for a small hospital in Maine. It was really basic, but the amount of traffic it received and the sense of urgency we felt were overwhelming. Wild times.
I entered the move skeptical of Salesforce's value; I left impressed with the flexibility of the platform but aghast at the costs and development effort required to do much of anything. (I was also disgusted by the rough edges of its myriad acquisitions and their partial integration into the ecosystem—even after many years.)
I have never worked in eCommerce, yet still keep running into areas of the orgs I've worked for that use it's plugin ecosystem to try and accomplish... things- things which usually have nothing to do with sales.
I'm sure it has some actual legitimate functions too but they're so utterly lost in a deluge of MBA bullshit that I don't think it's remotely worth the price. We don't have one where I work. We run a pieces-parts setup of custom apps alongside ancient code in our website, and it definitely has issues and we are addressing, but the CEO has no desire to buy anything like Salesforce. He calls it "data noise:" it looks like data and it looks important but it doesn't mean shit.
Imagine a company that is driven by actual salespeople — like car dealerships, or any telemarketing or charity operation — where someone is making phone calls and trying to make sales.
Salesforce is their CRM, a Customer Relation Manager. You can get a complete history of an individual and their buying history within your company.
I worked for a travel-adjacent company a couple years ago, the entire thing was predicated on a half-dozen sales reps making handfuls of deals worth $50k+ each. Nothing like e-commerce. Salesforce was their Rolodex and their beating heart.
That said, it isn't a good CRM. It's nineties tech that became very essential to very very big companies. Someone else here described it as akin to PhpMyAdmin and he absolutely nailed it.
I think Salesforce is likely to be worth more someday for their Slack acquisition, not unlike how Meta is worth more for Instagram than Facebook.
What this results in is that upper management sees all the features and capabilities in a flashy sales pitch, they close a deal with Salesforce (probably after some less-than-noble negotiation tactics deployed by SF salespeople), and then the mandate comes from the top: "We must implement Salesforce!" And all the tech people look awkwardly at each other not having the faintest fucking clue what that even means.
It seems to be a hard and fast rule of the universe that the more things your thing is designed to do, the worse it does all of those constituent things.
Its core strength (if you don't fall for all their salesy mumbo jumbo magical mystery tour weasel words) is that "native applications" require zero integrations/configurations. They "just work".
Salesforce is the CRM. It is the source of truth for our customers, orders, vendors. It is also the service (help desk agents use their VOIP to help customers and transcripts are automatically logged). It does the marketing. It also does our financials. It also integrates with our survey SaaS.
It also powers a lot of front end because our front end stack sucks. We use SOSL to power our front end search. It also creates micro-sites that our front end points to.
They also have an ecosystem of third-party apps that "just works".
With all that said. It is very expensive. Mulesoft is horrible. I wish they tone-down the salesy bullshit; they don't need the Microsoft-Azure level of bullshit -- Salesforce actually works.