You're not the intended user of Salesforce. The UIs and flows you use are mostly data entry funnels for the true user: management and executives. You didn't pay for the software; they did. "End-user" satisfaction is low on the product feature list.
Every time your client slows down, somewhere an executive was promoted.
I’m not sure I understand your point? My understanding is the intended users of Salesforce are most certainly the sales team.
And I say this out of experience with using it as part of a sales team at a car dealership I worked at years ago. Every sales person in the company was expected to log all the customers they interacted with, track phone numbers & other info, set reminders to makes sales calls, make notes of what you talked about in said sales calls, et cetera, et cetera. And management was adamant that we did these things.
And for good reason. Sales is a very data driven industry, so to your point yes, it’s great for upper management to be able to track & aggregate all of the data company wide.
It’s been too long since I used it for me to really remember or comment on the performance of the software. But if it’s as bad as the OP is saying that’s a real problem. If you have a whole sales team using this, and performance issues are constantly slowing them down and wasting time, that’s something that should seriously be addressed.
I guess you’re saying though that they just don’t care if the sales team experience sucks? As long as management gets their data?
Haha
My experience has been bit different with medium size companies. Small companies just dont buy any custom-developed software. Medium-sized have the money to pay for custom development, but not for buying SAP. And the executives are extremely sensitive to the effect of the software on work efficiency - basically this is what they pay for, the software is supposed to make employees more effective so they can avoid hiring more people. If the application gets slow and can't keep up with the business then they need to move more people to handle the slow task and the app developers get grilled.
On the other hand, in large companies, management quite often ignores it, they can just hire more people and thus grow their kingdoms.
I made a similar observation while working at a Fortune 500 company that used Salesforce. Decisions about the company's Salesforce implementation were clearly made by people who didn't care too much about data entry UX. The problem was that they did care greatly about data entry -- and data entry, at least in part due to being needlessly cumbersome, tended to fall far short of expectations.
Every time your client slows down, somewhere an executive was promoted.