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Comment by matwood | Hacker News Reader

My sales people love it.

Salespeople usually worked with Salesforce in other companies, and some of them are even familiar with the dozens of low-code, no-code tools that you can use with Salesforce. All of them making the data model absurdly worse than what it already is.

Sales and marketing executives are usually the most hostile stakeholders an engineering department may have (tip: Sometimes Legal and Compliance are your best allies when in a fight against Marketing and Sales), they absolutely hate engineering because they are absurdly focused on the short run.

Give them Salesforce, Office 365, some connectors and some no-code tool and they poke holes the size of the Titanic in your security, but they don't care, because they want their brilliant ideas implemented now, and salesforce and excel let them do whatever they please now.

Is there a good rundown on what they see / like?

I’ve only seen salesforce from a non sales perspective and it was a horror show, but I’m curious what it looks like to sales folks who like it?

The thing is, Salesforce understands sales people, and the product is designed to make their lives easier and more effective. And you know what, they are good at it, that's why they are so big.

But they are horrible at integrating with anything else, making engineers happy, make data and AI people happy. They wall everything in. Guess what, you are not their customer. The sales people are.

So yeah, I hate them, but even more reluctantly, I admit that despite the multi million dollar invoice they send each year, we haven't really found a worthwile replacement. And most of our staff is actually quite positive about them because the old system was MS Dynamics, which is even worse.

My sales people hated it. They all looked around clueless as to why they were handed another place to keep contacts. It do didn't anything they were told it would. Broken promises, shattered dreams, and an executive shocked that CRM means "place to store phone numbers."

It's sold as the magic sales tool that does everything. And it does do everything, as long as a developer builds whatever everything is you need first. Otherwise it doesn't do anything. That's pretty heartbreaking to watch people realize on repeat.

This thread captures the hatred for salesforce well: it is aggressively sales first. It's the antithesis of modern engineering culture that looks to provide value to customers and tech first by putting them first.

Salesforce puts sales people first, and salespeople's job is often reduced to extracting value from customers and tech.

Spot on!

Same where I use to work, and upper mang. is scared to remove it due to sales people revolting. They tried years ago and a revolt happened and the cancelled they project.

This is at a fortune 500 company.

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