Salesforce is amazing, in the sense that it truly lives up to its name. Everytime I've been hired into an executive role I've cancelled our Salesforce subscription and productivity has gone up.
Its clunky, slow and overly complex if you ask me. But their success cannot be denied, thus they must have an amazing salesforce.
Come in, shake things up by changing a big system to put their stamp on things, (no telling if productivity would’ve gone up if nothing had happened, e.g. company was already growing), then bounce to the next executive gig before the honeymoon wears off.
Check out this reply to my other comment asking for their background as an executive.
> [I’ve been an executive] 2 times. First I left because of a disagreement on strategy after 2 years. The second I left because of mismanagement at the highest levels.
I’ve looked like an ass before, but I think I did OK w/ my original comment.
I heard moving into a new home and then immediately burning it down to camp in the back yard is great for the maximizing your Daily Steps KPI also. This conversation of "what I did":"what the outcome was":"what the goal was":"what the organization needs to win" seems a bit imprecise.
In my case, the upstream ERP was there for historical reasons and literally wasn’t used beyond a few reports. The old system wasn’t modified with the business as it grew.
I'd love a longer answer. You seem to be happy to give quips and tidbits, but no substance in your answers.
Great, you've replaced your CRM with Office365 spreadsheet and a documented process in a wiki. Your spreadsheet has history, so audit logs are captured and you can backup. You have a documented and adhered to process for altering data in the spreadsheet.
But depending on your use-case, Salesforce may never have been a good fit. If you're following processes that can actually be adhered to by reading a document to manage your business - your business is extremely mature, well defined and unchanging, has no bad actors (because hitting "Download" on the top-right literally exports all of the company private data) with little compliance requirements, and doesn't require international or external integration, and will never experience unprecedented growth.
If these assumptions are wrong, please share some detail because I'd love to hear about the workflow in your organisation.
Like most highly successful enterprise software companies, their focus has definitely shifted to sales. They have the budget to fly executives around in their corporate jet and take them golfing and schmooze while using all the big talking points like "compliance". It's hard for superior, cheaper, but smaller products to compete because they have reached that "nobody ever got fired for choosing salesforce" stage.
Feel free to explain it, because you’re clearly posting on a site with a mostly American audience. So the way you’ve portrayed yourself as an executive shaking things up and canceling SalesForce contracts is getting less and less accurate with each comment that follows.
I worked with Real Estate Agency (<20 employees) and they were looking into CRMs. After trying out half a dozen CRMs they ended up commissioning a custom one. There is no single CRM out there that is designed for you.
Most CRMs (and especially Salesforce) have seen every business model under the sun and are customizable to fit any business process that you can write an ERD for (i.e. literally anything).
Oftentimes when people think they need a completely custom solution, it's because they're getting caught up on the default naming conventions and/or default sales processes (which are customizable in basically every mainstream CRM).
I would agree that no CRM is designed specifically for anyone -- that's the whole reason why any of the remotely good ones are built with configurability and customization in mind. The out-of-box-experience with most CRMs is always a traditional "product sales" paradigm, simply because that's the most common. You can definitely customize it to work with other types of models though.
Its clunky, slow and overly complex if you ask me. But their success cannot be denied, thus they must have an amazing salesforce.