
What I Learned at Salesforce.com - pragides
https://medium.com/@Mr.P/7-habits-of-successful-saas-startups-578c9da33e7e
======
eitally
Salesforce may have been a lean, mean sales ops tool back in 2004, but as the
company has grown through acquisition and its own sales force has hugely
expanded, it's platform is just not viable for many potential customers.

1) Implementation absolutely requires assistance from an integration partner.

2) Developing on top of it is an exercise in patience and futility. Their dev
platform & APIs are inconsistent and half-baked.

3) You can't just license a la carte. No matter what you think you need, you
end up being quoted and convinced you need the kitchen sink instead.

4) It is prohibitively expensive compared to pure focus CRMs like SugarCRM,
and doesn't have nearly the engineering polish (I can't believe I'm saying
this) of things like Microsoft Dynamics.

5) If you aren't a multi-thousand user customer, Salesforce's sale folks don't
take you seriously and it's hard to feel like you mean anything to them. I
have never received such poor support, and this includes other companies
famous for poor support (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle).

It's like they're still pretending to be a lean, mean, sexy startup when
they're firmly in enterprise territory, yet they refuse to behave in ways
appealing to enterprise customers. Moreover, they have spawned a whole slew of
SAAS providers whose sole purpose is to interface other things into Salesforce
(like 4Bridge from 4Thought, which connects Eloqua (lead generation on the
web) to Salesforce. Sure, Salesforce has some huge customers -- at Dreamforce
a few years ago, Cisco claimed to have something like 30,000 seats and Dell
had 20,000 -- but that's not the entirety of the market. To me, Salesforce is
the embodiment of the perception that many SAAS companies exist solely to
support other SAAS companies, and that they bring little to no value to
anyone.

~~~
bengali3
> "Implementation absolutely requires assistance from an integration partner."

> "If you aren't a multi-thousand user customer, Salesforce's sale folks don't
> take you seriously"

Thanks for the breakdon. I strongly agree with both above, which I think
leaves plenty of opportunity for those purely focused on SMBs where companies
like Hubspot have stated they will stay. Ever heard of a 'Salesforce
Developer'? I put that in the same category as 'Websphere developer',
'Dynamics CRM developer' or other 'Huge Headache Engineer'. When the market
needs a specialist for your tool (ie one who is familiar with the half-bakery)
then how is one NOT leaving opportunity behind?

Thanks

~~~
Domenic_S
> _Ever heard of a 'Salesforce Developer'?_

Yes, and the good ones charge obscene amounts of money. A good niche if it
interests you.

~~~
bengali3
yup, a great niche. Possibly even one of the best bang for buck
certifications.

------
codeulike
Its funny seeing Salesforce get knocked on here. I've been working with it
quite a lot. They deliver two upgrades with new features every year that are
deployed in minutes for each customer, and in nearly all cases, previous
features and APIs and customer customisations continue to be supported. To be
able to extend and extend and extend like that without breaking, their core
codebase must be incredibly well engineered. They must have their internal
modularity, testing, documentation and design really well figured out.

How many other live applications can you think of that have evolved
continuously for over a decade without becoming an unmaintainable mess?

I work with charities and SF offer an automatic 80% discount on everything
which makes them a pretty good option. Why bother custom building a CRUD-type
database when you can knock it together in Salesforce using (mostly) point and
click?

On the downside: too much marketing fluff (Can't google anything to do with
Salesforce coding without hitting loads of marketing bollocks), really bad
names/constantly changing names for features (Salesforce1 - anyone know what
that is yet?), really complicated licensing if you're trying to figure out how
to do X+Y with cheapest licences. And the names of the licences keep changing
....

But technically, they must be doing something very right under the hood. And
while I'm at it, I like their core API, its basically an ORM.

~~~
edwinnathaniel
Check my comment somewhere here as to how they ensure things don't break upon
update.

PS: Salesforce1 is their new platform that bridge web and mobile. It's not
just one or two thing. It's everything. It's how they build Salesforce...

------
wampus
Is someone testing their MarketSpeak Generator?

I absolutely hate dealing with vendors who use Salesforce.com. It's a red flag
that support might be dismal. The only lesson to be taken from this is that
you can build a business around a terrible product.

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
As someone in software support who had Salesforce "forced" upon us, I invite
you to consider that it's as maddening for us as it is for the end-user. I've
closed maybe 1500 tickets through SalesForce, and I find the system atrocious.

Among other duties, I am in charge of maintaining the Knowledge Base for our
product. SF's Knowledge article capabilities, however, are abysmal. The
default formatting is atrocious, barely above plaintext. SF will allow you to
try to "jazz it up" by turning on HTML mode. However, due to the incredibly
small character limit per article, trying to insert any more than a few
paragraphs with proper HTML formatting will quickly exhaust that limit (the
HTML tags themselves are counted as part of the character limit). Something as
simple as creating a Table of Contents for a longer article hence becomes a
nightmare in implementation.

To boot, those articles do not have static links that I can disseminate,
meaning that when I'm trying to point people to a particular article, I have
to tell them "Go to the Knowledge Base and search for 'X'." This is, frankly,
embarrassing to put on something like a Newsletter.

~~~
cssmoo
Hey if you think that's bad, we went one worse! This might make you feel
better but it makes me envy your position.

In the effort to integrate two distinct factions in the business, they decided
the best approach was not to find one holistic tool that works for both cases,
nor unify the process across the company but to do the following crime:

Integrate an on-site established JIRA processes with cocked up Salesforce lack
of processes with bidirectional escalation and updates!

So now the shitball of chaos and incompetence that is support and sales teams
can directly lay turds into the development team's toolchain, not that they're
any better in the majority. Likewise the other way, the developers can write
internal swearing and technical information all over salesforce cases which
can get published to the clients all the time...

And yes we're doing the same with the knowledgebase but we're pushing it and
release notes from JIRA into it.

Now I'm no fan of JIRA the money-sink by any means, as a guy who supported it
for a number of years, but neither platform is a good match for a well
established company devoid of any reasonable processes and going through a
rapid reinvention phase.

Ugh.

------
mjburgess
Isn't the whole "N-Point Evangelism" getting tired and cliched yet? Success
isn't N-principled and de-constructing a company's history and "moves" into
this form is just cheap pop-psych.

If you wanted to find out why SF.com worked, you'd need to write a large book.
You'd need chapters on each key individual, each key decision, the environment
they were operating in (how lucky they were), the risks, the interpersonal
conflict and cooperation. There's _at least_ a lifetime of work gone into SF,
split across hundreds of people+.

~~~
calibraxis
Yes, and there's stuff which can never be said. As opposed to bullshit like _"
Make Trust Your #1 Value."_ (Presumably, the author (PR flack ghostwriter?)
must've been laughing or eye-rolling while writing it.)

For example, one high-profile guy I know isn't about to blog about how he made
his money screwing over his cofounders, or his ruminations about how
incompetent his employees think he is. :)

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
I like the fact that "Make Trust Your #1 Value" is #5 on the list.

------
tomblomfield
"Salesforce had a truly aspirational goal: to change the way enterprise
software is delivered."

If that's what counts as aspirational around here, I'm in the wrong job.

~~~
arethuza
16 years ago when they were founded that _was_ an aspirational goal for
enterprise software and this is a CRM which a lot of organizations see as very
critical to their ongoing success.

~~~
smt88
I think what he means is that people should aspire to do more than lower costs
for enterprise clients.

~~~
arethuza
It's not just about costs - it's about ease of provision, access (salespeople
are out and about a lot so this is a huge deal), customizability, ease of
integration etc.

Salesforce were pretty courageous back in '99 basing their entire strategy
around SaaS.

~~~
doyoulikeworms
I'm not trying to be snarky, but you just listed a bunch of costs.

~~~
codeulike
No, its a bunch of technical challenges that no-one had successfully tackled
16 years ago

------
andor
_Many potential customers (and investors!) of Salesforce insisted that Benioff
provide an “on-premise” version in addition to a SaaS offering.

It took the resolve of Marc, Parker, Dave, and Frank to stay true to their
mission — to upend the software industry. They heard what their customers were
asking for, but delivered something better. They refused to build an “on-
premise” version of their product. And if they had, it would have prevented
them from building a platform for SaaS applications._

Why is that? I can install also applications for the Android and iOS Platforms
"on premise".

------
cconcepts
Really appreciated your insights. Have actually used your points to do a bit
of a review of our long term marketing strategy.

------
zqxwce
Do they make any money?

~~~
Axsuul
For their investors.

~~~
anon808
Through stock appreciation, not net income distribution.

------
edwinnathaniel
The amount of negative comments in this thread is as suspected when one brings
up enterprise software to the world of HN where the community prefers "clean
canvas" to draw the ideal world and call it elegant piece of art.

I would suggest people to view Salesforce from the perspective of the business
users (or check this comment as well:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9184356](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9184356))

The place I work for at the moment uses Salesforce and we're paying lots of
money to them (company with 100 people employees, balanced between
engineering, support, sales/bdr, marketing, hr). I've never heard our
Sales/SE/Support complained about Salesforce. In fact, they continue to find
better tools/vendors inside Appexchange that can help them to be more
productive closing Sales.

Our software integrate with Salesforce to some extend w.r.t to tracking
customer acquisition, license, and retention. I can't complain. Salesforce is
better than any other Enterprise software I've dealt with before.

I had a chance to talk to the CTO of Salesforce1 yesterday while he was demo-
ing the Salesforce1 platform on his iPhone. He showed me how Sys-Admins (sys-
admins of Salesforce themselves) can write a small "module" that can be
deployed and visible inside the Salesforce1 mobile app immediately.

That's probably one of the few "enterprise" mobile apps I've seen so far where
you can allow your customer to develop a small-modular-app to be deployed
within the _same_ Salesforce1 mobile app but only visible to your Organization
(or to certain group/role within your Organization).

Our customers purchased our solution (we are an APM company) to monitor their
Salesforce instances because they need a 3rd-party to ensure Salesforce does
not break their SLA. (We're talking about Fortune 500 company that signed $10m
contract with Salesforce; Salesforce will be held accountable if they break
SLA).

I asked him how Salesforce test Salesforce itself (the whole thing, that big
ball of mud if you want to call it that way). He went off and explain how they
rigorously test the whole system in details. That includes testing the mobile
app... and testing the "custom app" within Salesforce ecosystems.

So I got curious and asked him further: how do you test those custom apps
written by the customers? His replied was as follows:

1\. When the customer sign up, they agree to let Salesforce run test-
automation of their custom app

2\. Salesforce tries their best to educate "Salesforce Developer" to write
automation test that will be executed as part of Salesforce update/deploy
cycle

3\. If the customer/vendor does not do that (or write tests that don't test
properly), it's their fault.

That's insane! I've never seen an enterprise software company go that far!

During the event, I get the impression that Salesforce cares a lot of
automation, automation testing, and to ensure "things don't break". Can't say
the same thing with Facebook even though they're developing lots of "cool"
cutting edge tech. But then again, Salesforce customers force Salesforce to
not break things or else refund...

TLDR: Salesforce as an enterprise company is pretty good compare the rest. HN
community is definitely not the target market so it's natural to see negative
comments.

------
aboutus
_All of these companies owe their very existence to Salesforce.com._

Typical Salesforce propaganda. I stopped reading there.

~~~
rconti
I _should_ have stopped reading there. Instead I just laughed to myself and
continued on. Reading turned to skimming turned to skipping a paragraph or two
later when it was filled with the absolute worst marketing/PR buzzword bingo
straight out of .. not even Business 101, but some hack shilling a "how to
make your business succeed" book.

