I only understand Salesforce in that they purchase any successful company they can, and take what seems like 30 minutes of effort for each acquisition to integrate it with the rest of their businesses in a sensible, synergistic way.

The original Salesforce, people now call SFDC (Salesforce Dot Com) which as you know is a CRM but more broadly speaking, a database backend & a GUI, with a construction kit to let ~customers~ Salesforce Consultants model and build simple tooling for business processes of any kind.

They have snapped up various companies like ExactTarget (bulk email), Demandware (aka SFCC, probably what's being discussed here), Heroku, and Slack.

I assume the main synergy is just of the business kind. You can include Slack in a big overall Salesforce "deal" and have one big (steak dinners and alcohol-style) contract negotiation.

And honestly even though I teased above about the lack of integration or consistency (it took like 10 years for one to be able to even log into ET with Salesforce creds), I'm glad that they don't really do anything to their acquisitions to integrate them, since I have no desire to have any integration between say, Slack, and our bulk emailing platform, and anything like that would surely make Slack worse.

Is the steak dinner and alcohol-fueled (and I'll throw in golf) contract negotiation real? I keep hearing about it on HN comments but my experience with enterprise sales has been almost the complete opposite. Lots of meetings on Zoom and occasionally a drink at industry events.

Oh yeah, although probably less steak now than used to be. But enterprise sales is always (and will forever be) sales.

Caveat: the further you get into non-tech, as a customer base, the more prevalent this is. On the tech side, there's at least a thin veneer of objectivity (often masking a quiet steak dinner, in which the actual solution was picked).

The Salesforce account executives will definitely drop by before or around negotiations and take decision makers to dinner. They'll even host a Top Golf evening for the team, just to put faces with names. eyeroll

I heard it firsthand from my last company's head of digital marketing, who was the most key decision maker in that area there. These Salesforce sales guys, it seems, are able to spend lavishly on literal wining and dining, which is probably very effective in terms of getting them to win over other teams on why they should add on (insert SF service here) to increase deal size.

The last negotiation I was there for, for instance, in late 2021, the SF guys were pitching (hard) a product called "Salesforce Einstein" which was promised to be everything to everyone. I see they are now calling it "AI" which wasn't the main way they described it then before AI was such a hot buzzword. I think it was just branding for some kind of marketing workflow tooling, but to hear them tell it, it would do anything we could imagine.

I don’t know about sales force, but once you get high enough, vendors will spend tens of thousands on meals, tickets to conferences, etc to win you over and keep you.

The current place I work will call up Microsoft, databricks, or someone else and have them pay for a hackathon with ~100 participants including catered meals and dinners out for a week.

I sat next to one vendor, I saw the total bill for the dinner (30k). He didn’t flinch and slapped down his Amex

To be fair, they bought Quip four years before Slack, so they haven't all been winners.

My org decided rather suddenly to adopt Salesforce Marketing Cloud which sounded like a plausible decision until I found out it was ExactTarget and looked pretty much the same as it did in 2004 and also doesn't really integrate with Salesforce CRM in any useful way.

With every acquisition, Uncle Marc always has some grand, though nebulous integration vision to go with the announcement. But it never happens.

> I didn't even know it has an ecommerce function

It has at least two (2) ecommerce functions (more if you count B2B Classic / CloudCraze)

1. Salesforce Commerce Cloud B2C - 2016 Demandware acquisition, somewhere in the spectrum of PaaS to SaaS, separate offering compared to the rest of the Salesforce platform. Customizations are done in ISML (JSP/JSTL/JSF-like) and an ECMAScript-like language in modern implementations (not going to cover SiteGenesis, Pipelines, and SiteGenesis Controllers for you old folks here). APIs are provided by the legacy OCAPI layer, and SCAPI layer, which has a thin Mulesoft API layer on top

2. Salesforce Commerce Cloud B2B/D2C - Salesforce-native platform (e.g. native Salesforce objects). Customizations done via Lightning (front-end) and Apex (Java-like language). More-or-less fully integrated into the Salesforce platform. More or less fully SaaS.

Demandware (and subsequently, SFCC) was one of the first ecommerce platforms to pioneer licensing a commerce platform based on revenue sharing (given the SaaS-like model), as opposed to legacy self-hosted platforms (ATG, Hybris, IBM WebSphere) which initially focused on licensing per seats or CPU.

> I hardly even understand what Salesforce does. I thought it was a sales lead/CRM software. I didn't even know it has an ecommerce function

Salesforce Commerce is an entirely different stack than Saleforce CRM. It's essentially DemandWare that was rebranded. It is the same parent company but think of it as a separate software entirely.

> and I've been surprised to see it pop up in non-sales spaces (ex. the CFPB complaint system).

Look at the billions Salesforce makes every year, they are in a lot of industries you might not have thought of.

Mirroring what you're saying: I've worked with a company who has a "Salesforce Product Manager". A whole person dedicated to managing their Salesforce integration. I haven't used it myself, but seeing that role exists makes Salesforce sound both complicated and expensive.

IIUC, the big advantage of Salesforce is that it forces you to be in a singular ecosystem and that it's a re-org for data instead of people.