I've only seen Salesforce grow like a cancer in your org.

We were acquired and forced to integrate Salesforce into our product onboarding and user management.

They ended up having to hire a dev just for this project, it still wasn't done after 2 years. I left shortly after the "MVP" was launched.

Early on I wondered how our new parent company ended up with 8 Salesforce devs... and boy did I learn how.

8 devs was an entire team in my mind, our Epic + Cerner EHR team was 6 people working on significantly more complicated items...

My experience is that it's a very very expensive hammer, and suddenly everything in the org becomes a nail.

Somewhere a higher-up decides SF is the way to go, and then it's use and implementation is mandated for everyone in the org. They need to justify that cost somehow.

I worked on a small side-project for a major South African bank recently, and they closed a MASSIVE deal with SF a couple of years back. At some point we wanted to employ a customer support desk, because we had a legit need for it. In 30 minutes I had FreshDesk set up and running and working, with custom email domains and a ticketing system and everything. A week later it was shut down because we were not allowed to use anything but SF. It's been 2 years, and the salesforce replacement system is still not live, and the team's forced to support customer directly over the phone or email.

Sunk cost fallacy :).

Then when the SF contract isn’t renewed, you get to spend another 2-3 years ripping it out, migrating out data, re-writing contracts with other vendors.

Future work is guaranteed

Yes I've seen it a couple of times and it is unbelievably expensive and always a mess. The amount of Salesforce consultants, Salesforce developers, plugins, tools, etc to keep it all stable is wild.

Still, there's a reason people keep using it. Salesforce is basically a pseudo ERP at this point.

> there's a reason people keep using it

I believe that reason is that they've figured out quality matters not at all when you're pitching to C-levels.

Sunk cost fallacy: they've spent so much money on it already, they have to keep using it or that was a waste.

Salesforce's view of this: lock-in.

> Salesforce is basically a pseudo ERP at this point.

Wait, is that not what Salesforce is? I thought it was supposed to be a more modern SAP alternative with "cloudy" vibes.

> Salesforce is basically a pseudo ERP at this point.

Not quite there just yet.

Salesforce has commerce, OMS, CPQ, reporting (Tableau). Just missing the WMS (warehouse management system) and I think we should be there…

A third party offers a native Warehouse managed package. https://www.akatia.com/

And a lot of companies have built their own on Salesforce.

I am in the same boat as you. At our company only the sales team uses Salesforce. The support team uses Oracle Service Cloud, the development and product teams use JIRA, and operations uses Redmine.

Quite the cluster we have going on.

Who is the happiest out of those groups?

I am a long term redmine user not even using source code version control features or e-mail integration. One org adopted a supported fork with an updated UI.

I haven’t found anything that can replace redmine for me, and the 16 year old UI is a bonus at this stage it is so functional without any gimmicks

My day job is architecting and leading very large Salesforce implementations (thousands of users). I have seen clients run their entire customer service, from portal self serve to call centers, on it in a fully integrated way.

Some of my more memorable projects were standing up very large front-end and backend process for US state governments during the pandemic. When you heard “contact tracing” a LOT of that was done on SF. I did entire fully integrated vaccine information management systems on Salesforce because legacy systems couldn’t adapt to the specifics of the COVID vaccine in time. I think back on it fondly but hope I never have to work like that again.

For small companies Salesforce is just too expensive both in terms of licensing and implementation to be worth it.

/pretty sure I got Dr. Mandy Cohen her job at the CDC ;)

I built a website for a small nonprofit last year. They were using MailChimp for their newsletter and something else for lead management. Some board members insisted that since their companies used Salesforce this non-profit should too. They even donated the $20,000 to pay for it. The nonprofit has a lot of turnover - terrible leadership - and no one knows how to use it. Terrible decision for this organization even when "free". I spent some time trying to help them, but it's clearly a platform that you need to specialize in.

On another note, during the pandemic I built a vaccine signup website for a small hospital in Maine. It was really basic, but the amount of traffic it received and the sense of urgency we felt were overwhelming. Wild times.

I was laid off from a company that spent two and a half years transitioning to Salesforce (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Experience Cloud, Scheduler, 600+ seats) and decided to re-platform to Shopify plus a constellation—like 14 in total—of supporting startups to serve the various needs that Salesforce fulfilled. I was the tech lead and architect of the Salesforce move so I was intimately involved in every use by various teams.

I entered the move skeptical of Salesforce's value; I left impressed with the flexibility of the platform but aghast at the costs and development effort required to do much of anything. (I was also disgusted by the rough edges of its myriad acquisitions and their partial integration into the ecosystem—even after many years.)

I honestly still don't even understand what Salesforce is.

I have never worked in eCommerce, yet still keep running into areas of the orgs I've worked for that use it's plugin ecosystem to try and accomplish... things- things which usually have nothing to do with sales.

I've worked in Ecommerce, but SF was not a concern, especially compared to how big a deal Shopify was for us. Now In EdTech we need to interface with SF for the bigger clients and it is a wild, painful ride. They have their own tooling/language/architecture for EVERYTHING. Oh, and good luck doing SF development locally. To (mis)quote Homer Simpson, there's the right way, the wrong way and the Salesforce way - which is the wrong way but way slower and more complex.

Salesforce is the technical backing of the middle manager layer. The lemmings feed it data and neighboring software feeds it data so that middle managers can make fancy reports and presentations about how all the lines are going up that everyone forgets immediately as soon as they leave the room.

I'm sure it has some actual legitimate functions too but they're so utterly lost in a deluge of MBA bullshit that I don't think it's remotely worth the price. We don't have one where I work. We run a pieces-parts setup of custom apps alongside ancient code in our website, and it definitely has issues and we are addressing, but the CEO has no desire to buy anything like Salesforce. He calls it "data noise:" it looks like data and it looks important but it doesn't mean shit.

Hm, I think it’s slightly more useful than that.

Imagine a company that is driven by actual salespeople — like car dealerships, or any telemarketing or charity operation — where someone is making phone calls and trying to make sales.

Salesforce is their CRM, a Customer Relation Manager. You can get a complete history of an individual and their buying history within your company.

I worked for a travel-adjacent company a couple years ago, the entire thing was predicated on a half-dozen sales reps making handfuls of deals worth $50k+ each. Nothing like e-commerce. Salesforce was their Rolodex and their beating heart.

That said, it isn't a good CRM. It's nineties tech that became very essential to very very big companies. Someone else here described it as akin to PhpMyAdmin and he absolutely nailed it.

I think Salesforce is likely to be worth more someday for their Slack acquisition, not unlike how Meta is worth more for Instagram than Facebook.

Salesforce is not sold as a CRM though, and that's the problem. They position themselves as the do-everything-you-can-dream-of engine for your business' IT transformation. It's like it's rule 34 of the business word: If you can think of it, Salesforce has a checkbox on a powerpoint somewhere about it.

What this results in is that upper management sees all the features and capabilities in a flashy sales pitch, they close a deal with Salesforce (probably after some less-than-noble negotiation tactics deployed by SF salespeople), and then the mandate comes from the top: "We must implement Salesforce!" And all the tech people look awkwardly at each other not having the faintest fucking clue what that even means.

And this is just my experience but like: every single product I have ever used, from anything, that claims to be the "do anything!" solution, always, always, always is shit.

It seems to be a hard and fast rule of the universe that the more things your thing is designed to do, the worse it does all of those constituent things.

maybe a counter-example? Zoho doesn't have one product that does everything but does seem to have A product for everything. None of them are fantastic, but many are decent or good enough, and they are cheap. I've been pleasantly surprised with the experience, as I thought it would be similar to the GoDaddy or AWS perpetual dark-pattern upsell.

Where I work, Salesforce is the ERP and also powers a lot of our front end.

Its core strength (if you don't fall for all their salesy mumbo jumbo magical mystery tour weasel words) is that "native applications" require zero integrations/configurations. They "just work".

Salesforce is the CRM. It is the source of truth for our customers, orders, vendors. It is also the service (help desk agents use their VOIP to help customers and transcripts are automatically logged). It does the marketing. It also does our financials. It also integrates with our survey SaaS.

It also powers a lot of front end because our front end stack sucks. We use SOSL to power our front end search. It also creates micro-sites that our front end points to.

They also have an ecosystem of third-party apps that "just works".

With all that said. It is very expensive. Mulesoft is horrible. I wish they tone-down the salesy bullshit; they don't need the Microsoft-Azure level of bullshit -- Salesforce actually works.

I've only seen it used as a side tool for some specific stuff and never as anything business critical (that I could see anyway).

I have, and I've helped several companies move away from it with no negative impact on business and a HUGE savings. But in a lot it's a flex, a demand from an exec or board member who wants to tell people they're on Salesforce. Seriously. I had one COO tell me, "but then I can't tell [prospective acquisitions] we're on Salesforce." I said, "true, but they don't care about that, they're seemly impressed because it's expensive, not because they think it's the best tool. You could save that money as profit." He blinked and the conversation was over.