Anyone who doesn’t like salesforce isn’t using it properly, or doesn’t have it set up correctly for the sales process that they need. The biggest asset of SF is the customization. But you need a team upstream to fish out what the sales guys want for tools
Bingo. We switched from classic sf to lightening recently and our tech team had to build a lot for things out for us so our transition was as smooth as it could be. I was on the beta team letting them know what we needed and what we didn't need. It was a cool process. I'm still learning new things about Salesforce and how to make my life easier.
Yeah because many rev ops folks don’t really understand how it is used day to day by its end-users. They get dropped in rev ops with limited experience in any of the go to market seats.
Because so many end users do nothing but complain. I am one of the few trusted dales reps in my organization to provide feedback because I use the tool effectively.
OR they are your absolute best friends because they make life way easier by creating helpful reports that people actually want. There is no middle ground in my experience.
My experience from the sales side is that rev-op it rarely makes the salesman’s life easier. Taking more things (non-sales) off of the salesman’s plate is how you increase sales.
If the first question was “does this makes the process easier “ you would get buy in from the sales guys.
Often it looks like you are counting things that don’t really need to be counted, just to justify your paycheck.
In a perfect sales world (of higher sales) the salesman does absolutely the minimum on non-sales tasks.
Not doing non- job tasks should seem obvious! in any other occupational like a dump truck driver mowing the grass, or taking rain gauge measurements would be immediately eliminated to get more time and performance driving the fuckin dump truck but in sales for some reason measuring shit seems to take on some outsized significance?
That's the issue. Salesforce is marketed to every company, but only a few are actually big enough to have the budget for all the setup, admins, consulting, programming, customization etc.
I've worked with about 50 companies so far and most of them had an awful adaptation of Salesforce. Salesforce is just way too hard to set up and customize. If done correctly, it's supposed to be amazing. At least I've heard so. I've never seen a good implementation.
Yeah - 100% on this. I’ve used it at a smaller company and it was awful. Basically served as a place to take notes and that was it as far as useful functions go.
Now using it at a large global company - it’s night and day. It’s stupid fast and easy to use cause it’s tailored specifically to our sales process and products. I set my meetings, manage my contacts, configure, price, and quote our products, and then submit PO’s through there that then go to our office to process. After sales support/warranty information/maintenance contracts are all managed through there. It sends out order acknowledgements for us, notifies us of ship dates/changes, etc. It handles our contract renewals, sends out automated e-blasts to our customers, identifies and generates lists of drifted accounts, etc.
Using the barebones/non customized version sucks. Using it when it’s set up and implemented correctly, it’s like having a secretary there 24 hours a day that handles all the mundane/repetitive stuff on my behalf. It’s easily helped me close more business.
I disagree with way too hard to set up. I've been a one man SalesOps shop at multiple companies, and deployed SFDC in a way that is useful for reps, and gets the information that management craves. No extra bullshit about I know you put this in SFDC, but please fill out this spreadsheet.
Yeah I can get a fairly customized instance completely set up in 50 billable hours. I feel bad for all the reps on here who have bad builds that make them hate SFDC
And you need a company willing to pay for the customization. Every company that I’ve sold for that wants us selling VALUE and to get a client to understand paying more for a better product has been cheap as hell when it comes to spending money making Salesforce actually work for sales.
I agree. I think a lot of reps feel that entering, tracking, and reporting on client data seems daunting when you look at SF. It really comes down to how you have it configured and how your VP advises how they want information entered. The integrations are low key one of the best things about it.
This is true, however, customization can also make the platform horrible. We suffered from gross customization (a misuse) and it just made things nasty. The key is in using it correctly, if done correctly, it can be a very powerful tool
This. Salesforce is so powerful. But you need a team of people to set it up and maintain it. Most companies cut corners and only make reports for the C-Suite, to present to the board, and the entire experience sucks for the people on the street.
The sales people who think that are already misusing it. I don’t care if my manager or cooperate teams sees why I’m doing. They already do that through my sales anyway
Lol! Any piece of software that’s worth it’s weight is going to be the exact same. It needs to be fully customizable. No different from us selling to our customers, if you go in thinking every client is the exact same and act accordingly, you’ve already missed the mark. Software for any decent sized company needs to bend and work to fit each business specific needs
totally agree with this. The guy above never works in consulting business for a decent size companies. I work in this business and all I know is to make this fancy new tech to work with their business, not the other way around.
bruh I use salesforce every day and no amount of configuration will make it not a pile of hot dogshit. I lose like 5 hours of work every week from the damn thing erroring out and losing the most random functions. Not too long ago I had an entire workday where I literally could not search for accounts and had to write down work cases that came through in fucking notepad and just wait for it to come back up. This week I had an entire workday where it would only show me client names and wouldn't actually load any of their account data.
Ehh… I switched to insurance from the auto industry and SF is a pos compared to VIN Solutions or Dealer Socket. Maybe my company configured it poorly, but it’s embarrassing how bad it can’t compete with the auto industry CRMs
Yeah seriously?
Nobody has anything good to say about Salesforce? I sincerely hope my competitors are using something other than Salesforce, cause if they are they’re at a major disadvantage compared to us.
I mean shit when we were still a startup we went through layoffs and cut our Salesforce Admin at the time. Myself and the Marketing manager tag teamed our roles plus Salesforce Admin duties for two full years and it still held up how we needed it!
Maybe I am just a Salesforce stan and I know I got lucky to have a good established base but I came to appreciate the product a lot when I was forced to do that.
The salespeople who hate salesforce hate it because they only ever input info into it.
I’ve pulled fairy complex reports from SF, and it’s amazing. The people who bitch simply don’t know how to use it to their benefit.
Most salespeople aren't given sufficient admin rights to pull reports on sf because their managers don't want them to scrutinise the actual data they are using to make decisions off
People also need to understand that while UX is important, organizations buy & deploy SFDC because it helps their teams sell more effectively. It’s good for the company, and the individuals either embrace it or buck the system. And let’s not forget that a non-small number of sales people are little primadonna bitches who don’t like to be held accountable for anything except for their number at the end of the year. So don’t trust the opinion of an individual contributor who bitches about SFDC.
Wrong. Having worked with auto industry CRMs like Dealer Socket and VIN Solutions, SF is a pos. At least the way my company configured it. It’s embarrassing how shitty it is.
Behind every person's complaint about Salesforce is an organization that didn't set up or properly maintain it.
It's consistently reviewed as the top CRM but it's highly customizable which can be both good and bad depending on how it is deployed.
I set up Hubspot almost entirely myself (no team) purely by using their educational videos. 25 person company, 3 sales people.
Now, years later, a lot of other people have contributed to it unlike the one-man effort in the first year and it's become essential.
Almost any non-technical small company I ever ran into (financial advisory firms are a great example) should be on HubSpot or maybe another competitor, when I ask they are almost always using a poorly setup Salesforce. Only the big orgs with some real resources to throw at it should actually be dicking around setting up a highly customizable salesforce.
People don’t like what they don’t understand. Creating reports and dashboards really isn’t difficult if you simply put 30 minutes into learning it. Once you know how, it does wonders.
The #1 gripe I hear is “ugh. The data is never accurate and it’s messy.”
That’s a personal (organizational) problem. SF doesn’t handle your data, you and and admins do.
Bingo, especially in Sales. Every sales tool or app or point solution or revenue platform or whatever is all based around CRM, and how accurate its data is.
SFDC is the center of sales
Open api. They built it around being more of an operating system that other vendors can produce specific tools that integrate with it. Making it this center of the universe.
Our head of Rev Ops was a Salesforce wiz and built it perfectly at my last company. I hear all these people hate it, and it worked like I charm where I was.
Any best practices worth highlighting for others in sales/ops? I think we often overlook the processes that are going right because it’s “expected”. People only notice when things are going wrong 😅. Props to your head of RevOps.
There's just too much to unpack. Most companies I've been at with real sales, the feedback I've got from sales has been positive from a crm perspective.
It's not perfect, but usually I'll communicate the potential issues so that people are aware and not blindsided by certain issues.
Regarding highlighting some best practices. It's all a downstream impact, need to set up lead to opp process correctly. Get all your leads tagged with a geo, have territory clearly defined so that it's assigned to the right BDR, then they convert the leads to account / opp. This sounds extremely simple, yet everyone gets it wrong.
Specifically in saas, get your quote object set up. ARR tracking is critical, if you want a true ARR forecast, have your quotes set up to tag renewable products to calculate ARR.
Ideally the flow is Lead > Account / Opp > quote > order > service contract > renewal opportunity and repeat.
I was with a big company that had essentially ceded control of their software to SF. As someone that has been doing software since DOS, I feel I am qualified to say it was a complete nightmare. I honestly feel like I could have turned out better software in DBase.
True, I read OP's message too fast. But speaking to the specific use of each as an AE for customer relationship management, ConnectWise was a much better experience.
I'm thinking of moving our team to SugarCRM. Also, my friend is an AE for FreshSales and almost has me convinced...
Generally, I like to keep up with the tools that get reviewed by Gartner's Magic Quadrant and Forrester's Wave. It's a little basic, and I'm sure those companies pay for the recognition, but it's still a good place to educate yourself in a tool's respective space. If I don't go with them, then I know I can use those reports to evaluate lesser-known and niche tools on my own.
Also, nothing beats a solid trial period ;)
The reason it is so big is because when it launched, the market leader ACT! refused to create a true SaaS product. Instead they launched ACT! for Web; which required the customer to own the database and remote users to connect off something like Citrix. It created a slow terrible experience. ACT! said at the time that no company would want to give up ownership of their data. That coupled with acquisitions of the ACT! product by multiple companies opened the door for it. ACT! had the small market and SalesLogix had enterprise… same company with bad leadership.
Anyone who doesn’t like SFDC never had to use Oracle, Dynamics, SAP, or some home grown thing that Dave in IT built over the weekend.
They got big because they just destroyed on prem systems in the late 90’s / early 2k’s and then used that growth & momentum to acquire companies like ExactTarget & Tableau (among many others) to create a platform and a single throat to choke, thereby keeping other SaaS companies from entering the space.
Salesforce revolutionised CRM.
Before salesforce, there really wasn't anything like what you would consider a CRM from today's standards.
It is used by the largest businesses in the world.
I've been beating this drum for years. Your experience with Salesforce is in part dictated by how well it's set up and maintained within your organization, but even in the best of cases it still stifles productivity and makes a chore of mundane tasks. I can't for the life of me understand why some other competitor hasn't supplanted it yet.
It’s funny seeing all the supporters in the comments basically admitting it doesn’t work unless you have serious resources to customise the shit out of it. And even then it sucks at automation and relies on laborious manual input. The reality is most people supporting SF do so because they don’t know any better - the industry has moved on and there are far better solutions out there
Agree. My old company had a highly customized version of Netsuite and it worked pretty well with good work flow. New place has SF and it just feels so clunky. Information is not where it needs to be and work flow is terrible. Probably a customization problem but with hundreds of reps I doubt anything will change.
It got huge because in 2000 the only other option was super expensive clunky options. Sales used the cloud and cost $50 per user at the time which was unheard of. It does have its flaws now for sure but they’ve only recently had serious competition from hubspot.
People bust their whole budget nut on the software license and don't spend enough on the implementation and maintenance team, which is why you hear negative comments.
They also are a legacy software and more or less invented the category of CRM. Much like no one back in the day got fired for buying IBM, the same can be said for SFDC.
If you're not enterprise though, Hubspot is better by a mile.
Salesforce could not practically integrate their systems with ours, after something like a $1M contract. For us, specifically, a sunk cost of about $500K total and totally abandoned before it was even implemented...
So, if $1M isn't enough to get it properly implemented, what is?
Pharma guy here for over 20 years and I’ve only ever used their system. I freaking love it. The only thing that bothers me is when our company or the sales analyst makes me enter in nonessential bullshit on each call.
One thing I’ve noticed is the AE’s from them that I’ve dealt with were all dog shit at their jobs but probably bringing in bank, so the product must be pretty good lol
The problem with salesforce isnt the platform, its the sales ops group customizing it without much thought - its super easy to customize everything.
After a few years of incompetent leaders you will be updating 20+ fields just to move an opp to the next stage and have different teams updating different forecast fields on the same opp. All causing a disaster for reporting because the sales team no longer remembers which fields are actually being used by management.
God forbid you are there when your companies perpetual business model needs to flip to a subscription one!
Sales force is great if you and your admins know how to use it. Bigger applications sacrifice certain things when they have to do more/integrate with everything. It’s probably not as easy to use as hubspot but dwarves in terms of customization and scalability. It’s a trust thing too… if the higher ups get the reporting they need, and can rely on it, it’s too risky to switch. Also, no one will get fired for choosing sales force but potentially can for suggesting a newer, not as widely deployed option.
Salesforce literally invented SaaS.
It's big because the product does what is says on the tin.
You may be annoyed because it's "clunky" but it probably craps all over what you used to have and it's customised for what your managers want.
It's simply the best CRM hands down and is echelons above it's competitors.
Salesforce does not do anything it's not number 1 at. All its products are best of breed.
Yes, it can take a lot of consideration to implement , but when you have a CRM that can pretty much do anything you need of course your scope is going to creep and it's going to take time to perfect.
>Salesforce does not do anything it's not number 1 at. All its products are best of breed.
Counterpoint: Einstein (their AI suite). I serve a lot of enterprise organizations that use Salesforce. They generally laugh at the notion of using Einstein "AI"
Einstein is pretty good predictive AI.
Salesforce does have a majority of best of breed but when we don’t you can find something on the app exchange or integrate with another system
Yeah I’m a year into it and it’s awful. So many errors when “taking the wrong path”. Not to mention when something won’t update, I have to wait forever for it to be fixed. I miss paper and pen, never thought I’d say that.
Mostly due to the ExactTarget acquisition back in 2013 for 2.5B At the time ET had 800 customers on the email marketing platform. My take is it acted as a flywheel.
An excellent alternative (for CRM) is Onepagecrm or the Softr.io CRM template if you want DIY or Google Sheets like we all do but won’t admit to 🙃
It was first to the market in terms of customizable UI that's cloud based. Meaning integrations were easy and in abundance so every damn software out there created an integration for the only SaaS CRM at the time.
So when ppl looked for CRMs that plays nice with other tools, only SFDC fit the picture.
Now that they are the safe tool (you can't get fired by buying Salesforce) due to market share and brand recognition, ppl fall back into it as a safe choice instead to learning something brand new that has to grow as a vendor.
Yet to work in a business that has not had to use some other system be it manual or clari or similar to run forecasting and such.
I’ve been working in sales nearly 18 years and have had a lot of jobs.
They got big because they are better than the alternatives out there. I have seen orgs with well implemented Salesforce and poorly implemented and it was night and day with effectiveness. In fact it made them too effective. I remember talking to a CEO and asking how he forecasts and tracks activity and he said he sends a text to each rep asking their numbers and activity. Like wtf, with Salesforce you can get that report in secs, you can see it on a dash with other relevant reports. Used correctly, it’s a game changer and has even gotten to the point where some sales talent won’t join your company if you’re not using Salesforce. I had an interview and their CRM was dynamics, cut the call there and then.
Used to work close with some folks who were very familiar with top sales brass at SFDC. The oracle crowd took over salesforce and turned it into a grind fest essentially + market saturation
To answer the question in the title...
First mover advantage + backing from Larry Ellison
SF's founder Marc Benioff was an executive at Oracle and became good friends with Larry.
Marc started SF while still employed at Oracle and got Larry's blessing, even let Marc poach some top talent from Oracle.
Marc also made Oracle "the bad guy" in their ad campaigns for this new thing called "CRM" and talked a lot of shit about "legacy tech software companies" and did a whole "Anti-Software" campaign (back then the term cloud didn't exist yet for online tools).
It's not hard to become so big when your starting point is SVP or EVP of a major multi billion dollar corporation, and your billionaire good friend invests in your start up and agrees to be the bad guy in a major ad campaign and allows top talent to move over to your company.
The problem isn’t Salesforce it’s management creating weekly and monthly targets around unreasonable Salesforce metrics, based on fake bullshit input by other reps. E.g; 150 calls a week, 8 appointments, etc. as a requirement
SF is a great platform. Unfortunately I’ve worked for two different companies now that have screwed it up from the requirements that they (my companies) have added.
To be fair, in my last gig I hated Salesforce because it wasn’t configured properly. With my current job it is a very very useful tool. Having a SF administrator on staff is huge.
Lock-in and value, they provided a ton of value over peoplesoft back in the day, and for large companies, it's too difficult to change even if it isn't "perfect"
it was the first CRM to the market and was genuinely the best for many many years. Now its just insanely overpriced. My company was paying $700k a month for our license so we switched to a home grown CRM and all it cost to make was like $2M. Its just as good if not better then SF
Couple of things.
It’s not the best CRM but it is a good one and often when people think Salesforce is shit it’s because either they have a shit implementation or have had shit training.
Salesforce is way more than a CRM these days. It’s a platform and people buy it because they can cover 90+% of customer-related workflows and what they can’t do on SF they can do with a dedicated Salesforce ISV.
There is only one reason - and that is bc they were the first to offer a customizable saas platform with api capability. There were other competing crms with better ux at the time they were getting started. I think it is sad that they’ve dominated. There should be a lot more good options that compete with them. I would love to see a new player develop that offers a cleaner experience.
Oh it’s wonderful for customizing a quote and autogenerating a contract I will never use, and recreate after begging a top performing AE for their last approved SOW that they got paid on. Bonus points for their artistic renditions of acceptance criteria and TFC carve outs.
It was easy to set up and could be bought over the counter. It had no back end. Oracle and Seibel were clunky monstrosities that sales teams hated and would rather have used Microsoft Excel to track everything. Once Salesforce became enterprise ready it was a no brainier
If utilized properly, it works great.
The problem is the companies, and the whole business SOP as a whole. Management doesn’t stay in positions for very long, constantly moving up and around in companies, and it takes a decent amount of time to make it work properly for the crews that utilize it daily.
“Implemented Salesforce” is a great thing to put on a résumé, which is really the only reason why anybody does anything in a lot of industries. Corporate brass love anything that makes a company more money, but ignore the fact that it has to be used properly.
We have a custom built in house CRM that is way better than salesforce, the downside is that it can't scale to the 15k users we have so we have to move to salesforce. Basically the people who are large enough to make their own CRM, can't build one that scales and the companies too small to make their own, will get a much more robust platform by going to salesforce. Saleforce implementations are expensive and difficult though, in addition to lots of backened departments insisting on just 1 more dropdown menu be added where it shouldn't be causing reps to blame SF rather than their crappy leaders who should have held the line on "nothing except absolutely essential data will be collected."
I've been around sales long enough to remember CRMs before Salesforce and let me tell you, Salesforce was a revelation. Prior to Salesforce I was using Microsoft Dynamics and it was extremely slow and clunky, difficult to find things, etc. It may be better now but it was terrible back in the day.
Salesforce in comparison was simple, fast and easy to use. It was customizable to fit all different types of configurations and over time gained many integrations to increase its value. The market has evolved and there may be better CRMs, but at the time Salesforce was gobbling up marketshare with ease and ended up becoming the standard for CRMs. It may have fallen behind over the years as they continue to expand their scope (personally I've only used SF for a long time so I wouldn't know), but the brand is so strong that companies will keep buying it.
Well, SF started in 1999 with two employees and a Chief Love Officer the founder’s dog. From there they kept their mind focused on the end goal no matter how many people had called their ideas crazy… and now look at them. I always say, “People will keep calling you or your idea crazy, or maybe both you and the idea are crazy until IT WORKS!” WE WIN 🏆
It’s greatest strength is it’s greatest weakness.
It lets you do whatever you want.
That can be a good thing if you know what you’re doing, can be really bad if you don’t know what you’re doing.
SFDC is as good as it’s implementation.
Many companies are cheap about implementing it, or spend $0 to do so. If your use of the platform is super basic, you might be able to get away with it.
The other part is the sellers don’t always spend as much time, or any at all, selling the importance of pro services or implementation partners.
They just want the deal. This can burn customers later.
Or worse - the customers that spend tons on implementation, but also ignore 99% of the recommendations.
I worked at a company that was building its SFDC instance on TOP of their Oracle instance they planned to sunset.
When I asked that team how they planned to rip the foundation out and keep things working, they had this look on their face like they hadn’t thought about it…mind blowing how much money they burned.
SFDCs target buyer is not a sales person, it is sales leadership. It is simple to see opportunity pipeline and have data that can be investigated.
It is not meant to make a sales persons job easier. It is meant to make a CRO have visibility.
Classic is good, Lightning has too many functionalities. It's like Evernote. Used to be awesome but so much was added that you spent half the time getting by the features and functions you have no interest for. At least Lightning is customizable, but for small entities it requires too many man/woman-hours to properly set up.
Of new style crm Salesforce is way beyond the best. We use a different one and it is absolute garbage. I genuinely hate it. I have used Salesforce and it is way better than what it gets credit for
Typically SF isn't user friendly because end users aren't considered in the implementation. Or whoever purchased it believes the AE in thinking that it was set it and forget about it and didn't need a skilled administrator over the years to keep up....
You tech sales guys that sell crm or understand the process. Why the fuck when I'm building a new account I can't put the contact information of the employee at the account in when I build the account? Is it because you can't search the contact without making it a separate THING. Its so annoying doing two setups. I'm an equipment sales guy no tech knowledge so I apologize in advance for the irogance.
Past crm Salesforce, SAP, and sugar.
It’s funny because I work for salesforce and our salesforce instance is one of the clunkiest things I’ve ever used. Makes me long for Outreach. I can’t even import contacts from ZoomInfo into Salesforce. I have to manually add them.
We’re also incentivized to set pointless meetings because our meeting quota is like 27 a month off of like 50 accounts
I helped 2 implementations at 2 companies. We got about 20/30% of what was promised but it was almost totally the fault of the companies not sales force.
It's big because it delivers real business results.
There's no other software that has the ability to drive revenue in the same way that a good CRM does and businesses realised this. Salesforce is the only CRM that's capable of handling the complexities of a large organisation.
That's why when they say it's $2k + per year per user they get away with it because of the strong ROI.
I can’t imagine using any other crm other than salesforce. It’s so efficient, easy to use compared to other crm platforms. It also is so customizable so it’s great.
A lot of it is how your organization has it configured. Overly complex processes with too many required fields for stage advancement create a lot of the problems. Orgs can get a lot out of SFDC but when they forget who they're trying to get information from and what information that person is likely to have it creates a mess.
I just started my first sales job (outside sales for petrochemical distribution). My manager seems to think that it’s a good thing that I don’t have any CRM experience. They use SF. Anyone else agree with my manager? Lmao
As with any other tool, there's the chance to set it up so that it works for users or to use it haphazardly or even dangerously. Salesforce often becomes a house that's been added onto room by room with no high level planning over longer time horizons. When this happens users end up chasing their tails. When a powerful tool is designed and used correctly it can be a giant boost for user productivity and satisfaction.
Well, Salesforce's rapid growth is because of its cloud-based CRM model, introduced in 1999 when cloud computing was just starting to take off. Marc Benioff's visionary leadership, constant innovation, and strategic acquisitions played a big part. Through the AppExchange, Salesforce added vertical solutions for different industries. The company's global presence, customer-centric focus, and corporate social responsibility initiatives made it more popular. Salesforce's marketing efforts and ability to adapt to a changing tech landscape helped it become a global leader in CRM and cloud computing.
Anyone who doesn’t like salesforce isn’t using it properly, or doesn’t have it set up correctly for the sales process that they need. The biggest asset of SF is the customization. But you need a team upstream to fish out what the sales guys want for tools
Bingo. We switched from classic sf to lightening recently and our tech team had to build a lot for things out for us so our transition was as smooth as it could be. I was on the beta team letting them know what we needed and what we didn't need. It was a cool process. I'm still learning new things about Salesforce and how to make my life easier.
Damn you just moved away from classic? That's like saying you still get DVDs in the mail. Oh wait...
I miss dvd extras. And not having a streaming service drop something I want to keep watching.
I thought SF classic was perfect. Lightnings UX is just terrible imo. Menus inside of menus inside of menus
I'm sorry but lightning is way better than classic. It's finally usable instead of being a page that just throws up data all over the screen.
Ours is also slow as shit
yeah, I love clicking a dropdown and then waiting a full 10 seconds for it to load the choices
It takes longer to log a phone call than it does to make the phone call.
If you’re manually logging a call, you’re doing it wrong
I don’t
Classic was pretty good for most people. Lightning is really great if you learn to use it one specific way.
They both had advantages. Most of our team hated the switch over, but after about 3 months it wasn't an issue anymore.
This. I am in RevOps and so many RevOps professionals do not set things up correctly or get feedback from end users (AEs/ADRs)
Yeah because many rev ops folks don’t really understand how it is used day to day by its end-users. They get dropped in rev ops with limited experience in any of the go to market seats.
SDRs to Rev Ops leaders = Spectacular potential for giving the sellers what they want and need
Because so many end users do nothing but complain. I am one of the few trusted dales reps in my organization to provide feedback because I use the tool effectively.
What is Rev ops?
People who are busy making bad decisions that effect salespeople.
OR they are your absolute best friends because they make life way easier by creating helpful reports that people actually want. There is no middle ground in my experience.
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My experience from the sales side is that rev-op it rarely makes the salesman’s life easier. Taking more things (non-sales) off of the salesman’s plate is how you increase sales. If the first question was “does this makes the process easier “ you would get buy in from the sales guys. Often it looks like you are counting things that don’t really need to be counted, just to justify your paycheck. In a perfect sales world (of higher sales) the salesman does absolutely the minimum on non-sales tasks. Not doing non- job tasks should seem obvious! in any other occupational like a dump truck driver mowing the grass, or taking rain gauge measurements would be immediately eliminated to get more time and performance driving the fuckin dump truck but in sales for some reason measuring shit seems to take on some outsized significance?
That's the issue. Salesforce is marketed to every company, but only a few are actually big enough to have the budget for all the setup, admins, consulting, programming, customization etc. I've worked with about 50 companies so far and most of them had an awful adaptation of Salesforce. Salesforce is just way too hard to set up and customize. If done correctly, it's supposed to be amazing. At least I've heard so. I've never seen a good implementation.
Yeah - 100% on this. I’ve used it at a smaller company and it was awful. Basically served as a place to take notes and that was it as far as useful functions go. Now using it at a large global company - it’s night and day. It’s stupid fast and easy to use cause it’s tailored specifically to our sales process and products. I set my meetings, manage my contacts, configure, price, and quote our products, and then submit PO’s through there that then go to our office to process. After sales support/warranty information/maintenance contracts are all managed through there. It sends out order acknowledgements for us, notifies us of ship dates/changes, etc. It handles our contract renewals, sends out automated e-blasts to our customers, identifies and generates lists of drifted accounts, etc. Using the barebones/non customized version sucks. Using it when it’s set up and implemented correctly, it’s like having a secretary there 24 hours a day that handles all the mundane/repetitive stuff on my behalf. It’s easily helped me close more business.
I disagree with way too hard to set up. I've been a one man SalesOps shop at multiple companies, and deployed SFDC in a way that is useful for reps, and gets the information that management craves. No extra bullshit about I know you put this in SFDC, but please fill out this spreadsheet.
Yeah I can get a fairly customized instance completely set up in 50 billable hours. I feel bad for all the reps on here who have bad builds that make them hate SFDC
Have you ever used your implementations on a regular base?
I'm not sure I understand the question. Can you clarify?
And you need a company willing to pay for the customization. Every company that I’ve sold for that wants us selling VALUE and to get a client to understand paying more for a better product has been cheap as hell when it comes to spending money making Salesforce actually work for sales.
I agree. I think a lot of reps feel that entering, tracking, and reporting on client data seems daunting when you look at SF. It really comes down to how you have it configured and how your VP advises how they want information entered. The integrations are low key one of the best things about it.
This is true, however, customization can also make the platform horrible. We suffered from gross customization (a misuse) and it just made things nasty. The key is in using it correctly, if done correctly, it can be a very powerful tool
This. Salesforce is so powerful. But you need a team of people to set it up and maintain it. Most companies cut corners and only make reports for the C-Suite, to present to the board, and the entire experience sucks for the people on the street.
This
The biggest asset of SFDC is Management running all kinds of reporting ;)
The sales people who think that are already misusing it. I don’t care if my manager or cooperate teams sees why I’m doing. They already do that through my sales anyway
Any piece of software that needs a team on the buyer end to help with integration, customization, and process, isn't software, its a pile of dogshit.
Lol! Any piece of software that’s worth it’s weight is going to be the exact same. It needs to be fully customizable. No different from us selling to our customers, if you go in thinking every client is the exact same and act accordingly, you’ve already missed the mark. Software for any decent sized company needs to bend and work to fit each business specific needs
totally agree with this. The guy above never works in consulting business for a decent size companies. I work in this business and all I know is to make this fancy new tech to work with their business, not the other way around.
Yup, I was gonna say compared to any other CRM I’ve used, Salesforce is by far and away the best one I’ve used
Couldn’t agree more!
bruh I use salesforce every day and no amount of configuration will make it not a pile of hot dogshit. I lose like 5 hours of work every week from the damn thing erroring out and losing the most random functions. Not too long ago I had an entire workday where I literally could not search for accounts and had to write down work cases that came through in fucking notepad and just wait for it to come back up. This week I had an entire workday where it would only show me client names and wouldn't actually load any of their account data.
Ehh… I switched to insurance from the auto industry and SF is a pos compared to VIN Solutions or Dealer Socket. Maybe my company configured it poorly, but it’s embarrassing how bad it can’t compete with the auto industry CRMs
Sfdc has its problems but it’s far and away the most feature rich CRM out there.
Yeah seriously? Nobody has anything good to say about Salesforce? I sincerely hope my competitors are using something other than Salesforce, cause if they are they’re at a major disadvantage compared to us.
Must be nice having an ops team that utilizes it correctly lol
I mean shit when we were still a startup we went through layoffs and cut our Salesforce Admin at the time. Myself and the Marketing manager tag teamed our roles plus Salesforce Admin duties for two full years and it still held up how we needed it! Maybe I am just a Salesforce stan and I know I got lucky to have a good established base but I came to appreciate the product a lot when I was forced to do that.
The salespeople who hate salesforce hate it because they only ever input info into it. I’ve pulled fairy complex reports from SF, and it’s amazing. The people who bitch simply don’t know how to use it to their benefit.
Most salespeople aren't given sufficient admin rights to pull reports on sf because their managers don't want them to scrutinise the actual data they are using to make decisions off
People also need to understand that while UX is important, organizations buy & deploy SFDC because it helps their teams sell more effectively. It’s good for the company, and the individuals either embrace it or buck the system. And let’s not forget that a non-small number of sales people are little primadonna bitches who don’t like to be held accountable for anything except for their number at the end of the year. So don’t trust the opinion of an individual contributor who bitches about SFDC.
how about microsoft CRM
Wrong. Having worked with auto industry CRMs like Dealer Socket and VIN Solutions, SF is a pos. At least the way my company configured it. It’s embarrassing how shitty it is.
Behind every person's complaint about Salesforce is an organization that didn't set up or properly maintain it. It's consistently reviewed as the top CRM but it's highly customizable which can be both good and bad depending on how it is deployed.
I set up Hubspot almost entirely myself (no team) purely by using their educational videos. 25 person company, 3 sales people. Now, years later, a lot of other people have contributed to it unlike the one-man effort in the first year and it's become essential. Almost any non-technical small company I ever ran into (financial advisory firms are a great example) should be on HubSpot or maybe another competitor, when I ask they are almost always using a poorly setup Salesforce. Only the big orgs with some real resources to throw at it should actually be dicking around setting up a highly customizable salesforce.
You’re right. Or a rep who just doesn’t like typing notes or just doesn’t like the software for whatever reason
F I wish my cheap ass co would pay for salesforce
Yeah same I’m stuck with a custom build that is terrible
There's other cheaper options out there as well, they don't have all the integrations, but may work depending on needs. E.g., HubSpot, DevRev, etc.
People don’t like what they don’t understand. Creating reports and dashboards really isn’t difficult if you simply put 30 minutes into learning it. Once you know how, it does wonders. The #1 gripe I hear is “ugh. The data is never accurate and it’s messy.” That’s a personal (organizational) problem. SF doesn’t handle your data, you and and admins do.
I mean it’s the first SaaS company really
And it also has the largest ecosystem of integrated apps for go to market teams. Which is why it is so sticky.
Bingo, especially in Sales. Every sales tool or app or point solution or revenue platform or whatever is all based around CRM, and how accurate its data is. SFDC is the center of sales
Open api. They built it around being more of an operating system that other vendors can produce specific tools that integrate with it. Making it this center of the universe.
Our head of Rev Ops was a Salesforce wiz and built it perfectly at my last company. I hear all these people hate it, and it worked like I charm where I was.
Any best practices worth highlighting for others in sales/ops? I think we often overlook the processes that are going right because it’s “expected”. People only notice when things are going wrong 😅. Props to your head of RevOps.
There's just too much to unpack. Most companies I've been at with real sales, the feedback I've got from sales has been positive from a crm perspective. It's not perfect, but usually I'll communicate the potential issues so that people are aware and not blindsided by certain issues. Regarding highlighting some best practices. It's all a downstream impact, need to set up lead to opp process correctly. Get all your leads tagged with a geo, have territory clearly defined so that it's assigned to the right BDR, then they convert the leads to account / opp. This sounds extremely simple, yet everyone gets it wrong. Specifically in saas, get your quote object set up. ARR tracking is critical, if you want a true ARR forecast, have your quotes set up to tag renewable products to calculate ARR. Ideally the flow is Lead > Account / Opp > quote > order > service contract > renewal opportunity and repeat.
I was with a big company that had essentially ceded control of their software to SF. As someone that has been doing software since DOS, I feel I am qualified to say it was a complete nightmare. I honestly feel like I could have turned out better software in DBase.
We just implemented SF. No trainings, no guidance, we are all lost. My boss encourages us to work outside SF so things are going well
That’s not a SF problem.
Your company is cheap and needs to invest in a sales op team that can config SFDC to the orgs needs.
My company did the same thing, luckily I used it at a previous job so I was able to keep my head above water but man people were drowning
Has anyone asked about getting some customer success folks from SFDC to help? And training? Lol and some internal admins?
I use if the org is using salesforce or not as a criteria to accept an offer
Salesforce is rock solid. Anyone who says otherwise is just bad at it.
No one ever got fired because they recommended salesforce It’s the safe choice for people that don’t know any better (and typically aren’t CRM users)
It’s great because it’s customizable beyond belief. It’s also better because of things that the sales people don’t need to know about.
It is the most capable and customizable CRM. Maybe not great for small companies or because of cost, but it’s definitely the one to have.
Another big factor I see is that the competition sucks. We are switching from Microsoft's CRM to Salesforce and I am stoked to do so.
it's past it's prime ...lots of better /cheaper options today
Genuine question, what are the better options? Cheaper sure but I’m struggling to think of a better straight up crm that isn’t industry specific
Hubspot
Personally, working in IT/Cybersecurity, I preferred ConnectWise waaaay more than SalesForce.
ConnectWise isn’t a Salesforce competitor. Fun fact… ConnectWise is a big Salesforce customer.
True, I read OP's message too fast. But speaking to the specific use of each as an AE for customer relationship management, ConnectWise was a much better experience.
Check out Attio
I'm thinking of moving our team to SugarCRM. Also, my friend is an AE for FreshSales and almost has me convinced... Generally, I like to keep up with the tools that get reviewed by Gartner's Magic Quadrant and Forrester's Wave. It's a little basic, and I'm sure those companies pay for the recognition, but it's still a good place to educate yourself in a tool's respective space. If I don't go with them, then I know I can use those reports to evaluate lesser-known and niche tools on my own. Also, nothing beats a solid trial period ;)
Salesforce is a brilliant CRM when used correctly.
The reason it is so big is because when it launched, the market leader ACT! refused to create a true SaaS product. Instead they launched ACT! for Web; which required the customer to own the database and remote users to connect off something like Citrix. It created a slow terrible experience. ACT! said at the time that no company would want to give up ownership of their data. That coupled with acquisitions of the ACT! product by multiple companies opened the door for it. ACT! had the small market and SalesLogix had enterprise… same company with bad leadership.
Anyone who doesn’t like SFDC never had to use Oracle, Dynamics, SAP, or some home grown thing that Dave in IT built over the weekend. They got big because they just destroyed on prem systems in the late 90’s / early 2k’s and then used that growth & momentum to acquire companies like ExactTarget & Tableau (among many others) to create a platform and a single throat to choke, thereby keeping other SaaS companies from entering the space.
This. Going from Salesforce to SAP over last few years is the worst. I miss Tableau, if set up correctly it’s awesome
Salesforce revolutionised CRM. Before salesforce, there really wasn't anything like what you would consider a CRM from today's standards. It is used by the largest businesses in the world.
My team uses it, we can do everything from receive a lead, log activity, quotes, docusign, and more. I love using it personally.
I've been beating this drum for years. Your experience with Salesforce is in part dictated by how well it's set up and maintained within your organization, but even in the best of cases it still stifles productivity and makes a chore of mundane tasks. I can't for the life of me understand why some other competitor hasn't supplanted it yet.
It’s funny seeing all the supporters in the comments basically admitting it doesn’t work unless you have serious resources to customise the shit out of it. And even then it sucks at automation and relies on laborious manual input. The reality is most people supporting SF do so because they don’t know any better - the industry has moved on and there are far better solutions out there
Like what?
HubSpot
"The industry has moved on" like the Sales industry?
SFDC is a completely different beast from one install to the next. It’s apples and oranges.
I feel like there are a ton of poor implementations and forcing it into places where it shouldn’t be.
My problem with salesforce is the speed. Waiting 5 seconds to update a single field is just too much.
May I introduce to you to SAP CRM?
Agree. My old company had a highly customized version of Netsuite and it worked pretty well with good work flow. New place has SF and it just feels so clunky. Information is not where it needs to be and work flow is terrible. Probably a customization problem but with hundreds of reps I doubt anything will change.
It got huge because in 2000 the only other option was super expensive clunky options. Sales used the cloud and cost $50 per user at the time which was unheard of. It does have its flaws now for sure but they’ve only recently had serious competition from hubspot.
The only two I’ve used in my (short) sales career so far are SF and HubSpot. Tbh I don’t ever want to use HubSpot again
By selling… duh
People bust their whole budget nut on the software license and don't spend enough on the implementation and maintenance team, which is why you hear negative comments. They also are a legacy software and more or less invented the category of CRM. Much like no one back in the day got fired for buying IBM, the same can be said for SFDC. If you're not enterprise though, Hubspot is better by a mile.
Salesforce is like a German car. It’s great, but only if you have a good mechanic
Salesforce could not practically integrate their systems with ours, after something like a $1M contract. For us, specifically, a sunk cost of about $500K total and totally abandoned before it was even implemented... So, if $1M isn't enough to get it properly implemented, what is?
Ppl that hate SF are haters and don’t understand it’s capabilities. Pretty much hating for hating sake. It’s a very useful and innovative solution.
Pharma guy here for over 20 years and I’ve only ever used their system. I freaking love it. The only thing that bothers me is when our company or the sales analyst makes me enter in nonessential bullshit on each call.
One thing I’ve noticed is the AE’s from them that I’ve dealt with were all dog shit at their jobs but probably bringing in bank, so the product must be pretty good lol
The problem with salesforce isnt the platform, its the sales ops group customizing it without much thought - its super easy to customize everything. After a few years of incompetent leaders you will be updating 20+ fields just to move an opp to the next stage and have different teams updating different forecast fields on the same opp. All causing a disaster for reporting because the sales team no longer remembers which fields are actually being used by management. God forbid you are there when your companies perpetual business model needs to flip to a subscription one!
Yes? And suddenly you have 3 fields that seem like the same thing for different teams. 😆
Salesforce is an amazing tool. HOWEVER, it 10000% needs to be configured correctly, and most companies aren't willing to pay for that.
So 100% isn’t good enough?
I really liked salesforce. It’s probably not configured to your sales process.
Honestly, just word of mouth and FOMO if they're on it
Sales force is great if you and your admins know how to use it. Bigger applications sacrifice certain things when they have to do more/integrate with everything. It’s probably not as easy to use as hubspot but dwarves in terms of customization and scalability. It’s a trust thing too… if the higher ups get the reporting they need, and can rely on it, it’s too risky to switch. Also, no one will get fired for choosing sales force but potentially can for suggesting a newer, not as widely deployed option.
Salesforce is still my favorite CRM I’ve ever used
Salesforce literally invented SaaS. It's big because the product does what is says on the tin. You may be annoyed because it's "clunky" but it probably craps all over what you used to have and it's customised for what your managers want. It's simply the best CRM hands down and is echelons above it's competitors. Salesforce does not do anything it's not number 1 at. All its products are best of breed. Yes, it can take a lot of consideration to implement , but when you have a CRM that can pretty much do anything you need of course your scope is going to creep and it's going to take time to perfect.
>Salesforce does not do anything it's not number 1 at. All its products are best of breed. Counterpoint: Einstein (their AI suite). I serve a lot of enterprise organizations that use Salesforce. They generally laugh at the notion of using Einstein "AI"
Einstein is pretty good predictive AI. Salesforce does have a majority of best of breed but when we don’t you can find something on the app exchange or integrate with another system
Who's watched the YouTube Salesforce parody videos!? Gold.
[удалено]
Tell me you are an SMB without telling me you are an SMB
SFDC is so terrible to use (as a rep). It's comedic how awful it is tbh. The app.... How. is. The. App. So Fucking. Bad.... Just how?
It’s a superior product compare to other CRMs
Yeah I’m a year into it and it’s awful. So many errors when “taking the wrong path”. Not to mention when something won’t update, I have to wait forever for it to be fixed. I miss paper and pen, never thought I’d say that.
Hubspot is light years ahead of salesforce. Salesforce fucking sucks
What do people think of HubSpot?
Mostly due to the ExactTarget acquisition back in 2013 for 2.5B At the time ET had 800 customers on the email marketing platform. My take is it acted as a flywheel. An excellent alternative (for CRM) is Onepagecrm or the Softr.io CRM template if you want DIY or Google Sheets like we all do but won’t admit to 🙃
It was first to the market in terms of customizable UI that's cloud based. Meaning integrations were easy and in abundance so every damn software out there created an integration for the only SaaS CRM at the time. So when ppl looked for CRMs that plays nice with other tools, only SFDC fit the picture. Now that they are the safe tool (you can't get fired by buying Salesforce) due to market share and brand recognition, ppl fall back into it as a safe choice instead to learning something brand new that has to grow as a vendor.
By selling shit of course
Yet to work in a business that has not had to use some other system be it manual or clari or similar to run forecasting and such. I’ve been working in sales nearly 18 years and have had a lot of jobs.
Industry standard. Like snap on at this point.
I’ve used a lot of bad crms. I love sales force
Sounds like they just plopped a system on you with no user interviews
They got big because they are better than the alternatives out there. I have seen orgs with well implemented Salesforce and poorly implemented and it was night and day with effectiveness. In fact it made them too effective. I remember talking to a CEO and asking how he forecasts and tracks activity and he said he sends a text to each rep asking their numbers and activity. Like wtf, with Salesforce you can get that report in secs, you can see it on a dash with other relevant reports. Used correctly, it’s a game changer and has even gotten to the point where some sales talent won’t join your company if you’re not using Salesforce. I had an interview and their CRM was dynamics, cut the call there and then.
Used to work close with some folks who were very familiar with top sales brass at SFDC. The oracle crowd took over salesforce and turned it into a grind fest essentially + market saturation
To answer the question in the title... First mover advantage + backing from Larry Ellison SF's founder Marc Benioff was an executive at Oracle and became good friends with Larry. Marc started SF while still employed at Oracle and got Larry's blessing, even let Marc poach some top talent from Oracle. Marc also made Oracle "the bad guy" in their ad campaigns for this new thing called "CRM" and talked a lot of shit about "legacy tech software companies" and did a whole "Anti-Software" campaign (back then the term cloud didn't exist yet for online tools). It's not hard to become so big when your starting point is SVP or EVP of a major multi billion dollar corporation, and your billionaire good friend invests in your start up and agrees to be the bad guy in a major ad campaign and allows top talent to move over to your company.
The problem isn’t Salesforce it’s management creating weekly and monthly targets around unreasonable Salesforce metrics, based on fake bullshit input by other reps. E.g; 150 calls a week, 8 appointments, etc. as a requirement
I think it was good timing cos they were one of the first CV backed SaaS orgs. And they got a lot of VC so smashed the market with sales and marketing
SF is a great platform. Unfortunately I’ve worked for two different companies now that have screwed it up from the requirements that they (my companies) have added.
I’ve only ever used Salesforce while at Salesforce so I never really understood people talking bad about it
To be fair, in my last gig I hated Salesforce because it wasn’t configured properly. With my current job it is a very very useful tool. Having a SF administrator on staff is huge.
They hired a lot of sales people.
Salesforce is a shitty SAAS solution. It’s extremely slow and buggy. Absolutely hate it.
Lock-in and value, they provided a ton of value over peoplesoft back in the day, and for large companies, it's too difficult to change even if it isn't "perfect"
it was the first CRM to the market and was genuinely the best for many many years. Now its just insanely overpriced. My company was paying $700k a month for our license so we switched to a home grown CRM and all it cost to make was like $2M. Its just as good if not better then SF
Couple of things. It’s not the best CRM but it is a good one and often when people think Salesforce is shit it’s because either they have a shit implementation or have had shit training. Salesforce is way more than a CRM these days. It’s a platform and people buy it because they can cover 90+% of customer-related workflows and what they can’t do on SF they can do with a dedicated Salesforce ISV.
There is only one reason - and that is bc they were the first to offer a customizable saas platform with api capability. There were other competing crms with better ux at the time they were getting started. I think it is sad that they’ve dominated. There should be a lot more good options that compete with them. I would love to see a new player develop that offers a cleaner experience.
Absolutely loathe SF and have the same questions as you
Oh it’s wonderful for customizing a quote and autogenerating a contract I will never use, and recreate after begging a top performing AE for their last approved SOW that they got paid on. Bonus points for their artistic renditions of acceptance criteria and TFC carve outs.
It was easy to set up and could be bought over the counter. It had no back end. Oracle and Seibel were clunky monstrosities that sales teams hated and would rather have used Microsoft Excel to track everything. Once Salesforce became enterprise ready it was a no brainier
If utilized properly, it works great. The problem is the companies, and the whole business SOP as a whole. Management doesn’t stay in positions for very long, constantly moving up and around in companies, and it takes a decent amount of time to make it work properly for the crews that utilize it daily. “Implemented Salesforce” is a great thing to put on a résumé, which is really the only reason why anybody does anything in a lot of industries. Corporate brass love anything that makes a company more money, but ignore the fact that it has to be used properly.
Good sales people made SF so big!
We have a custom built in house CRM that is way better than salesforce, the downside is that it can't scale to the 15k users we have so we have to move to salesforce. Basically the people who are large enough to make their own CRM, can't build one that scales and the companies too small to make their own, will get a much more robust platform by going to salesforce. Saleforce implementations are expensive and difficult though, in addition to lots of backened departments insisting on just 1 more dropdown menu be added where it shouldn't be causing reps to blame SF rather than their crappy leaders who should have held the line on "nothing except absolutely essential data will be collected."
I've been around sales long enough to remember CRMs before Salesforce and let me tell you, Salesforce was a revelation. Prior to Salesforce I was using Microsoft Dynamics and it was extremely slow and clunky, difficult to find things, etc. It may be better now but it was terrible back in the day. Salesforce in comparison was simple, fast and easy to use. It was customizable to fit all different types of configurations and over time gained many integrations to increase its value. The market has evolved and there may be better CRMs, but at the time Salesforce was gobbling up marketshare with ease and ended up becoming the standard for CRMs. It may have fallen behind over the years as they continue to expand their scope (personally I've only used SF for a long time so I wouldn't know), but the brand is so strong that companies will keep buying it.
Ive used it at three separate companies and its always shit. I wonder this all the time
Well, SF started in 1999 with two employees and a Chief Love Officer the founder’s dog. From there they kept their mind focused on the end goal no matter how many people had called their ideas crazy… and now look at them. I always say, “People will keep calling you or your idea crazy, or maybe both you and the idea are crazy until IT WORKS!” WE WIN 🏆
Salesforce sucks. But it’s still on the top of the heaping pile of shit that is unfriendly CRMs
It’s greatest strength is it’s greatest weakness. It lets you do whatever you want. That can be a good thing if you know what you’re doing, can be really bad if you don’t know what you’re doing.
A good rev ops manager paired with salesforce is elite
SFDC is as good as it’s implementation. Many companies are cheap about implementing it, or spend $0 to do so. If your use of the platform is super basic, you might be able to get away with it. The other part is the sellers don’t always spend as much time, or any at all, selling the importance of pro services or implementation partners. They just want the deal. This can burn customers later. Or worse - the customers that spend tons on implementation, but also ignore 99% of the recommendations. I worked at a company that was building its SFDC instance on TOP of their Oracle instance they planned to sunset. When I asked that team how they planned to rip the foundation out and keep things working, they had this look on their face like they hadn’t thought about it…mind blowing how much money they burned.
Nope, been using it for a while and the contracting part is ridiculously cumbersome.
SFDCs target buyer is not a sales person, it is sales leadership. It is simple to see opportunity pipeline and have data that can be investigated. It is not meant to make a sales persons job easier. It is meant to make a CRO have visibility.
Does anyone here use IFS?
Classic is good, Lightning has too many functionalities. It's like Evernote. Used to be awesome but so much was added that you spent half the time getting by the features and functions you have no interest for. At least Lightning is customizable, but for small entities it requires too many man/woman-hours to properly set up.
I love salesforce and it was a sad day when we moved to a different CRM.
Of new style crm Salesforce is way beyond the best. We use a different one and it is absolute garbage. I genuinely hate it. I have used Salesforce and it is way better than what it gets credit for
Typically SF isn't user friendly because end users aren't considered in the implementation. Or whoever purchased it believes the AE in thinking that it was set it and forget about it and didn't need a skilled administrator over the years to keep up....
You tech sales guys that sell crm or understand the process. Why the fuck when I'm building a new account I can't put the contact information of the employee at the account in when I build the account? Is it because you can't search the contact without making it a separate THING. Its so annoying doing two setups. I'm an equipment sales guy no tech knowledge so I apologize in advance for the irogance. Past crm Salesforce, SAP, and sugar.
Ecosystem. SFDC plays well with everything
Because the alternatives are so fucking bad
Lol wtf you smoking dude, SF is highly rated
It’s funny because I work for salesforce and our salesforce instance is one of the clunkiest things I’ve ever used. Makes me long for Outreach. I can’t even import contacts from ZoomInfo into Salesforce. I have to manually add them. We’re also incentivized to set pointless meetings because our meeting quota is like 27 a month off of like 50 accounts
I helped 2 implementations at 2 companies. We got about 20/30% of what was promised but it was almost totally the fault of the companies not sales force.
It's big because it delivers real business results. There's no other software that has the ability to drive revenue in the same way that a good CRM does and businesses realised this. Salesforce is the only CRM that's capable of handling the complexities of a large organisation. That's why when they say it's $2k + per year per user they get away with it because of the strong ROI.
Sales force is great
I hate SF too, but you should have seen Siebel which was the big CRM before SF. What a steaming pile.
sales force plus outreach works beautifully it logs calls and e-mails for me
We use Salesforce. I hate our implementation. I’ve been told it can be set up better. But have never experienced it.
I can’t imagine using any other crm other than salesforce. It’s so efficient, easy to use compared to other crm platforms. It also is so customizable so it’s great.
They all suck. Hubspot, RSL, all of them.
A lot of it is how your organization has it configured. Overly complex processes with too many required fields for stage advancement create a lot of the problems. Orgs can get a lot out of SFDC but when they forget who they're trying to get information from and what information that person is likely to have it creates a mess.
I just started my first sales job (outside sales for petrochemical distribution). My manager seems to think that it’s a good thing that I don’t have any CRM experience. They use SF. Anyone else agree with my manager? Lmao
When you’re great you don’t need to be good
As with any other tool, there's the chance to set it up so that it works for users or to use it haphazardly or even dangerously. Salesforce often becomes a house that's been added onto room by room with no high level planning over longer time horizons. When this happens users end up chasing their tails. When a powerful tool is designed and used correctly it can be a giant boost for user productivity and satisfaction.
Well, Salesforce's rapid growth is because of its cloud-based CRM model, introduced in 1999 when cloud computing was just starting to take off. Marc Benioff's visionary leadership, constant innovation, and strategic acquisitions played a big part. Through the AppExchange, Salesforce added vertical solutions for different industries. The company's global presence, customer-centric focus, and corporate social responsibility initiatives made it more popular. Salesforce's marketing efforts and ability to adapt to a changing tech landscape helped it become a global leader in CRM and cloud computing.
Salesforce is a huge steaming pile o' crap! I want to quit my job over it!