Does Salesforce always run like shit or is that my personal experience?

Posted by axis757@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 14 comments

We don't use Salesforce here, but a large number of our vendors use it for their support portals. It seems like they are always incredibly slow, or often times never actually load and I need to come back later. Is this the actual performance of Salesforce, or is it something the vendors are doing? It seems insane to me that something as simple as a support portal can run as terribly as it does in 2025.

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Xibby@reddit

How Salesforce is implemented:

New mid-management or VP moves from big enterprise to SMB, and champions Salesforce.
No proper scoping, implementation, or documentation, just Salesforce, Salesforce, Salesforce!
Executive moves on to greener pastures after 18-25 months. Salesforce never lives up to the promise because the “champion” had no idea what they were doing and the Salesforce they got was nothing like the Salesforce they knew, because the big enterprise customized the hell out of it. It was custom business software using the Salesforce platform.
SMB now has a six to seven figure annual Salesforce bill.
SMB hires a new CRM champion for “insert platform here.”
GOTO 1.

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clf28264@reddit

God I feel this… as the guy who brought salesforce into my firm. We spent about 75k getting it to do what we needed and honestly should have just written our own CRM. I say that since I run a quant software business. Sugar sucks too

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Carthax12@reddit

Yup. I could have built the CRM our folks wanted for only a few hundred man-hours, but they decided to spend nearly half a million dollars (and counting!) to use SalesForce.

...and I've spent a few hundred man-hours supporting the data export from our 3rd-party database to SalesForce, which adds to that cost.

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ProgRockin@reddit

$75k?

Laughs in millions.

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clf28264@reddit

I’m know, small but write all our own software and for the small cost of my sanity I bid out. It should have been a BA and a month but was 75k to ingest contract details.

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Carthax12@reddit

Yup, and then the development team (Hi!) is stuck doing the data import (which, because of the way Salesforce requires their data to be pushed to their API, it can't be pushed using the existing EDI application, and requires both a new table in the DB and a new python script, naturally) for a product they don't know, in a database to which they don't have direct access, and have to work with a person who has no clue about SQL, but who has the access the developer needs.

...but I'm not bitter or anything. ::cries::

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CLE-Mosh@reddit

A company I part time for, has been implementing SF for 2 yrs. Finally rolling out ( so they say) full implementation in May. I told another tech that this would be a shitshow, wait and see... I asked him how it's going on field tech side... "It's a Shitshow"...

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angrydeuce@reddit

I hate that I've seen this happen multiple times...and I've been officially in IT for less than 10 years.

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IamHydrogenMike@reddit

This is so spot on...

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anxiousinfotech@reddit

Salesforce is always slow. We also use Dynamics 365 which is also always slow. I swear they're in competition over who can make their experience the crappiest. You have to be very careful with customizations to make sure they don't impact performance any more than necessary.

As someone else mentioned Hubspot (we use that too for a few things) runs a lot faster, but there's no way it can do everything we use SF for. Dynamics can, but it's both an absolute beast to make it do what you need and we have a team of people who cream their pants every time Salesforce is mentioned. They're trying to get rid of Hubspot currently and I swear it's because the performance makes Salesforce look bad.

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fuckedfinance@reddit

The problem is that most companies do not have a dedicated Salesforce development team. They'll have worked with a consulting group to do the initial configurations and might contract out periodically to get a few things added.

Of the remaining companies, most only have 1, MAYBE 2 "developers" (i.e. slightly technical people) that can add fields and make reports.

Of the remaining companies after that, large ones will have 3-4 full teams of Salesforce people whose only job is to implement new fields/functionality while also maintaining performance.

I've worked for small companies with limited data and seen Salesforce run like dogshit. I've worked with a fortune 500 company that had a tremendous amount of data with 3 dedicated core SF teams and 1 additional per business unit. That implementation was fast.

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If there are errors this is probably the issue, otherwise it might be a network issue on your side.