Is Salesforce the biggest money pit in IT.

You don't get your own fiber cable? Why do you stand getting peed in the face?

Looks like a russian patch to cut expenses. Holy shit the gipsies in America.

Worse than Germany

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PowerShellGenius@reddit

You get your own fiber cable in a house because it makes a difference. In an apartment complex with several dozen customers that close together that copper easily gives you a gigabit, why would they run 60+ separate fiber cables?

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spawncampinitiated@reddit

That is the cheapest shit I've seen. We run n+spares fiber cables to every single flat. No matter how many there are, you get your fiber, full stop.

What does salesforce do though. It's not like I haven't been exposed to it in a limited saleforce addon broke fix please sort of way. But I can't wrap my brain around it's functionality. It keep being used so I must be missing something about it.

And trying to google what it's used feel like swimming through a sea of jargon term without like explaining workflow or use case.

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karafili@reddit

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SilentSamurai@reddit

This sounds like the sort of company that will "unfortunately" lay off a large % of the company suddenly when the CFO gets off their butt and looks at the latest budget.

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lofisoundguy@reddit

This would be a great use of AI instead of a human C suite.

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the problem appears when you do not have that laser focus and clairvoyance

My wife makes her living off Salesforce and I've been on both the sales and IT side of the world.

What you said here is true of literally anything -- programs like SF and SAP just happen to be very big but I've seen companies consisting of just 5 people burn money on pointless integrations. One was a real estate agency that just had to have everyone running Apple b/c the lead believed the increased productivity would outweigh the cost.

It didn't.

I'll never understand the logic of bringing someone into a senior management role who uses "this worked in my last place" as a justification to deliver technology transformation.

We had exactly the same happen with a Director of Tech (or similar bullshit title) wanting to roll out a new ITSM tool about 10 years ago. when we queried the product choice (some obscure startup) we were met on the defensive with "i have always used this and its the best on the market", i asked a very simple question "best by what measurements?" I got the classic "gartner magic quadrant" haha, ok dude, well the product seems to have about 4 devs behind it and is double the price we currently pay, they also have no training programs so you are literally going to be tied into this 3rd party managing this software for you indefinitely....he was gone within 2 years leaving us with this bag of shite ITSM that we quickly ditched for something we chose after gathering our own requirements!

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p8ntballnxj@reddit

I'm part of a major SF project to replace our current CRM for our call centers. Between them, Copado and Mulesoft, it's just a giant chasm that money gets dumped into.

Don't get me started on their support docs lol.

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JudgeCastle@reddit

More devs on it so it cooks faster!!!

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ITGuy402@reddit

I am also in the same boat. about 2m into it and barely being used by our customers.

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p8ntballnxj@reddit

The best part is when a production deploy happens, it breaks something major and we are on a priority 1 call instantly. 90%+ of the time, it's a SF issue.

Salesforce is a decent CRM/platform but it's commonly sold as "easy to integrate".

No ERP/CRM is easy to integrate into all workflows. Salesforce is designed around a salespipline if you don't have one, don't use it.

Bjg money secret, pick the ERP that fits your workflow or adopt the one for the solution you buy.

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sanitarypth@reddit (OP)

Working on ERP project right now. Just a shitty black box CRUD program. We should have built our own system. The business wants to bend the old system to their old workflows but the off the shelf software wasn’t built for that. Also, old school management loves waterfall and hard cut overs. It’s been chaotic af. Old system was so basic that a modern replacement would have been fairly easy to build.

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OmenVi@reddit

The cloud of dread that came on reading this. Went through an erp cut, and they hacked the thing up to work like the old one in a lot of ways. Been dealing with fallout every upgrade cycle. Keep it as OOB as you can possibly manage to, would be my suggestion.

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TinderSubThrowAway@reddit

Keep it as OOB as you can possibly manage to

This is key, especially reports. I can't count on an abacus how many companies made custom reports that had the same info as other reports but they insisted they needed them versus using the canned report and just ignoring the few extra columns of data in the report they didn't need and weren't privileged in any way.

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terryducks@reddit

Keep it as OOB

3rd'd.

Every year since rollout, for ten years, till MGMT got a clue, was months of work, hammering the shit show into shape due to all the customization.

The cluebat was MGMT telling, nope, change yer processes to standard, we're not changing the system again.

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sanitarypth@reddit (OP)

Oh my god yes! We don’t control the source code so every release has breaking changes to the custom built integrations and customizations. Then the vendor has no idea how to help us fix these oddball things because it is homegrown.

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I tested Salesforce 10 years ago and its UI was terrible. I figured computer illiterates would hate it even more than me so I recommended a different CRM that we still use today.

lewis_943@reddit

My last company paid 300k for 1500 users

(300,000/1500)/12 = ~$16 per-user, per-month. That's not insane pricing compared to other things on the market, but it is a lot when you consider the limits of what slack really does...

We've been using a non-enterprise version of slack for years as it absolutely walked all over the Skype for Business infrastructure we had back in the day. But with Teams and Zoom both offering VC & PBX services bundled in with collaborative chat, it's fetting harder and harder to see the benefit of slack beyond personal affinity.

Salesforce aren't really appealing to people who only use Slack though. Since they took over, they've cleaned house and seemingly gotten rid of anyone with an @slack.com email address; we've rotated account managers a half-dozen times in an 18 month period. They're not interested in any customer that isn't also paying for salesforce products, and the EA who spoke to us at our renewal pretty much said so. Seems they don't want to sell slack on its own anymore.

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awit7317@reddit

SAP enters the chat

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dsotm49@reddit

SAP, Snow, Crowdstrike - the unholy trinity - begin the ritual to summon the great beast...

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IrquiM@reddit

SAP should never be maintained by IT.

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ThatITguy2015@reddit

Oh, it gets so much worse. At least with companies that call themselves “industry leading”.

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L3veLUP@reddit

I'm aware of a company that bastardized SAP so much into an internal ops and maintenance log system. Its as awful as it sounds

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awit7317@reddit

That sure is an expensive hobby!

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MrJingleJangle@reddit

I’ve worked in a few places with SAP, and the outcome varies. One of them, a large German multinational, SAP rocked. Then again, there was a thirty-odd team of tweakers, and a hotline to report your difficulties or unhappiness with SAP, and if you reported something, improvements happened very quickly.

I’ve seen the same thing with lots of products, not just ERP like SAP. Heck, I’ve seen it with Sharepoint.

Some middle manager used to work for a company that used (PRODUCT). They used that product properly. There was a clear plan with clear goals for what they wanted to achieve; implementation and ongoing maintenance were taken seriously and overall it did a good job. Said middle manager wasn’t involved in this project, though, so he’s got no idea how much effort was involved.

So, he’s at his new employer and he sees they don’t have any tools to help them solve a problem. This is unacceptable, he says. Senior management agrees.

His previous employer used (PRODUCT), and it worked really well for them. He speaks to a salesman who quotes a figure that looks like a telephone number. It includes quite a few optional extra modules, consultancy fees and training - the salesman spoke to a colleague and quoted based on what our manager’s former employer had bought.

That price is out of the question. So the salesman requotes with none of that - none of the extra modules, no customisation, no training. Our middle manager, happy with his new price, gets approval and buys the product thinking it’s no different to installing and using Excel; isn’t he the clever one for seeing through the sales patter and getting the price down?

A lot of people mistakenly think the "solution" in "enterprise solution" refers to "resolving a problem". It makes much more sense once you realize it actually refers to the meaning of the word used in contexts like cleaning products - "enterprise solution" as in a cleaning solution used for dissolving piles of cash in enterprise vaults.

Many of them work very well for that.

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MasterLigno@reddit

I've heard "Slow and Painful"

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Sleepytitan@reddit

One company outsourced dev and it became Still Almost in Prod

A company doesn’t know what they use SAP for? It’s an ERP system, so, everything? Sounds a bit made up..

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tdhuck@reddit

Or they bought it and aren't using it. This is very common.

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rotoddlescorr@reddit

Depends. I know of several companies that have been in the "implementation phase" of SAP for the past few years now. It basically gets started and stopped. They're still paying for it, but no one is using it yet because it's not fully implemented.

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Fluffy-Queequeg@reddit

It’s never fully implemented, and it’s also not a single product. I work for a large FMCG company and we have literally hundreds of SAP systems. There isn’t a single person in the company who can explain what every one of the systems actually does. We also have Salesforce integrated into SAP.

SAP has had to extend their support out to something like 2032 for R/3 because customers simply can’t justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars upgrading to S/4 when it does essentially the same thing as the current release.

Consistent_Chip_3281@reddit

Lol quit his job to

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BrilliantEffective21@reddit

employees like that won't last long.

when I was tier-2 support, someone super nice called in and I was playing D2R.

after I realized what I did, I uninstalled the game and started looking for a new job.

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missingMBR@reddit

Came to the comments to say this

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zeus204013@reddit

I remember a dude talking about SAP (in the 90s, Latam country). He wanted to ask some questions to some representative. The rep told that that reunion was a mistake, because "his company only accepts projects starting at usd 1Million..."

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TheMelwayMan@reddit

Came here to say this.

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frohstr@reddit

To be fair we used to run an ERP that was highly customized since we were oh so special. Due to all that customization it was nearly impossible to follow the usual releases. Any change in the regulatory environment required huge efforts to adapt the ERP and our systems were solidly stuck in the past.

SAP enters the chat

Due to a merger my company is half M3, half SAP. I come from the M3 side.

Some of the people from the SAP side are very vocal about getting off M3 and onto SAP, I'm like... Dude, talk to anyone who has to use both, EVERYONE in that boat prefers M3.

Lmao for the entire 10 years I worked my first job, SAP was going to be implemented "in the near future". They never did because we used an old version of Filemaker and used that extensively throughout every step of production. Switching to SAP would have cost a ton of money, if only in remaking every interface we used.

I'm pretty sure they still don't use SAP, and I've been gone for 5+ years.

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awit7317@reddit

FileMaker to SAP. Now that is crazy talk.

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I work for an ERP IVR (we resell a SAP competitor), one of our customers told us they were leaving because they felt our product was "the old way" and they were moving to SAP, that was 4 years ago, they are still paying their renewals and support fees for our services because they still haven't completed the migration.

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darthnugget@reddit

Snow has been summoned

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leob0505@reddit

I remember when one of our internal managers advocated snow for months to our organization, while everyone around him told that snow would bring zero value to the company. He kept pushing forward with this project, and we started using it. One month later the whole thing was cancelled and he got fired

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chefanubis@reddit

SAP its good at least.

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czenst@reddit

One of my fav stories of all time:

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252446965/Lidl-dumps-500m-SAP-project

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Medium-Comfortable@reddit

When you start using SAP it reshapes your whole organization. Not as it should be, the other way around.

I have seen 6 (!) companies go bankrupt as a direct result of trying to migrate to SAP. The fact of the matter was that they were trying to do it outsourced (consultants only) and were below the billion/yr treshhold. One of them was at the migration for 5 years then had it running for 6 months before the creditors came calling.

tbf. I have seen a bunch of companies go bankrupt as a direct result of trying to migrate their business-logic to the newest FAD, without doing due dilligence and defnining the requirements before going to look for a software replacement.

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liQuid_bot8@reddit

Let me introduce you to this SAP->Oracle Fusion migration disaster. https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/20/birmingham_oracle_cost/

MDParagon@reddit

It's as bad as it is implemented, there's a reason why is still a top sold ESM.. that and they have money

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Pristine_Curve@reddit

The challenge with things like Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, etc... Isn't that they are expensive, but that they are often implemented as top down 'grand visions'. Rather than a true nuts and bolts examination of needs, processes, and costs.

In many cases the costs would be 'worth it' if integrated appropriately and completely. Along with process design etc... In practice leadership 'buys the demo', and writes a big check. Only to find out that the actual 'work' is separate from the 'software'. I.E. You want to create a workflow but the different teams all want custom flows for the same task to handle their niche demands. These differences are driven entirely by existing habits rather than baseline requirements. No one pushes back on this fragmentation, because the software is 'just supposed to handle it all like the demo'.

Combine this fragmentation with products which are in this hazy middle ground of both product/consultancy. They end up billing through the roof to knock down every groups 'custom requirement'. Inevitably we deliver a system which has 100 different 'options' to satisfy everyone's requirements 75 of them will never be used, another 15 will be used just often enough to have to keep maintaining them, and the last 10 will never deliver enough value to justify the costs but it will generate enough adherents to roadblock killing the platform to stop the bleeding.

The key to managing this into a successful project is to push the complexity into the earliest part of the process. Specifically surrounding process fragmentation. Get people in the room to confront the business process side as part of the process. Ideally they identify a task group or committee which can create/provide a uniform set of processes.

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nevesis@reddit

I've had the most success by literally going and shadowing teams and learning their workflows or doing a full LEAN process mapping with them. By knowing their current processes, you can actually identify ways to automate/integrate/minimize duplicate effort/etc.

Likewise, if a non-technical person tells you they need Salesforce to do XYZ or they need ABC changed - the correct answer is, "what are you trying to accomplish with this?" not as pushback but because maybe you, the Salesforce expert, actually know a better method of accomplishing that.

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secretraisinman@reddit

I'm fascinated by this process and want to learn more about the software-agnostic process mapping you do with teams. Can you share your favorite learning resources about this?

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nevesis@reddit

You can start at goleansixsigma.com and Google from there. Specifically I'm talking about #2, #3, and #4.

I worked at a company that had two business units: one for a direct to consumer facing product, and another for B2B. Of course, that means that you have to have two separate salesforce instances.

Those instances talk to each other? No.

I took a sales call one time from a woman who was really just trying to bust my balls for a 30% discount on the B2B version of our product, which is just not going to happen.

I got a call from the DTC division the next day effectively blaming me because she called them to say she’s going to cancel her subscription. I didn’t even know she was Customer of the DTC product!

Incidentally, salesforce does such a poor job of hiding information that one day I got to look deep in salesforce and found out that the total contract value of a sale that I made was about 50% more than what they were commissioning me on. So it worked out well for me, I don’t work there anymore.

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Dogupupcouch@reddit

Salesforce can potentially make sense if you have the scale... but it didn't for us, it was obvious it didn't for us, and Marketing went all the way to the board of directors to make it happen after being told it didn't make sense (by IT). Only a module for Marketing was implemented. Proceeded to result in marketing being over budged by 1 Million... all other corporate departments were tapped to make up for the "unforeseeable over-spend." We lost a full time helpdesk position from it and the person that spearheaded the decision kept her job. There was 0 increased productivity from the new system because their department didn't implement new policy changes that would actually make a platform like salesforce an effective force multiplier.

We made up for the reduced helpdesk staffing by having the sysadmin significantly increase help with T1 tickets.... I'm not still upset.

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Xibby@reddit

I have a rule when it comes to platforms…

Never, ever, ever, ever let someone hired from a Fortune company decide on the platform. They don’t know anything about the time and money that was thrown into the platform. It does not do what they are used to out of the box, so after implementation you have a new project for customizing it. And about 6 months in the champion gets another job, moves on, and throwing money into the downward spiral begins in enrnest.

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ralphiooo0@reddit

“We hate our CRM and want you to migrate us”

Ok tell me about your CRM - “oh we have been using it for over a decade and have customised the shit out of it”

Ok tell me about these customisations….

5 meetings and about 10 hours later…

Ok guys you have built up a lot of stuff, this is going to be a massive project to rebuild and improve on what you have.

“Yeah that’s what we need.”

Ok well it’s going to be a 1 year project and cost about $1m+

“😳but why is it so expensive?”

Then they go with a cheaper option and it all turns to shit.

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RoosterBrewster@reddit

There's probably a lot of people that are the intermediate or "glue" in processes to make things work. Then trying to formalize that becomes a spaghetti mess.

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ralphiooo0@reddit

Yeah always way too many people pulled in along the way. The ones who scream the loudest get their way which often only serves their purposes and makes it a giant mess for everyone else.

And often at the end of the project those people have moved on… and then everyone’s sitting around going why the hell is it like this.

It’s just insanity really.

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RoosterBrewster@reddit

It's almost like software development where code is hastily put together, but then adding features become a nightmare.

You sort of need the power of a dictator to set the process from the top and then time to also refactor.

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touchytypist@reddit

Absolutely! Had a Harvard MBA get hired at a midsize business and brought in ServiceNow because that’s what his previous Fortune 500 company had. A few consultants, years, and millions of dollars later, it’s still just a crappy expensive ticketing system for them.

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DwemerSteamPunk@reddit

Absolutely agree. We went Dynamics to Salesforce and partway through the process I realized Dynamics could do everything we were building out in Salesforce, it's just that nobody looked into it or built that out.

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ReputationNo8889@reddit

Well at a certain size you just have to use Software X. Okay but why? Because every company that reaches size Y needs software X. At some point it just became a "we do this because everyone else does it" instead of a "it fits out business case"

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bindermichi@reddit

Exactly. You are starting to show great management potential

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trapped_outta_town2@reddit

This is why I dislike working in the enterprise. Everything is slow and boring. Most staff are clueless lifers who are just there for the easy ride.

Purchasing decisions are based solely on what is where in the Gartner quadrant and because “nobody got fired for buying X”

I agree, but I spent enough time working in fast paced, cutting edge environments and they bring different problems.

Personally now that I'm in my 40s I prefer the slow, predictable environments where I can do my 9-5 and leave.

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menace323@reddit

Just curious, what workload on a single windows server would you be wanting 800Gbps for?

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lightmatter501@reddit

A dual socket system with large CPUs can be >200 cores now. 4 Gbps per core isn’t that much.

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menace323@reddit

Okay, what workload would you be running on a single Windows Server node that would effectively use that bandwidth?

For the amount of data per second you are talking, this sounds like definitely some custom workflow you’d run on Linux anyway.

While yeah, I think it should, for this kind of bandwidth requirements, I doubt people are looking g at Windows Server to do it.

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lightmatter501@reddit

People aren’t looking at Windows because they made no substantial investments in their network stack recently. That extra cost scales all the way down to 1 Gbps where you are still using more CPU than necessary.

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gordonv@reddit

But is it a money pit?

You're getting measured use out of a Windows server.

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mercurygreen@reddit

I have a different (industry-specific) case where they went on about "OH WE NEED TO PLACE THIS FREE PIECE OF SOFTWARE WITH THIS THING (that will handcuff us to a vendor for years)!"

"What are the benefits over what we're using?"

"Uhhhh..."

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inteller@reddit

We pay way too much for it, then we go bolt on Salesloft, Hubspot, etc. I thought Salesforce was supposed to do it all.

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AMoreExcitingName@reddit

I work for a MSP which does a lot of projects. We deal with government, so we have legally mandated pay scales for different types of work, we have partial billing as product is delivered and projects are completed, we have change orders that have to take into account varying discount levels. We have legally mandated records retention and sometimes deal with projects where the product we sold isn't even manufactured anymore by the time you go to install it. One entity views any documents with signature lines as requiring board approval, and the board meets once a month. So all the quotes to those guys can't have a signature line; recept of their PO is considered a signature.

Trying to build a system to go from quote/proposal -> purchase order -> ordering and inventory -> staffing (and staffing predictions) -> install -> product delivery (and sometimes partial product delivery) -> final documentation and billing... Also keep track of everything for various tax purposes and internal budgeting and forecasting, and whatever else I forgot.

That's hard. Way harder than you'd think. None of the systems do everything you need. Getting everyone in a company to change their processes to match the way things are done in any given system is really hard.

So does salesforce suck? Yes, it does. They all do, in their own way. Because the problem they're trying to solve sucks.

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DwemerSteamPunk@reddit

I haven't experienced an all-in ERP but in my limited experience it seems better to have a couple good dedicated-purpose systems that you tie together vis API and let each do what it does best. Rather than try to strangle one platform into doing everything.

But yes I agree that people severely underestimate the massive difficulty there is actually performing all the pieces

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Reverent@reddit

Yep, micro service the hell out of ERP business workflows.

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Leopold_Porkstacker@reddit

Who do you think can afford the better lawyers and can afford to drag things out for years in that court case?

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badtux99@reddit

Oracle is a law firm with a technology company attached to its side with bungee cords.

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beansNdip@reddit

Fair, oracles game is probably to come at the company woth some insane number. (Like 3mil) than offer to settle the case for significantly less. I'm sure most orgs would just eat the cost.

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lightmatter501@reddit

OracleDB, to my knowledge, still uses a replication algorithm that fails catastrophically in the event of a network partition (the best case is that a human has to manually fix things before the DB can come back online). Modern databases do not do that. It also can’t be properly georeplicated with live replication due to that same algorithm. It, like most older SQL DBs, is a C/A system under the CAP theorem, meaning that in the presence of a fallible network most guarantees are gone.

What my org uses from them is fine and does the job. But then they crank up the pricing even though we're a non-profit, it makes it really hard to justify staying with them.

And that's just from a business standpoint, everyone in my department hates them for various reasons and would love to use any other vendor if given the chance.

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plain-slice@reddit

I’m definitely not debating that they’re expensive or that Oracle is the worst. But they can have rates like they do because they are the defacto best choice for a mission critical db. Fortune 500 companies use them, and they work. Better than plenty of other platforms I’ve had to support.

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placated@reddit

Not so much anymore. I’d go so far to say that Oracle RDBMS is almost a niche product now. I’m not saying there isn’t a lot of it out there, but I’d classify it like IBM system Z. You use it because you’ve always used it, and it’s not worth it to change. If you were building an app or product from the ground up there’s almost no reason you’d use Oracle over something like Postgres, or a NoSQL offering like Cassandra.

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plain-slice@reddit

You’d classify the most popular db worldwide the same as a legacy mainframe system that has less than half a percentage point of market share. That’s laughable.

their Responsys platform is hot dogshit.

Who looks at that mess and goes 'yes this is what i need'.

Before the licensing got oracle'd it was a neat piece of technology. Especially 10-15 years ago, when I suspect most vendors last renewed their tech stack.

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NocturneSapphire@reddit

Isn't Tomcat an Apache project? How does Oracle licensing prevent its use? Can it not run on OpenJDK?

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jaymz668@reddit

often it all gets bundled by a vendor in one click to install package and moving it off that Oracle JRE is a process

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ryosen@reddit

I’m confused by this, as well. Tomcat does not come bundled with a JRE and works fine with any of the OpenJDK variants.

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Beginning_Ad1239@reddit

Our parent company got so tired of Oracle they ordered all Oracle Java and database removed and spent a million dollars on it. Our dev team had to migrate a ton of old plsql to other methodology to get it to work on other dbms.

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ShameBasedEconomy@reddit

Yeah. Fucking awesome for higher ed. Computer labs set up to allow “Domain Users” to log in locally. 100K active AD users.

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soahc@reddit

Yeah I work for higher ed, between this and their virtual box extension witch hunt. We now have added oracle Java signing certs to defender and they are blocked. We allow them on a per device basis once the licensing has been checked. We also block oracle.com and virtualbox.org from our campuses to stop downloads

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wildcarde815@reddit

Latest one is going to be Anaconda, use the standard installers, base or base-r repos? They're aparently shaking trees now to charge $50 / user / month (but don't worry, there's a 30% discount for academic usage).

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ShameBasedEconomy@reddit

We got off the Oracle JDK, except when used by other licensed Oracle crap like sql developer or Peopletools. Our policies aren’t as tight, to put it mildly, and we are deep in the Oracle tar pit. Peoplesoft, Exadata, now Oracle Cloud… No way to block on our network at that level, damn near need a Holy Writ to do anything that might disturb a researcher or impede academic freedom. VBox was fun too, had forgotten since it was while Microsoft was having us true up.

Hands down. There's a lot of fresh, fancy-pants consultant-infested enterprise crapware out there today, but the ancient evil just never dies. SF curves your spine, Oracle twists your very soul

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cretan_bull@reddit

From Bryan Cantrill:

I actually think that it does a disservice to not go to Nazi allegory, because if I don't use Nazi allegory when referring to Oracle there is some critical understanding that I have left on the table; there is an element of the story that you can't possibly understand.

In fact, as I have said before and I emphatically believe, if you had to explain the Nazis to somebody who had never heard of WWII but was an Oracle customer, there's a very good chance that you actually explain the Nazis in Oracle allegory.

So, it's like: "Really, wow, a whole country?"; "Yes, Larry Ellison has an entire country"; "Oh my god, the humanity! The License Audits!"; "Yeah, you should talk to Poland about it, it was bad. Bad, it was a blitzkrieg license audit."

Salesforce is a cool buzzword, with excellent marketing staff that can wow those executives. Sort of like Cisco does with DNAC that doesn't work.

The end result is millions lost, but when the bill comes due, the guys responsible are long gone to other positions or companies, and the layoffs hit the rank and file.

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gwrabbit@reddit

I firmly believe every ERP vendor is a giant money pit.

Sent from my IBM iSeries AS400 custom program

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uhdoy@reddit

I dunno. Maybe Mulesoft… also owned by Salesforce.

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DonCBurr@reddit

so your two poor experiences makes the 10 of 1,000s of Salesforce implementations and Salesforce itself a joke and waste of money?

wow... embarrassing

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sanitarypth@reddit (OP)

The fact that this rant post got this much engagement tells me that I am not alone. You sound like a shill trying to do damage control.

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DonCBurr@reddit

Nope just someone who works exclusively with the Fortune 500 and see and understand the benefits Salesforce provides.

Is every implementation perfect, are there challenges, of course, that comes with any large scale implementation

Inquisitive_idiot@reddit

At the end of the day, it is just rows and columns.

Story of my marriage 😮‍💨

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Catharticfart@reddit

if you can’t afford the services to properly implement the product and train your people internally, you can’t afford the product.

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captaincool31@reddit

Our company is an insurer and we are the exact target audience that needs salesforce. Household management, adding people, splitting household, merging duplicates, managing consent, information cases, notes. I have zero complaints. It's one of the only systems we have that just seems to work all of the time without delay and we have around 2-3000 simultaneous users at any one time.

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Bizdatastack@reddit

I’ll give a counter view to most here. I’ve done 2 full self implementations as an end user for SMB companies.

selltekk@reddit

Same. Our execs drank the kool aid. Salesforce and mulesoft. We are a Microsoft shop. Integrations would have been way easier and cheaper had we gone with dynamics/power platform and logic apps.

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Seigmoraig@reddit

Good thing they have businesses like this to help them make back the 10million per year they pay the actor Matthew McConaughey

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/salesforce-matthew-mcconaughey-layoffs-san-francisco-b2292198.html

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Tantric75@reddit

Sounds like those places have crappy project management. A well planned implementation can be an incredibly efficient and performant system.

One legitimate issue I have seen with many CRM implementations I've been involved with is that they typically have non-technical folks making decisions and consultants implementing their requirements without the input of people who understand how it will be used and maintained from a technical perspective.

I know lots of people in this sub clown on it, but I was a sysadmin for 10 years. 4 years ago I made the hop over to Salesforce administration/development.

My stress has been reduced 100 fold and I make 20-30% more while no longer having to work over 40 hours a week.

Being a general sysadmin required me to work with many different programs and technologies and there was an expectation that I knew them all intimately. And for the most part I did, but it caused a huge amount of stress and there was always a fight to get basic things like security implemented.

With Salesforce, the platform itself is something that can be learned. Once you learn it you can do almost anything and security is built in. And after having experience as a seasoned sysadmin, you look like a rockstar on these teams because they are generally populated with business folks who know little to nothing about managing an enterprise platform.

It was the best career decision I have ever made.

You do sacrifice some small amount of freedom and control, but not having to deal with that shit and just being able to focus on maintaining design and reducing tech debt is fantastic. Its easy to implement automation and maintain a clean data schema.

Salesforce is a platform. If you have a shit plan you will end up with a shit product. That is the case for almost any enterprise software.

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Zkrslmn_@reddit

I manage big Salesforce implementation for internal use since 2020.

In fact we built a erp system on top of standard CRM capabilities and spent 1+ mio USD on development. External consulting would be 3+ mio for this I think.

The key to success is licensing most of the users with platform licences not the sales/service cloud ones. Costs 10 times cheaper per user.

Anyway CPQ/productivity functionality out of the box is crap, so you grant full licenses to sales team and top management only, all productivity and quotes are built custom to be financially reasonable.

lanboy0@reddit

Salesforce is fine compared to SAP, at least you can cancel it one day.

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TheMagecite@reddit

We just built our own. What a CRM does isn’t that complicated. It’s customised for our business completely and completely runs rings around what everyone else is offering.

naixelsyd@reddit

So heres how it normally works.

Sw sales team engage with boomers in csuite and above.

Sw sales team say " we have an out of the box solution for that". " you won't need any coders or that voodoo crap, we'll get you going in no time".

Boomer thinks " thats talking my language. I never understood this tech mumbo jumbo anyway. I just want to focus on my business instead of the tech".

So company adopts platform x which was designed based on some other business. Suddenly there are change requests coming through ( without requirements for change requests to be lunked to).

Sw sales team have their commission, they're off to the bext victim. Hand ball consulting to some partner.

Partner sends in tye a-team. Does some work. Amount of changes spiral out od control, so before anyone realises it theres a small army of consultants there.

Boomer cant back out as they've put their rep on the line and their ego. Sw company knows this, so its time for rhe death march phase.

Partner moves out a team and moves in c d e and f teams. Project struggles on until the next bright shiny thing comes along. Eventually company hust poaches a couple of e team members and try to fumble their way through.

Now boomer rxe is now acting as a reference for sw company because they are balls deep in it and can't get out.

So then the cycle continues.

Its not so much about the capability of the tech, its about its application and the expertise required to do it properly.

And rwalistically, the money is made on the sw licencing - not the services ( although death march phase can turn profits for as long as the victim company can feed it).

In hindsight, this is much like a cordycepts fungi, isnt it?

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naixelsyd@reddit

Oh, and give it a couple of years down thee track, sw company forces victim company to upgrade, but because of all the bespoke butchering thats taken place, it works out cheaper to pay sw company for extended maintenance until they can find a replacement.

New csuite member enters sw company and declares they want to go with xyz software because thats what they're familiar with. Next round begins.

How to avoid this. Start with your requirements for your business without being coloured by any particular tech. Then choose the tech with eyes wide open. Once complete, your requirements need to be kept up to date to facilitate tech changes in future ( requirements are not just for development of systems).

And remember. The difference between a software sakesman and a used car salesman is that the used car salesman knows they're lying.

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mkosmo@reddit

ERPs and CRMs aren't typically something IT has much visibility into the actual use. They're business critical and do things that most folks can't even imagine.

You may see some of the infrastructure and configuration components, but they're massively complex bits of software that save tons of hours in what used to be manual bookkeeping and records management. Plus, they can reduce the errors of human management of those records.

They're expensive, yes, but they aren't something that most companies can live without. The math tends to show them as benefits rather than money pits.

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RCTID1975@reddit

Assuming they're correctly configured.

Problem is, there are a LOT of poor implementations that people often find a workaround for because they're so convoluted

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mkosmo@reddit

Absolutely. But that’s often a result of refusing to pony up for proserv, internal process/collab failures among the necessary stakeholders, or simple office politics.

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planedrop@reddit

Oh this is great.

I can also notate that I've seen smaller companies doing the exact same thing, less money, but also just not using it at all. It's practically a glorified contact list.

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hex00110@reddit

Oracle NetSuite.

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JuiceLots@reddit

Far worse out there. Often time the businesses don’t know how to translate their processes into tech speak.

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SquizzOC@reddit

We just left Salesforce for Zoho, I’m completing the project this week actually. Salesforce works out of the box and you can get away with minimal customization and it integrates natively with everything (I’m exaggerating), Zoho doesn’t work with a damn thing, everything has to be customized, everything needs a script or workflow to function right and then they break things regularly and you have to hope support can have a developer fix it on the back end.

You get what you pay for with Salesforce, sales could be said for Zoho that’s half the price sadly.

On the plus side, now that it all works for now, I just got an extra 2 hours back out of my day and no one’s software renewal will ever be forgotten again 😂

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m4ng3lo@reddit

As a Zoho admin who is getting more (technically) empowered to do our system design. Yea I agree Zoho is dirt cheap, but you need to put in a LOT of footwork

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SquizzOC@reddit

Some of the most basic functionality not working correctly (meetings created in teams don’t sync with their calendar system) are just infuriating. It’s like they launch all code with zero testing.

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m4ng3lo@reddit

If you're in a complete Zoho environment then things work a little bit more smoothly. You still need to configure the integrations, but it isn't a completely "from the ground up" thing.

many orgs can exist without it but choose not to

sales is a product of building what customers want and need

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ProgRockin@reddit

Had to check your post history to see if we work together.

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PrincipleExciting457@reddit

You guys are finishing projects out here?

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jipsydude@reddit

NetSuite would like a word.

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ehode@reddit

I feel like somebody hears of a story where it was a success with grand results but I’ve never seen actual numbers or anyone describe what they did other than really commit to a CRM. Honestly for how all over the map it is there are plenty of other platforms you can get the same result if you have upper management buy in.

Excited_Biologist@reddit

Datadog would like to have a word

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Raah1911@reddit

What I haven’t seen said is most tech decisions aren’t logical. They are ego driven. Most ego driven people just saying like if you get tool x problem y goes away and the uninformed clap and approve z budget.

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TinderSubThrowAway@reddit

Any ERP/CRM system.

I used to work for one, sales over promises on what can actually be done.

Part of the problem is that people don’t want to spend the time to actually audit their processes and accept that there may be a different, maybe better, way to do what they do to better match how the software works.

Instead, they want to customize the product to fit their own processes that they’ve been using for 30, 40, 50 years since before computers were really a thing in the business. What works while shuffling paper doesn’t always work while using a computer program.

I remember one implementation, they wanted to use doclink by altec for an approval process, but instead of actually using the software for what it could do, they used it like email, a doc would go in, the person who got it for approval would PRINT it, sign, stamp and date it, the SCAN it back into the system where it would go for the next approval and they would repeat the same process.

Then in the end they would print the final version and file it in a file cabinet.

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jake_robins@reddit

I worked with a company to deploy it in 2019. They regret it and are still trying to disentangle themselves from it.

I successfully discouraged a client from signing up last year and I feel like it was my good deed for the year.

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rodder678@reddit

Salesforce is a platform that enables you to hire/contract a team of developers to build something that fits your business. The out-if-the-box functionality is pretty poor. I've worked for several companies where they bought Salesforce as a CRM and half-assed used it as a contact database and sometimes actually created opportunities but didn't actually manage the deal lifecycle. I've worked at one company that used it as CRM and were serious about deal lifecycles, and pipeline management and forecasting through 3rd party integrations. I've worked at one company with a full CPQ implementation and massive integration with everything in sales, marketing, product, licensing, support and training. SF in that shop was the source of truth for all customer data and entitlements for everything in the company from licensing to CIAM to support to dozens of marketing systems. That last implementation was really cool and I enjoyed supporting it a lot more than the half-assed contact database users. What seems to happen at a lot of smaller shops is they hire people who've been users of a successful custom SFDC implementation that have no clue as to what it took to build that implementation (in both time and money), and think they can just sign up for Salesforce and hire a salesops person and be back in their SFDC glory days.

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theoriginalzads@reddit

I’ve seen some companies use SF extremely well… and others who grabbed it with no real idea on what they wanted to use it for only to end up with clunky and pointless.

Then again if you buy these applications with no understanding of the work needed or what you want to achieve then there’s no end of things you can’t achieve!

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mallet17@reddit

Any ticketing or CRM systems are money pits. The software is a kick in the left nut, and implementation consultants being the kick in the right nut, equally painful.

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Impressive-Cap1140@reddit

What’s your suggestion for a ticketing system?

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mallet17@reddit

Aside from checking all the boxes for current and future capabilities, I reckon one that the firm is capable of supporting with an in-house team, but can outsource dev works easily to any 3rd party.

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Spagman_Aus@reddit

There was a Salesforce option in the mix in a recent systems procurement at my Org and I thought I would end up having my work cut out debunking, sorry.. checking their claims, but their demo was extremely poor and their quote immediately took them out of contention.

Salesforce makes companies money, so they can charge what they want for it… until someone takes the mantel from them, they will always be that expensive.

Service Now is doing the same in ITIL and Case Management.

Getting duped by sales folks promises is the biggest money pit in IT.

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lost_in_life_34@reddit

You probably didn't throw enough consultants at it and why it failed

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moebaca@reddit

Datadog is one if you're not careful.

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Pballakev@reddit

PDI is also really bad for this. By far the worst company I have ever gone through an implementation with.

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BloinkXP@reddit

Just hundreds of thousands...

Yeah, we have it and it is full of the same BS.

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beedunc@reddit

Have you heard of Oracle? 😳

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tgwill@reddit

SFDC has always been a cluster fuck. I worked for a company that successfully sued them for defrauding them.

One of our VP’s who is not in IT signed a 5 year contract with them, worth a stupid sum of money, for 5 users. They just use it as a glorified Rolodex.

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crimsonpowder@reddit

That's honestly a really strange way of spelling DataDog.