Something about this company sets off my spidey senses.
My company just put it in. If you look out in the web, there's almost something like a cult around it. Granted, a lot of people are making a lot of money "helping' companies implement this product. My company hired a consulting firm to do it.
I'm an old school IT admin. I'm looking at this conglomeration of a system and it frankly doesn't make any sense to me why there is so much raving about it and why it costs so much. Seems most of it is half-assed, poorly documented and needlessly costly and complicated. But I went out looking for opinions like mine and it seems that everything I find just gushes about how great it is and anyone who questions this is a luddite.
Now layer on top of that the owner is a wildly successful libtard billionaire/"philanthropist" and it really makes me wonder what's going on here.
I know maybe I'm not articulating this well, but I've been involved in implementing this product for almost a year, and I think we could have done it better and faster with our small in-house dev team and we wouldn't have a black box of code inside the bigger black box of code that is Salesforce housed on somebody else's cloud infrastructure that we're locked into for the next however many decades because it's almost impossible to port anywhere else. None of it makes any sense.
Don't know Frens. Usually when something doesn't make sense like this to me, it ends up being cabal related, but maybe I'm getting conspiratorial in my old age.
I have never really looked at the software, but I share your skepticism. I have to begrudgingly admit the founder saw a trend and had the drive to develop an application to exploit it.
The trend was and is under qualified management and sales people who lack core requirements for success, people skills, a real work ethic, and, dare I say common sense. I worked with a company that had just a handful of customers and the local executive team was constantly complaining the parent company wouldn’t sign off on a CRM.
The promise of CRM is to magically track customer interactions and produce meaningful analysis to more effectively run your business. Most companies I’ve worked for, purchased from, or sold to had so much room for improvement just by standardizing their processes and actually using their ERP correctly. I seriously doubt they could ever honestly justify and payback the expense of a CRM.
I think the "genius" was to turn it into a whole development environment, as bad as that is. Once you buy into the sale, then you need a bunch of developers who specialize in Salesforce to make any customizations. They all had to get trained and certified into the Salesforce's club. And none of the work you put in is easily transportable later because it's all specialized to Salesforce.
it's okay as a product. although they have access to a lot of info
I guess there's a lot of "everyone else is doing it so it must be good" involved.
Used SalesForce as a CRM for fundraising. Very hard to use for lay people. In other words - GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out).
The hype and unjustified high cost you describe in the second paragraph is exactly how I feel about Starbucks. Like many trendy things, they are marketed to insecure people who just want to be associated with whatever the latest thing is. I’m hearing that giant “Stanley” cups are the latest craze among soccer moms.
The one thing about Starbucks that I appreciate in a very narrow set of circumstances is their consistency. You pretty much know what you're going to get - whether you like it or not is a different issue.
When I'm in an airport and I see a Starbucks, I go there. Only because I've had enough $8 airport coffee that tasted like ass to prefer to spend it on Starbucks burnt bitter crap. At least Starbucks will fill it full of cream and sugar to take the edge off.
Some of the stuff I had from a no-name stand in the Lauderdale airport was better used as paint remover than a beverage.
I have used it every working day for almost 15 years and it’s not meant to make end-user’s lives better. It’s meant for management so they can decide if you are doing your job or not. It protects the company more than the employee (which is mostly the case in corporate America). Personally, I see the value in it as it manages a sales opportunity life-cycle and has become the industry standard(corporate cabal sanctioned). If you are a public company, it’s practically essential but I mostly agree with your points
Just wait until Salesforce gets hacked, and all of the companies using it are compromised. It's only a matter of time, especially if it's poorly coded.
Your observations are valid
Further there’s not much to it, it’s just a relational database focused on contact management. But they won the war and every company needs one of those.
My favorite part is when I search for help, and this happens almost every single time, the articles always give some simple possible solution that was so obvious I already tried, and then say "see your Salesforce Administrator".
Real helpful when you're the salesforce administrator trying to find an answer. I'm thinking of keeping a running total of every time I look for help and that's the answer they give me.