
What's Salesforce? - dvdhsu
https://tryretool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers/
======
dvdhsu
Hi, I'm one of the authors of the post. As an engineer, I've always wondered
what Salesforce was. It seemed like a clunky, expensive piece of legacy
software that the "business people" always used.

Since starting a SaaS company myself (Retool;
[https://tryretool.com](https://tryretool.com)), I now understand a lot more,
hah. Salesforce, basically, is the source of truth for your customer, for the
business-side of things (sales, marketing, operations, etc.). So the stuff we
would typically store in our databases (company name, users, how much they pay
us, etc.) is stored inside of Salesforce. And Salesforce gives you a bunch of
views that a typical company would need — views to update the close date of a
contract, the value of a contract, to take notes on a call, etc.

The cool thing about Salesforce is how customizable it is — you can change the
database models (e.g. "add a column to the `Leads` table"), as well as change
the front-ends themselves (e.g. "I want to display this data in this view").
I've previously used a lot of SaaS (e.g. Slack, Intercom, etc.) and it's
always frustrating because I can't customize the views (e.g. in Slack, maybe I
want to add a button to mute + clear all the notifications for this channel).
Salesforce lets you customize all that, which, frankly, is really cool.

To some extent, Salesforce is like a new way of programming. Instead of
writing code, you let non-technical people change models and UIs (and to some
extent, controllers).

Happy to answer any questions! If you all think the essay could be improved in
any way, LMK too :)

(Edit: added blurb about SFDC being a new way of programming, in response to a
comment downstream.)

~~~
reallydontask
Just skimmed your article but you showed a screenshot of Dynamics 365 as a CRM
system and then went on to talk about Salesforce as much more than just CRM.

Pretty much anything that Salesforce does, Dynamics 365 does too, so perhaps
not the best screenshot of a bread and butter CRM system.

~~~
cols
I've gotta push back politely here. If you are comparing marketing matrices
between D365 and SFDC, then yes, on the surface D365 does "pretty much
anything that Salesforce does". But you are missing one big factor: D365 costs
half as much and there is a big fat reason for that. The D365 platform is very
immature and feels like an afterthought at best.

I had the displeasure of running a D365 setup in a small government agency
that took about a year to get off the ground. It was a living nightmare and I
would never recommend D365 under any circumstance because of that experience.
I'm tempted to say you would be better off using a free or homegrown CRM than
choosing Dynamics.

A few lowlights (Disclosure: we were in the government cloud which is
notoriously far behind the commercial cloud):

* Had to hire a PFE to set up the Exchange integration. This should be turnkey if you are in the same company's stack, IMO. Instead it took thousands of dollars and days of work by the PFE, our centralized Exchange admins, and myself.

* Little things like hiding the freaking nav bar cards are literally disallowed in Dynamics.

* The Dynamics 365 App for Outlook is a dumpster fire that didn't work at least half the time. Search queries returning no results, no useful error messages, and an overall appalling UX. It single-handedly killed adoption.

* I spent many hours trying to figure out how to send timed emails. That's because you have to use the advanced logic tools which are a nightmare. I was able to spin up the same timed email in SFDC in a matter of minutes. I truly wish this was an exaggeration but it's not.

* D365 documentation is utter garbage when compared to the SFDC Trailhead. The only option for getting off the ground for our technical staff was to pay for training through one of MS's sketchy vendors. It was overpriced (about $3k) and not at all great.

* The only way to programmatically interface with D365 APIs is through using the ancient SOAP API or their REST endpoint with OData syntax only.

* Oh BTW, if you were hoping for a modern development workflow, think again. You are going to be stuck manually uploading files into Dynamics for things like editing the internal interfaces of Dynamics. Oh and you have to register every single function against every single trigger, manually through a GUI.

* Their customer facing website options are a joke. I can create a fully fledged web app with complete control over the HTML/CSS/JS using the SFDC community, this is definitely not the case with Dynamics. You are limited to the point of only being able to choose layout templates with Dynamics. The last time I checked, you couldn't create your own.

* The development workflow with Dynamics is a joke. With SFDC I get a passable command line tool, multiple VS Code extensions, an easy deployment path, local development with Lightning Web Components, and many other developer tools. Good luck finding any of that with Dynamics.

The above probably could have been shortened to say the following: SFDC is
dedicated to CRM while Dynamics is another in a long line of MS products and
it feels like it.

I know there are problems with the SF platform, I feel them daily, but I don't
think comparing the two is fair to D365.

~~~
vadym909
Now why can't we find honest reviews like this for most software. Why do
customers have to endure this in this age of Gartner magic quadrant/G2 and
similarly fawning and often paid for marketing mumbo jumbo.

~~~
zantana
It has to do with the challenge of evaluating systems like this. The only
people who really can understand it are people who are actually implementing
and using it at scale and its the nature of their experience that they can't
write a review "... I work at company x and after millions of dollars I can
honestly say that this product is piece of junk here's a bunch of complaints
which dovetail into the heart of our company's business..."

So we'll just have to live with the lone reviewer working in their home lab.
"I created mailboxes for my cats and sent them 50 test messages without any
hiccups, so Exchange 2019 looks like another winner!"

------
TbobbyZ
As a Salesforce developer, I find myself feeling like I'm on a different
planet compared to other developers. I can't:

\- develop locally. \- easily backup using source control. \- contribute to or
create open source projects easily. There are a lot more barriers to do so
compared to JavaScript or Golang communities.

In addition, I'm always working with sugar-coated Salesforce tech. Apex (kinda
like Java), Aura Components (crappy js framework that doesn't even come close
to react).

I'm happy that Salesforce is going in the right direction with their web
components, but it still feels like they are 10-15 years behind.

~~~
bamboozled
What’s the actual point of being a “SF developer” or investing in sales force
development over traditional development then ?

It sounds super limiting and frustrating ?

It also sounds like very non transferable skills you’re learning which might
be difficult to use in other roles ?

~~~
TbobbyZ
There is a high demand. Like exceptionally high. As a contractor I have
endless work and never have a hard time negotiating my rate. There is such
high demand because Salesforce is not as sexy as being a front-end dev that
uses react or a back-end dev that uses go.

It's limiting and can be frustrating, yes.

Apex and aura components are not transferable directly, but what is is
learning how to work with enterprise software. Plus, my bred and butter with
Salesforce work is integrations, which has given me plenty of opportunities to
learn other languages as needed to get the work done.

~~~
matchagaucho
We've been able to develop Salesforce apps using React. There are some good
open source libraries out there.

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stabilizing-salesforce-
lightn...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stabilizing-salesforce-lightning-
development-react-design-mike-leach/)

~~~
TbobbyZ
Sure, I've done that in the past. The problem with using a third-party
framework is the longevity of the org. As a developer, I want to leave an org
in better shape than when I started.

If I created an angular app here, a react app there, and elm lang app over
there, you are dramatically increasing the overhead to maintain the org. IMO,
it's better to play it safe by using Salesforce's tech stack so your client
has an easier time maintaining their org in the future. Future Salesforce devs
will thank you too :D

Plus, there is a very high chance that future interviews for Salesforce dev
gigs, they are NOT going to ask if you know React/Angular. Nice to have skills
for sure, but they want to know how quickly you can get started working in
their org. And chances are their apps are built with apex, Visualforce, or
aura components. I'd rather spend a year building with aura components to make
my new project transition easy, than spend a year building with react and have
to pick up aura components all over again.

------
cubecul
There is a TON of money in Salesforce. I'm rolling it out at our company right
now and it's mind-boggling how many associated costs there are when you want
the Salesforce connector for your existing tools:

    
    
      * Data enrichment service plugging into Salesforce? Extra $10-20K/annually
      * NPS service piping responses in? Upgrade for an extra $8K
      * Preloading account data? There are like 5-10 sources you can have, each one with a different purpose, each one a potential $25K/annually
      * How about a note-taking app that lets you modify Salesforce fields in the app? Another $40/user/month
      * Hiring a consultant? $150-200/hr, and it'll take 100 hours to get it done
    

All that's on top of the $150/user/month Salesforce Enterprise list price

~~~
fabian2k
I've no experience with this area, but the $150 per user and month seem pretty
high to me. How many people would typically need that kind of access? Only
Sales, or even more parts of the company?

~~~
nik736
If you pay your sales guys $100k a year, $150 is nothing.

~~~
dwaltrip
$150 * 12 months, but your point still stands.

------
legitster
I work in the sales and marketing world, and the best way describe Salesforce
is it's the _infrastructure_ sales is built on. Especially in the B2B world,
it's just as big and heavy hitting as any of the other FAANG companies, if not
more.

And I want to stress how big and clunky SFDC is even for people familiar with
it. I am sure everyone and their mother can build a faster, more elegant CRM.
But that misses the point. It's _infrastructure_. The fact that it's legacy is
the feature! I'm sure we can design more elegant roads and pick smarter rail
gauges today, but having consistent and interchangeable standards is important
to build on. It's enough for a company to constantly track their changing
market, they don't need to risk losing customers because they upgrade the CRM
every couple of years.

~~~
exceptione
As a non-salesperson I would like to ask: what do you mean with
infrastructure?

FAANG is just about de facto monopolies too big to compete with, so I don know
what parallel you draw on.

~~~
rafd
I think "infrastructure" in that every other app that might integrate with a
CRM has a salesforce integration.

Also, you can expect sales hires to know salesforce.

------
cosmodisk
I kind of built my career on it. While reading some forums, including some
threads on HN, I see a lot of misconceptions about Salesforce. When it
started,it used to be purely software for sales and how to manage leads,deals
and contacts. However it's been around for 20 years and now it covers much
more. For instance,I work for a company that delivers training to thousands of
people every year.The entire business runs on Salesforce.The sales manage
their leads(tens of thousands) and interactions with them(calls,emails,sms),
while operations book the courses, customer service manage complaints, finance
team tracks products, invoicing,and vendor manager tracks their performance,
contracts and etc. At any given time I can go on Salesforce and see how much
money the company made,what are the issues, how's marketing doing and etc.
Alternatively to this kind of unified system is a mish mash of number of
applications, endless Excel spreadsheets and bottomless email server. Since I
joined, the company tripled revenues,yet we have same number of people
managing training and customer service...The sales reps pulling in twice as
much of revenue. I know there are a lot of developers here on HN: even if you
don't want to use Salesforce platform,you can leverage free developer edition
for rapid prototyping.You could literally mock up things within
hours,including interface,database and sometimes even automations. For those
who are planning to hire sales people: the absolute majority of decent ones(
especially in the US and to some degree in the UK) most likely used it in
their previous jobs and it is very likely they will expect it in your company
as well. What companies use it? All of them,including Google,Amazon,Coke,
Shell, Barclay's and etc..

~~~
DaveWalk
+1 to developers on HN: if your dream is to have a company with a sales team,
it's great practice to get to know CRM softwares early and in-depth. Every
seasoned salesperson will need a functioning CRM to do good work...and the
best salespeople will get held back by a malfunctioning/nonexistent CRM.

~~~
trisomy21
Do you have any recommendations on where to get a solid introduction to the
most popular/prominent CRM tools? I’m really curious to dive deeper.

~~~
DaveWalk
As mentioned there are dozens, and Wikipedia will show you[0]. Since CRMs can
be bolted onto just about every business, use cases vary extremely. If I'm
being honest, every sales manager starts with an internet search to find the
latest rundown [1].

My recommendation is to set aside time to play with a lightweight (pipedrive)
+ heavyweight (Salesforce) options to see how you might use them one day. I
would treat CRMs like a regular piece of software. Many offer totally free
trials for 1-3 users. So I would bet they agree with this approach :)

[0]:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_CRM_systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_CRM_systems)
[1]:[https://www.pcmag.com/roundup/253275/the-best-crm-
software](https://www.pcmag.com/roundup/253275/the-best-crm-software)

~~~
trisomy21
Great recommendation. Thanks!

------
nwatson
I have extended family (two brothers, two nieces, one niece's husband, one
nephew) all into Salesforce.com/SFDC development.

Four of them successfully ran a SFDC consulting business for several years
with many good clients and lots of junior and senior developers and architects
(I joined briefly after leaving SF Bay Area but decided I should go back to
building products). The business ran into family-business-squabble problems
between two of the principals and dissolved ... however they all stayed in the
SFDC game and have done very well, making significantly more (even considering
they're contracting) on long-term stable contracts than their software
experience would net them at established SF Bay Area companies ... and they
all live in much lower cost-of-living areas. I don't think the SFDC game will
go away any time soon, either.

There are probably some interesting SFDC development niches, but I would have
struggled to maintain interest.

~~~
stallmanite
As an outsider these descriptions sound like Avon or Mary Kay or Amway.

~~~
mattmanser
Salesforce is _awful_ to develop in. The worst designed language, terrible
tools, poor feedback, inscrutable gotchas. An abhorrent mix of the worst parts
of Java with the worst parts of SQL. Everything is utterly rubbish, there is
absolutely nothing positive about it.

But it's great to put your sales process on for a slightly techy person. Sort
of the modern equivalent of access.

Needless to say, that means no developer wants to touch it with a bargepole.

So if you're prepared to put up with all that, you can make a lot of money
doing ridiculously simple things.

------
jefflombardjr
Salesforce is essentially a database as a service with some fancy admin panels
and prebuilt web interfaces.

The tech is proprietary, and not that fun to work with. [0]

As someone who has worked extensively with Salesforce, the cult like fanbase
is annoying. I'll be the first to admit the tech is underwhelming and in many
cases nowhere near other modern technology.[1][2][3]

But, I still 100% recommend Salesforce to companies when they ask about it.
Why? _Data liability_. Yes Salesforce is expensive - but you are outsourcing
the responsibility of dealing with sensitive data to Salesforce. This is
something that they should market more heavily in imo. (at least to sw
engineers and CTOs) Realistically many companies are not properly equipped to
deal with data, let alone sensitive data. Salesforce may have started out as a
CRM, but now it is a solution to that problem. CTO's now have someone to point
the finger at if shit hits the fan on an Equifax level. This alone is worth
big $$$.

[0] - [https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#most-loved-
dr...](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#most-loved-dreaded-and-
wanted)

[1] - [https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-
us.apexcode.m...](https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-
us.apexcode.meta/apexcode/apex_gov_limits.htm)

[2] -
[https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2018/05/summer18-reth...](https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2018/05/summer18-rethink-
trigger-logic-with-apex-switch.html)

[3] -
[https://developer.salesforce.com/page/Multi_Tenant_Architect...](https://developer.salesforce.com/page/Multi_Tenant_Architecture)

[4] - [https://trust.salesforce.com/en/](https://trust.salesforce.com/en/)

~~~
Will_Parker
> The tech is proprietary, and not that fun to work with.

That's a very kind way to say: everything in it appears deliberately
engineered to ensure continued employment of consultants. :)

~~~
wrs
What’s really bizarre is that Salesforce is happy to fly ten of their internal
consultants to a meeting, spend all day talking about your business
requirements, then end up telling you to hire a 3rd party consultant. I don’t
understand what the consultants who work for Salesforce actually do!

~~~
thrav
They're paid to add value to the customers and be people the customers can
trust. This is valuable because when the customer needs something, they ask
this person for their 2 cents. When the problem is something a Salesforce tool
can solve, the customer is more likely to choose it and either give Salesforce
money, or save a bunch of money not having to buy an extra thing (saved money
means more budget left over for Salesforce).

Salesforce is built on mutually beneficial relationships. If you go under,
they lose your business. If you grow, they make more money selling you more
seats.

It's exactly what business should be.

~~~
anamexis
Are you a Salesforce consultant?

------
chasd00
It should be called "everythingforce" instead of Salesforce. The features have
grown so wide and deep that even CRM is just a small sliver of what Salesforce
is. It has its own server side language ( APEX ), a front end framework
(Lightning), a community builder/site hosting thingy ( Community Cloud ), and
"custom objects" and relationships (think a user defined schema ). If you
wanted to you could use Salesforce as a hosting platform for any web
application.

~~~
pssdbt
Yep, and the problem with that in my experience is it's enough rope for
companies to hang themselves with. I've seen multiple cases of using
Salesforce for things/applications for things that belong outside of it. I'm
only a little sour about it :D

~~~
jbf1001
I am in the process of dealing with that myself. In my case, the leadership of
our company was convinced by a consulting firm that Salesforce is capable of
anything, including acting as IaaS for a huge SaaS application we are
building. The result being that we have to make very expensive work arounds
for API call limits.

The hard part about this is that it might function eventually, so "there is no
reason to switch until we KNOW for sure". Salesforce can do a lot, but it can
NOT do IaaS. Use AWS, GCP, or literally anything else if you want a 100%
customizable autoscaling application with in depth monitoring.

EDIT: Pardon my cry for help, but if anyone has any business targeted material
to present these ideas to company presidents who don't have a clue in the
world, I implore you to point me to it.

~~~
cosmodisk
I'd kick such a consultancy out of the door on the first instance of such an
advice. For this kind of stuff some tech strategy consultancies are
required,not the ones that implement it. I'd stay away from the big ones(i.e.
Accenture), irrespectively of the company size. Salesforce is great but it is
definitely not for everything.

~~~
jbf1001
If I had the power, I would. Right now, my employer has business blinders on.

------
teh_klev
Sounds like I'm a Salesforce shill here, but...for some context I presently
work as a developer in the charitable/volunteer sector at the moment. I'm 52,
with around 30 years in the biz building all sorts of stuff in COBOL, Clipper,
Java, CORBA, VB, C#....and worked with all sorts of databases.

Here's my take in my current situ:

Salesforce do some mighty decent things for voluntary/charitable orgs. One of
them being that if you're a charitable/volunteer sector operator you get
Salesforce Enterprise edition for free. Now, despite being aware of
Salesforce, until about six months ago I'd never used it, and thought "oh-oh"
when a project went down this route.

But you know something I kinda like it.

I sense some "dislike" here about Salesforce here on HN, and sure it has some
road humps and other things, but it's become a developer platform, and with
many developer platforms you need to spend some time learning to make it work
for you. But it's not that hard. I think their docs and training material are
pretty decent. We also use their SFDX bits so basically we can check in an
entire org to source control and run deployments into sandboxes for testing
before deploying into production. Their Visual Code tooling is pretty decent
as well.

Lightning, Apex, Callouts, Creating inbound REST API's...what's not to like if
you can bish-bash-bosh something for a client quickly and build an working
MVP?

We can build a bunch of apps for these voluntary/charitable folks fairly
quickly and much faster than we could with .NET/SQL (or something else) which
would otherwise cost them a lot more money.

I realise it's not for everyone, sometimes it feels a bit "Scientology"'ish
once you're into the eco-system, but it's a tool.

Use it, don't use it, it's up to you.

------
snarf21
Salesforce is fine if you use it for its intended purpose like e-commerce.
Just don't try to use it as an AWS replacement for an application platform
just because "all your data will be in the same place". Everything is a tool,
just pick the right one for the job.

~~~
teh_klev
This ^^^

We use Salesforce for some stuff because we don't need the overhead of
AWS/Azure etc. It's quick (and some might say "dirty") but it suits certain
types of work we do. And customers are happy. It's all about paying the bills.

------
tvanantwerp
I've implemented Salesforce twice for non-profits doing fundraising. It's
probably a great B2B sales platform, but it's not _that_ customizable for
purposes outside what was intended. And it's not clear why some bits are
customizable and others aren't. I don't consider myself a Salesforce expert,
so maybe I'm just showing off my ignorance here, but this is a conversation
I've had to have:

Fundraiser: "Can we have a custom database of Thing X that interfaces with
everything else?"

Me: "Sure, no problem."

Fundraiser: "And can we rename this default field from 'Widget' to 'Doodad'?"

Me: "Nope. Impossible. Whenever you see 'Widget', just imagine it said
'Doodad'."

I still recommend Salesforce to non-profits, for the same reason Churchill
recommends democracy: it may be the worst CRM, but it's better than all the
others that have been tried.

~~~
cosmodisk
Well,you were wrong,you can change them:
[https://success.salesforce.com/answers?id=90630000000gwQ2AAI](https://success.salesforce.com/answers?id=90630000000gwQ2AAI)
Kristin Flewelling's comment has the correct answer.

------
jdm2212
Thank you! I've been wondering about what the heck Salesforce is for ages :)

Seems like a lot of enterprise software boils down to integrating enterprise
data for a some domain, mapping it to an ontology, and then building a plugin
framework, dashboards, alerts and workflow management on top of that. (I don't
mean to imply it's easy, just that it's a successful general template if you
happen to have domaine expertise in a domain without a dominant existing SaaS
player.)

------
ABeeSea
In my experience, Salesforce is replacing emailed excel files and “excel as a
database” en masse. It’s kind of interesting to watch these migration of
business processes from manual excel to manual salesforce. And it’s not just
sales people.

------
vbsteven
It has its uses in enterprise environments but it takes a special kind of
business-y person to setup, configure and maintain.

I worked at a small startup with at its peak 30 people (of which 10 in
sales/marketing) and we implemented Netsuite which is a similar ERP suite
bought by Oracle.

It took 2 expensive consultants a couple months to setup and I believe it did
CRM, invoicing, accounting, taxes, prospecting, email signups and newsletters,
customer support, inventory tracking and probably a few more things. Every
time we wanted to change some process we had to bring the consultants back in.
In my eyes it was too expensive and too early in the startup process to be
implementing something like that.

------
jvagner
My own experience in e-commerce was that Salesforce came in to a couple of
companies I worked at and it wasn't a fit. Which was weird.

I recently looked for a platform for CRM, invoicing, project management and
communication, and Salesforce didn't really have anything out of the box (or
within a reasonable distance of a read-to-go-box) for that either. There was
little off-the-shelf available... not even starter packs, which I found a bit
curious.

Ended up going with Accelo, which I think of as one level up from a bare
Salesforce install.

My conclusion.. albeit not entirely informed, is that I probably am happiest
never working in a company, or with a client, that's oriented around
Salesforce processes.

~~~
commandlinefan
I was tricked into doing SFDC development for a while, about eight years ago.
I had a background in more “traditional” application development: Java on the
back end and Javascript on the front end. Working in Salesforce was honestly a
pretty miserable experience. Everything you do in it is metered; you have a
limit on the number of DB calls you can make in an hour, a limit on how many
bytes you can access in an hour, a limit on how many rows you can save… it’s
almost as bad as AWS, but nowhere near as manageable because you can’t tell if
you’re going to hit a limit until you hit it in production. At least back
then, there was no interactive debugger for Apex, and no test client for SOQL
(their “almost SQL but not SQL” query language), so any debugging you wanted
to do was done using print statements. And of course, you couldn’t run
anything locally - everything had to be copied up to their servers in order to
something as trivial as test a form validation. I slogged through it for about
3 years before I finally gave up on it - although it does a good job of making
simple things like creating input forms for database object easy, it makes
harder things like an actual business workflow impossible (it’s noteworthy
that even the CRM functionality wasn’t implemented in “pure” Apex/VisualForce
because it was too limiting even for the thing that Salesforce was designed
for).

------
emers0n
Awesome post! Next up -- what's MuleSoft? That's another big one where I'm not
really sure what problems they're really solving.

~~~
niftich
In the Mule ecosystem, you use a drag-and-drop flow builder of canned
components to build flows that typically ingest events, do something to them,
and possibly write someplace. Almost anywhere, you can also inject your custom
code.

You deploy these flows in their engine, where they're kept alive. You can
self-host the engine, but they also offer it in their cloud.

Then you can choose to frontend it with a HTTP API that you build in their
builder, and choose to put it in your organization's private store, or the
public store for others to use. There's management dashboards too.

There's hundreds of other products or product combinations that could be
described in the same sort of vague language, but MuleSoft ships and supports
a particular environment and a particular collection of tools that does it
pretty well.

Ultimately, the goal of all of these is the reduction of the effort around
every other piece besides the parts that are custom to your unique
circumstances.

------
zulfishah
Good article. Thanks for disentangling the jargon around Salesforce. I've
always wondered why the idea of "CRM" never extends to more than the "Sales"
process. What about more lightweight, easy-to-use system that someone who just
opened a flower shop, or a yoga studio, could use to manage not just customers
but also their employees and contractors? Why don't people use "Personal CRM"
tools to keep track of conversations around the work-place, or interacting
with employees? There is a lot of potential for a "contact interaction
system", with many many use-cases, but I'm curious if the idea just doesn't
have legs, or if it's waiting for something to popularize the concept.

Personal angle: I work on such a 'contact interaction system' with an app I
have in the App Store, and though I market it as "CRM", my goal is to build
something that's very easy-to-use so that "anyone" can use it, for the people
who are looking for a good system to manage their contact and customer
interactions. I would love to figure out how to drive more traction around the
idea, since it's something that's beyond the regular idea of "CRM app for
sales". Any thoughts?

~~~
thrav
What’s yours called? I’ve been wanting one for a while, but never been
satisfied with what I find.

~~~
zulfishah
It's available for iOS and Mac. Search for Contacts Journal in the App Store.
Would love your feedback.

------
kyrieeschaton
Salesforce has begun retroactively restricting the products you can sell if
you're using their platform, which makes moving to Salesforce a very risky
proposition.

[https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/30/18645722/salesforce-
ban-r...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/30/18645722/salesforce-ban-retail-
customers-selling-semi-automatic-guns-rifles)

~~~
cosmodisk
I appreciate it's a hot potato in the US, however in my opinion these kind of
thigs should only be sold to military,in which case no CRM is required,as
there are only a handful of countries as potential clients.I used guns for
many years and can't see a single reason why anyone would need it for personal
use.

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
>I appreciate it's a hot potato in the US, however in my opinion these kind of
[things] should only be sold to military

You "used guns for many years" \- OK, I suppose that makes you an expert on
self defense choices in the US.

The DoD released a report that found the AR pattern rifle to be the absolutely
most appropriate personal defense weapon that exists today - why do you or
SalesForce get to decide what is appropriate for my personal protection?

The only real question here is why would I ever want my CRM company to make
decisions like that for me or anyone else? Should I want my CRM company to
care at all what I'm selling? Why would you ever _assume_ it stops at things
you personally don't like?

~~~
cosmodisk
There are many reasons why they might not want gun manufacturers using them
and one of them being that it doesn't fit their marketing agenda. The image
they are painting is that it's a nice,inclusive, supporting and charitable
company where the sky is is the limit for anyone.And suddenly its like: oh
that nice and soft helps to sell guns? And that's what they keep communicating
to the world.I understand it's BS but they seem to be willing to drop some
account to make sure the bs becomes more believable. As for self defense part-
no,I'm not an expert on the choices in the US but I'm pretty sure there's
plenty. DoD may be right, however what are the circumstances? If I'm in highly
populates area,the use of AR rifle can result in lots of collateral damage if
not handled well. It is also very impractical to carry, especially if your job
is not in military or security. Does AR rifle stops a potential threat well? I
have no doubts of it, however it's practicality remains a huge question
mark... I didn't say I don't like guns,I just think it just doesn't make sense
to have such rifles for self defense. I appreciate the US may not be the
safest place on the planet,but just realistically what kind of potential
attackers one would expect to stop with it?

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
I’m going to leave the rifle stuff alone because you seem to have very little
in the way of actual knowledge vs myth and misunderstanding. The very minimum
you could do would be to learn about destabilization and over penetration of
ball 9mm compared to 556.

I’ll ask simply, again, why would you ever assume it stops at things you
personally don't like?

You’d have to be very naïve to think that.

~~~
cosmodisk
It doesn't stop and it's not that I don't like,I don't understand it. You just
ignored all my questions and went on about penetration..It would be
interesting to hear your opinion,maybe I'm missing something.

------
G4BB3R
I worked 2 months for a IT company that uses 100% salesforce. It was the worst
experience of my life. The tool can be great for the sales team and others,
but keep things separated, salesforce shouldn't be used by programmers.

~~~
cosmodisk
What did you use it for? Let me guess: instead of Jira?

~~~
chance_state
Salesforce eats their own dogfood.

They use an app built on the force.com platform for managing all development
work on their CRM product.

The app, free to install in your own instance and use:
[https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listing...](https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=a0N30000000ps3jEAA&channel=featured)

~~~
chasd00
Also, they use SF for Dreamforce planning end to end. I've seen it, it's
pretty freaking amazing. I was convinced they were going to release a
"Conference Cloud" product after I saw what they had done for organizing
Dreamforce.

~~~
thrav
Real Estate, Investor Relations, HR, Anything with an Approval Process... If
you ever have a chance to attend a “Salesforce on Salesforce” session, take
it. Or better yet, just ask for one if you’re a customer and want to see how
they do a thing.

------
shadowtree
It's a platform that has multiple very successful companies riding on top of
it.

The largest built a 20bn+ market cap co out of it, in 12 years.

SFDC is far more capable than people think.

------
benbristow
Nice article. Always wondered what SalesForce actually was and why it's so
popular. Now I know.

------
nocubicles
How long does implementing Salesforce takes usually, lets say in a company
with 10 users(salespeople?)?

I have implemented 10-13 SAP Saas ERP systems in last couple of years and the
projects are around 2-4 months with 1-2 consultants working on the project for
a company of ~50 users. But ERP is much wider then just CRM, it includes all
business processes.

Can Salesforce be self implemented by the company or is consulting needed? ERP
cannot be self implemented, definitly needs consulting both on configurating
the system and also changing companies business processes.

Its still amazing how Saas EPR can be implemented in this short time given it
used to take atleast 1 year due to the need of setting up infrastructure and
all over more complexity.

~~~
nik736
What would you say makes it faster to implement a SaaS ERP compared to an on
premise one?

~~~
nocubicles
Well for starters the product is smaller and not that extendable. So it means
when typically with on-prem you start developing and customizing the software
to fit it into company procedures then with Saas ERP company needs to fit into
ERP processes.

The UI is based on HTML and therefore users like it more and are not that
hesitant to start using it and less training is needed.

Public API-s that you can just take and make integrations, no need for
allowing access through firewall etc.

There are many more but these are just some that I can think of right now.

------
wnevets
has salesforce figured out how to do an arbitrary number of objects yet? For
example a customer with as many addresses they want? I was told by very
expensive salesforce "experts" that wasn't possible a few years ago. You
actually needed to hardcode address_1_zip, address_2_zip, address_3_zip and so
on.

~~~
ironchef
Easy enough ... set a related list on the SObject.

So ... if a contact should have N Addresses... create an SObject called
"ContactAddress" .. and have a relatedlist from contact to N ContactAddress.

~~~
csunbird
This is the correct way to do it, but this also means you are going to add
another custom object to "objects needs to be documented and maintained by
your team" list.

~~~
chasd00
more importantly, it means one less custom object available based on your
license. For example, there's nothing stopping you from making 100 custom
object available to Customer Community licensed users. However, with the
license you get 10 and when they randomly audit your instance find you at +90
the bill will be shocking to say the least. Pay up or get your instance turned
off and lose everything.

~~~
ironchef
"with the license you get 10" Questioner didn't stipulate the license they
were on. The SF folks I deal with have enterprise licenses (200 custom
objects) because SF supports a core part of the enterprise (the revenue side
of things). With that there's a certain set of norms that happen and my
suggestion is a simple approach to the problem.

"Pay appropriately and do it the right way"

If you're looking for the cheapest solution or the "just getting by" solution
don't use Salesforce or you'll get some nasty surprises.

------
ncmncm
SF has what must be the most valuable database in the world. It must be worth
far, far more than their market cap.

That I have not heard of anybody mining it must mean they have a really good
handle on how to keep such activity secret. Because from a business standpoint
it would be irresponsible not to monetize something so valuable. Anybody using
it must realize that has to be going on, at some level.

Maybe they only license out access to spooks -- NSA, Mossad, GRU. (What is the
Chinese one called?) Those have access to unlimited cash, and know how to use
spooking to get more.

------
stcredzero
_An entire economy is built around Salesforce. For every dollar that
Salesforce makes, its ecosystem generates $4. Millions of developers build
apps for Salesforce’s platform, and Salesforce development is itself a
lucrative niche within software engineering._

So Salesforce has turned themselves into an ecosystem. No wonder they're doing
well. What's the secret to turning yourself into an ecosystem? It must involve
low barriers to entry and the ability to make money within the ecosystem.

------
sixdimensional
"Single source of truth" = loaded statement. Maybe single source of truth for
a certain subset of things, but in my experience, Salesforce is absolutely not
the single source of truth for an organization. I do not like that marketing
pitch.

------
simonebrunozzi
> In 2008, these were consolidated into Force.com — a platform for developers
> to build and run apps without worrying about infrastructure. It was the
> first platform-as-a-service (PaaS).

Heroku launched before Force.com - by a few months, if I'm not mistaken.

------
rkido
The way this article described Salesforce makes it sound like generic database
frontend software, like a more powerful, complex, and customizable Airtable.
I'd love to read a comparison of the two if anyone has used both.

~~~
DaveWalk
From a business side of things, the advantage of Salesforce is that it can
very easily be managed by non-devs. It has straightforward sales functions
baked in: reporting, forecasting contact management. For sure, Airtable can be
used as a lightweight CRM. Depending on your business, it might be all you
need -- it might even be preferred if you're bootstrapping and constantly
iterating early on! But Airtable falls down when your sales/marketing needs
grow -- those hires probably won't have the patience to develop tools that tie
into Airtable. To reference the old Jim Barksdale line, Salesforce is the
"bundle" option, and Airtable is the "unbundle" one.

------
incomplete
wow, great article! i work for a university and our admin group needs a
"killer app" for tracking students, researchers, faculty, industry partners,
events, and a bunch of other little things... i've been doing my best to try
and explain to them what SF is capable of but it's been tricky as i don't have
any first-hand experience w/it.

i've forwarded the article off to them and the entire group had a collective
"ah-ha!" moment. thanks for putting this together. :)

~~~
rchaud
When I was applying to grad schools in 2016, the online applications all sat
on top of a Salesforce build. It's clunky to build on for sure, but there has
to be trade-offs when you're using a pre-designed "lego blocks" type system to
build an app.

You can sign up for a free SF developer account, which gives you access to a
dummy account that can support 2 users. Go to Salesforce Trailhead, their
training site and look at the modules to figure out which one might help you
create a prototype you can use as a proof of concept for your team.

~~~
incomplete
dope. thanks, i'll do that now.

------
m3kw9
Finally know what CRM and Salesforce really is

------
te_chris
I was a sceptic, but it’s actually great. The amount of powerful stuff you can
do with it, with process builder, platform events and flows, e.g. is
incredible. Still super annoying in a lot of ways, but it doesn’t really make
any sense to manually build out that stuff, to me anyway

------
Tade0
One of my coworkers has experience in Salesforce and recently did an
introductory presentation about it.

I just want to say that I'm very grateful that I _don 't have to_ have
anything to do with it.

------
JetSpiegel
So, it's like a wiki for sales people? With custom fields?

------
luminati
I see what you did there - Nice puff piece to get the Salesforce corpdev
drones to start buzzing around you guys to lay the seeds to an eventual
acquisition ;)

------
codeisawesome
The people demand the same article but now for ERP.

------
RocketSyntax
It's ironic how much people make fun of SFDC when they literally invented SaaS
and internet-driven platforms

------
pbreit
Retool looks super neat but I'm wondering how it works in practice. Any
experience here?

------
carapace
Anybody interested in a "Computer-Aided Small Business" kind of a thing?

------
avodonosov
As a joke I once wanted to register failsource.com and redirect it to
salesforce.com. But it was already taken (I suspected by salesforce)

~~~
teh_klev
I think you'll find that your suspicions reach somewhat naive a dead end.

[http://whois.domaintools.com/failsource.com](http://whois.domaintools.com/failsource.com)

[http://whois.domaintools.com/salesforce.com](http://whois.domaintools.com/salesforce.com)

~~~
avodonosov
Sure they didn't register it under their own name :)

~~~
ninju
Plausible deniability is the best defense

------
dboreham
It's the new SAP isn't it? And SAP was the new Oracle And Oracle was the new
AS/400 And...

~~~
nocubicles
I think SAP is like 15 years older then Oracle.

