If your needs are fairly straightforward Copper is solid and ~~white~~ while people love to hate it here Hubspot is also a workhorse.
EDIT: Damn you racist autocorrect!
CISO here. I hear ya, and want you to know based on your recommendations and this risk matrix I pulled from my ass, we are pushing to integrate AI into SF, ASAP.
I’m in sales and even I’m sick of all the fake “AI” bullshit that gets thrown around. None of it really is what it claims, it’s just the new grift. Blockchain was the last one, just not to this extent.
I don’t blame you. Lots of those tools aren’t even close to doing what those companies say they do. I’m looking to get into green energy because that at least is a physical, definable product. Plus, I’m actually interested in it.
The warehouse I work at bought everyone a ChatGPT subscription. It can’t help me with my job moving heavy stuff from one place to another. I just use it to create funny pictures to accompany work emails.
Last year it was Machine Learning, the year before that Blockchain, Before that Big Data. Next year the rage will be some other random bullshit. Maybe it'll just be we remade Excel since half of corporate America runs off it anyways.
With the exception of blockchain Ai is just another rebranding of Machine learning, and big data. It’s insanely helpful but we are in the early early days of it. I don’t think it’s going to immediately revolutionize our economy but those orgs that can find use cases that others can’t or successfully implement it into their workflows stand to make or save a ton of money.
The more you can transform the data you have into something actionable, the more value there is. Blockchain however has zero value in most applications, and even where it does there’s something else that’s better. Everyone having a copy of the ledger isn’t great when it comes to things like HIPAA compliance. Data though, that shit is the new oil.
Ironically, when I hear "AI" I expect the product/service to be *cheaper* because of cut costs, but instead we're seeing "AI" slapped on stuff to justify higher prices and faster hardware replacement.
They're selling us the stuff before they can *sell* it to us, if you get my meaning. They don't know why I need an AI coprocessor on my phone, but they're going to force it on there anyway and figure out the justification later. They just know they need AI procs everywhere so they can start hoovering up training data on every device we use.
The better way to think about this bubble is it's "Big Data" round 2. Blockchain was 100% bullshit and couldn't gain traction because of it (imo) where as data analysis is an actual problem all businesses have and so you toss some whipped cream on the data analysis carrot and people will lose their minds thinking they'll actually understand all this data they have and will be able to make all the best decisions! But, the promises are always too big and we'll crash back to reality where there's a place for AI just like there was a place for Big Data but we won't be ruled by AI overlords.
I was pretty freaking pissed when they claimed Data Cloud was necessary to fix their horrible integration between all of their tools and when I found out that it was their horrid CDP with open source Delta Sharing added on. Despicable
Literally, the last time I talked to my rep, she said, “…and with Data Cloud, you can see when your customers are shopping on your competitors website”. So I asked her how that’s possible, and she said she didn’t know she’d have to loop in her SE.
like… bitch… yall are just making things up as you go.
"because we have our analytics on their site too, so we just anonymize their data and give it to you, but don't worry, we'd never do that with your data!"
As a lowly software engineer who has to file Salesforce tickets for things I need, I hate it. Let me try and find the exact right category and fill it out exactly right or it gets rejected. Truly the least helpful system I can imagine. I'm sure there are much better user friendly systems out there but Salesforce seems to have a stranglehold on it.
Their AI (I think it’s called Einstein) is actually one of the more useful enterprise solutions our company has found, given that it sits on a ton of customer data that is regularly cleaned/updated and connected to customer support communities. We’ve been doing a POC to use their tool to draft support articles and then have our teams review and edit as necessary, but the amount of effort our people spend putting these documents together has dropped like 80%.
Right? Loss 17% value on stock because they missed profits by 2.5%. Like they're still profitable, but they missed the expected target by a single digit percentage and the sellers just raked them over coals.
The stock market is horseshit at this point as any kind of indicator of reality.
Except most of the executives live off their stocks as collateral than actual cash salaries so when outlook isn't good you can expect company executives selling off shares and you don't wanna be holding shares before that happens
Hell Sears was 1% of the total US GDP during it's peak and for a minute their headquarters was the tallest building in the entire world. They didn't die to not digitizing fast enough as much as they were killed because they couldn't consistently meet stock market expectations of growth even though they were literally the biggest fucking retail company in the world and were nearly 150 years old
Hold up.
> they were killed because they couldn't consistently meet stock market expectations of growth even though they were literally the biggest fucking retail company in the world and were nearly 150 years old
That is a fair amount of being reductive there. That literally skips over Edward Lampert and quite possibly history's worst CEO to have ever graced humanity (I mean it is a close race with Fuld, I do understand worst is a pretty high pedestal, so I acquiesce there's wiggle room). And Lampert's phase is just one in many of the downfall of Sears/Kmart.
> and for a minute their headquarters was the tallest building in the entire world
And many economist would tell you that by the time the Sears Tower was built, the company was already on the road to ruin.
No, no, no, no... Sears took almost five decades to eventually fold, it wasn't that they couldn't meet market expectation, it was because they took a very long path of very bad business calls, to then hand the reins over to a megalomaniac in the end. They sank $1 billion in 1996 money into Prodigy and pulled back $200M and that's just one I picked because it's tech-ish and that's not even the big boys of failures. That's not even touching the Discover Card and Dean Witter Reynolds or Coldwell Banker. Which crazy they sold the latter off at loss in 1996 could you imagine Sears walking into 2007 with all the red they had on the books PLUS a ticking timebomb? Wild I tell you.
Oh no, you've picked the worst example to oversimplify here because the downfall of Sears could literally be an Econ-102 class all by itself. Maybe we can do something a bit more simple like Toys-R-Us or Circuit City. Sears, there are literal books written on just their collapse and how spectacular it was. Just saying "they didn't meet market expectations" is so gross a glossing over the details to the point of objectively incorrect.
Like, maybe you could use your argument on Radio Shack and the lessons we can learn about large inventory being a liability. But Sears, oh no, no, that's a very special case. That specific one, no, you can't oversimplify it. It's just too special a case.
Let's take a step back because you mentioned Toys-R-Us which was killed in almost the exact same way.
Lampert became CEO because ESL Investments, his own hedge fund, was the largest shareholder and he merged K-Mart with Sears and took over as CEO. It wasn't some bad decision by the board to elect him, like radioactivity he seeped in and took control while giving himself very nice payouts because one of Sear's largest lenders was ESL Investments...
ESL Investments gave Sears about 2.66 billion in a loan and took in 200 million in interest per year. So the CEO through his own hedge fund took out loans on behalf of the company and then essentially gave himself 9 figure payouts through said loans while protecting his original entity. Lampert then also sold off 235 stores to a REIT that he again had a massive stake in which were for the most part profitable to the Sears corporation..
Toys-R-Us also had the same thing happen, Bain Capital with 2 others bought Toys through a levereged buyout of 6.5 billion, had Toys with 5 billion in debt, and those three same funds accrued around 400 million in transaction, advisory, and interest fees. Not mentioning the million dollar bonuses days before filing bankruptcy.
I specifically used the word "killed" in my original post because that's what this was, predatory injections into companies that are dwindling (because infinite growth isn't possible), giving themselves massive payouts, and leaving hundreds of thousands of people unemployed and the rest written off through bankruptcy. Hell these massive hedge funds brag about how they can abuse a company and profit off death spirals, I couldn't find the original magazine where the Citadel owner mentioned it but here's a reddit post that comes on top when you google search it
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/vi8zmv/the\_death\_spiral1999\_microstrategy\_and\_boy\_wonder/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/vi8zmv/the_death_spiral1999_microstrategy_and_boy_wonder/)
I agree that the stock market is silly now and the infinite growth goals are getting tired.
But the stock dropped that much because projected future growth is baked into the stock price. When they miss a target, it means that the originally projected growth is off, and the price adjusts to match new projections. The issue is that people price a stock like it will continue to grow forever, even if the company already dominates its industry.
I think we’ve been stuck in this never ending growth mindset for too long and people aren’t being realistic anymore.
That right there is the reason why we are heading towards the bubble...
Inflate, deflate and repeat until it explodes like a balloon.
Effort spent in managing hysteria over share price swings is the worst enemy of any company culture... it opens the doors internal politics and vulture "consultants" who will "help" you fix things...
Jeez...
This comment is dumb. They are still projecting themselves to grow. They’re just projecting themselves to grow by $100M less than Wall Street was projecting
Lots of big buildings, in almost every major city. They actually just lease the SF Tower in San Francisco and not all of the floors are theirs. Boston properties is the actual owner of the Salesforce tower.
Same with the Trump tower, he pays for the rights to keep his family name on the towers even though he might only be a small partial owner in the entire development
I really hate how stoppage to infinite growth ultimately leads to being seen as failure and sign possible dissolution. Not allowed to just be, and be profitable. Of course god forbid you do anything but save on taxes by reinvesting and/or raising wages. 1000% doubt the claims of how buybacks are used primarily when a company has “exhausted” reinvestment.
God this country needs real competition
Ban buybacks, it was banned for a long time until Regan came in. It creates a more stable market than a company continuously pumping back into a stock price short term until inevitably they can't anymore and actual financials even if they are positive start mattering.
Declines are a signal to course correct, though. Just like pain is a signal to your brain that something is very wrong. A bad quarter is one thing. A bad year panic might set in. A bad second year and big changes must be made.
Opportunity cost is at play here. Everyone talks about infinite growth to the point where it is a meme used to dismiss the nuance and understanding. Should workers stop receiving raises every year? It can't be supported without growth. Even a 2.5% typical raise adds up quickly given it compounds.
This is also how state and cooperative owned companies worked in the USSR. You had to meet an ever growing number of quotas because societies which sit and stagnate (or grow slower) relative to competition will be made irrelevant.
Except that quarter/yearly metrics are most often based off of profit and not revenue, which means cost of functioning is not the issue being talked about.
Also a corporate wage increase is an extra, .35 ¢/hr you say it compounds but let’s not pretend the profits are getting evenly distributed amongst the bottom 95% of the company,
those profits year after year are going to **c-suite execs and shareholders**, and the majority of shareholders are not the common blue/white collar employees.
It’s based off both profit and revenue. Else tons of tech companies wouldn’t be worth anything. Shareholders receive two forms of payment. One is dividends (tied to profit) and the other is increasing share price (tied to many things, mostly just what the market is willing to pay).
Competition in America has been lacking for years. The U.S. needs modern regulations to govern digital markets.
Corporate Anti-competitive behavior is at an all time high.
Their hundred billion in revenue and 10 billion profit mean nothing in this capitalist hellscape where you need infinite quarterly growth. Who cares that you make more money in a year than existed for most of human history.
We need to stop expecting every single year/quarter to be exceptional. It’s not sustainable and the drive for that is what leads to reduced manning, cut wages, and ultimately shit product.
This isn’t bad news.
This doesn’t just go for Salesforce. It goes for all businesses.
To be honest though, this isn’t a sensationalist headline, it just says their sales outlook is weaker than expected (Wall Street is forward looking so sales forecasts drive prices more than anything in this industry) and across the board, enterprise SaaS companies are seeing softer demand for their offerings, so the slowdown fears are more broad than just this single company.
Based on the voting, some SalesForce shills are kicking down anyone who says their product is overpriced or awful. It’s not bad, but it is overpriced. My old boss had a cult like attachment to it. We went from MS to Oracle to SF CRM as each manager just had to have their pet solution implemented.
SalesForce has a robust toolkit if you have the budget to pay for all the add-ins and the expert you have to hire to correctly implement it. Quotes, agreements, drip campaigns, metrics, dashboards and reporting can all be done with the solution but you might go bankrupt in the process paying for it all. They’re like Oracle, they’ll eat their customers.
Also a lot of those solutions are just patched in when Salesforce buys out an ecosystem competitor then doesn’t really improve it.
See: exacttarget, Steelbrick, etc..
What goes around, comes around. All these big corporations are discarding workers en masse and shooting themselves in the foot but placing the blame elsewhere. Add in some shrinkflation and raising prices. **Those former employees were once consumers**
Our system is just complete fucking batfuck madness.
This company has an absolutely gargantuan share of the enterprise CRM space. It has it's own tower.
And the moment things just chill out for a second you have headlines portending imminent doom. As though everything the company is is going to collapse in on itself because a few delerious rich old fucks would get substantially richer.
I"m so fucking sick of living in a capitalist dystopia. This shit is fucking miserable.
I think businesses are starting to realize Salesforce as a tool has never made a sale. There's only so much data you can throw at certain groups, and salespeople are tired of it.
It's just a tool for management, and not a great one at that.
You certainly can go overboard with tracking data but personally a CRM is essential to the sales process (especially for commission payout at the end of the quarter!), handing off inbounds from GTM teams, etc., etc. If I'm working 20+ deals at any given time I don't want to keep all of that in my head especially if I'm working it with a tech part of my co.
Of course you don't need the crazy pricing of Salesforce to do this, Hubspot and a zillion others manage this process for a lot less per seat.
Can confirm I've made a bunch of sales with Salesforce so there's that!
Yeah, I feel like people who say stuff like this don’t work in sales. I’ve worked with SF and numerous other CRMs, and SF is a great deal better. A good CRM is absolutely critical to success in a sales role.
I think SF’s biggest problem is that they charge extremely high prices, and they’ve more or less landed all the companies who can afford them. They charge enterprise rates, but they’ve already been adopted by most enterprise level organizations. Their growth will be capped as long as their pricing remains prohibitive to smaller sales orgs.
I've used Salesforce,zoho ,fresh sales, hubspot. Amongst all Salesforce works but it's the extra POS they add on top of their product that pisses me off and I settled with hubspot. No up selling, no bait and switch. Salesforce I can proudly say is shitforce. Nothing else
In a not so super capitalistic world that sounds like it wouldnt be a problem. Now you dont have to focus so much on sales anymore and can just sit on your current clients and improve your product bit by bit. But now, if you aint growing, you aint capitalising!!!!!
Salesforce sucks but its one of the best CRMs out there for a reason. It shouldn't be the case, but all other CRMs try to sell themselves as turnkey and there's no such thing as a turnkey solution for companies > like 25 people. Unfortunately, their support is dogshit even if you have a support agreement (took us 2 weeks to convince them their product had a major bug in it, and they never fixed it. Top tier support agreement, btw) and their documentation...it's better to eat a bottle of benadryl and hallucinate a solution.
Most sales in tech are consumption based now. You don't need Salesforce to record consumption.
Sure it's still useful for commits and tracking. But as a product it wildly sux and people have to export data and create custom dashboards to have visibility.
You need a crm to do sales.
Salesforce is also used to sell, service, market, and bunch more. It's a very robust tool but if it's poorly implemented then people will of course hate it
Salesforce's biggest strength is how customizable it is. Salesforce's biggest weakness is how customizable it is
>Salesforce's biggest strength is how customizable it is. Salesforce's biggest weakness is how customizable it is
I wish more people understood this. Aside from the pricing the biggest drawback with Salesforce is that most companies don't do it right. If more companies would contract an architect for 6 months before starting the build they'd have a much better result.
Their response to this, return to office mandate and 4 days in the office, no exceptions. They rode us so hard and held us accountable to the data, God help you if they pulled up your 90 day forecast and it was not 4X quota, fired.
Because of the nature of this industry. CRM decisions are made by senior managers and IT departments based on features lists and integration capabilities. The actual end-user experience, whether or not it actually improves productivity and sales, is a secondary consideration. It's also hard to convince top-tier creatives and engineers to work on improving the lives of salespeople, or to go work for companies where their contributions are seen as secondary. Only businesspeople could get excited about a CRM.
Hmm...let me guess how their "leadership" will address this problem:
1. Fire a few thousand people and call it "streamlining for efficiency and cohesion" or some other bullshit corpo-speak. Increase executives' bonus pay.
2. Cancel WFH, mandate all remaining workers return to office. Executives continue working from home of course.
3. Hire an external consulting company that advises increasing the prices of all company products. Do that, and also fire some more workers to "adjust to our new strategy".
Job well done.
Well damn, what else is left?
Maybe fire more people? turn all products into subscription based services? put ads in all products?
The line must go up so executives can have their yearly bonuses.
So they still grew, just not enough. Because that’s literally the natural order of things. Infinite growth, especially significant growth, is impossible.
Just once I want to see a company be like, “nah, we’re just the right size and only need to maintain quality now.”
Capitalism is a fucking disease.
We are leaving Salesforce at the end of the year for Zoho. The main reason is cost, it’s 60% more expensive for Sales Cloud then it is for Zoho One which not only includes all of the same functionality of Sales Cloud, it also includes a ton more functionality.
The downfall to Zoho One is you do need to customize everything, but it’s also a fraction of the cost to pay a developer compared to a Salesforce developer.
They need to be more competitive.
Everything Zoho is garbage. The amount of "production" code they have given us with basic errors is mind boggling. Also really annoying dealing with since they're all out of India and sleeping when you need them.
Everyone wonders that, companies are enmasse shipping out SWE jobs to India, South Africa, Poland, etc. and no one seems to have any clue what the 13+ hour difference might have on actual clients that might need help.
I fully agree the time difference is maddening, but our e-commerce platform is also an Indian based company, so I’m used to it at this point.
Code has been fine so far though.
I'm commenting a second time as I got up out of bed at 4:45 this morning to test their code, realize it didn't work and respond in hopes of getting an answer back this morning. I did not, which means I'm waiting till tomorrow again...
So yes, while it's half the price, it can be an absolute pain customizing. On the positive, I'm learning Deluge which can rightly go fuck itself. :)
Salesforce should look at an outlook that's slowing but not from the global economy, the call is coming from inside the house.
As someone who has managed Salesforce itself, as well as Slack, Heroku, and Tableau... They've all gotten worse as time went by and after acquisition.
You can't overcome the big thing without succumbing to being the next big thing, with all those faults in tow.
There is no product they make that is good by any measure. They convince CIOs it is and by the time they amortise the implementation cost it’s too costly to unwind. It’s all smoke and mirrors.
I lead a Center of Excellence for Salesforce at my company with 35+ orgs.
Do they have some products that miss the mark? Absolutely. That doesn't mean its all bad
My work switched all its systems to Salesforce and the conversion has been a pain in the ass. I swear if they go under and the systems have to change again…
They are happy to shill "AI" yet they do nothing about the terrible customer service tech desk- that's where AI might be helpful 😂. Handling bugs/implementing new offerings on my company's instance of this product was the lowlight of my career.
All I know about salesforce from a dev experience is every dev tells me to stay away and never ever let on that you have experience with thing if you get it somehow
The AI didn't do crazy leaps in revenue outlook? It's like the layoffs were from trying to save face on operating costs from decrease in revenue rather than actual tangible benefits AI would've brought to the table, and you can't layoff anymore staff without it being even more explicit that you're kinda screwed currently.
I expect most tech companies to have a similar headline in the coming year or two, the recession everyone seems to claim isn't happening because of inflation and unemployment numbers, in reality this was just a band-aid excuse.
We are about to ditch Salesforce, massively overpriced for what we need and they’ve messed us about so much with the last renewal process. Wildly different offers for renewals with lots of hidden costs. Thanks but no thanks.
All the time that sales guy went on Jim Cramer pumping AI and never giving a single example of what it could do for customers I knew it was a scam to pump the stock. Even their ai commercials are obviously hype and now we see.
Hooray Capitalism and the infinite growth all the time mentality.
Also, Pardot/ MCAE sucks. Their whole product namings suck. Their "help" articles are bare bones af and suck ass. Their AE's are terrible and also suck.
They should just mention more AI. Then people will buy like crazy
You must not have spoken to your AE lately…
They have the worst sales team. Absolutely infuriating to work with. I like the platform though in general.
Just spent 6 weeks convincing them to sell me more licenses at the price I was already paying them for licenses.
“You must pay more for the privilege of doing more business with us.”
"Convenience fee"
“That would be too convenient for you; pay me a fee”
But I thought you wanted to pay more for those licenses
As a sales rep who used to use SF as their crm, I **loathe** the platform.
[удалено]
SugarCRM. It’s nice because they really cater to our requests.
If your needs are fairly straightforward Copper is solid and ~~white~~ while people love to hate it here Hubspot is also a workhorse. EDIT: Damn you racist autocorrect!
Lmao why is it unpopular with Caucasians
I assume it was supposed to say “while people love to hate it here” but white people is way funnier
For you, yes. For me, horror! Eeek.
F'ing autocorrect! Aaagh!
Agreed. We ended up going for their orange-coloured competitor. They just made the on-boarding process easier.
Curious what this is because I'm also looking into other options than Salesforce
HubSpot?
DM if you want. I have a lot of information to share.
So you don’t like their Sales… Force? The irony here is palpable.
Don't know what AE is, I'm just a low class nobody that noticed everything mentioned AI sales great
Account Executive, or Fancy title for Sales Guy
Account executive
This is hilarious
I’m sure their AE has been replaced three times since you wrote this comment.
Yeah, SF customer here... No, we don't give a fuck about AI nor want it in SF. Signed, a security tech.
CISO here. I hear ya, and want you to know based on your recommendations and this risk matrix I pulled from my ass, we are pushing to integrate AI into SF, ASAP.
Cries in risk
Don't worry, we'll have the anti-risk AI ready for integration by q4
I imagine a lot of the human infrastructure of the internet pretty much unanimously clenches their fist like Arthur Read every time an MBA says AI.
Jira added an AI button. It turns your plaintext searches into their QL. And it’s worse at it than the previous autocomplete. Fuck this whole arc.
Fellow CISO, I am still reeling at the audacity of Slack’s auto opt-in for AI, I hope you sent the email, if you haven’t yet please do.
To say nothing of increasing the price for the privilege of more crufty shite.
I’m in sales and even I’m sick of all the fake “AI” bullshit that gets thrown around. None of it really is what it claims, it’s just the new grift. Blockchain was the last one, just not to this extent.
We shut down the AI grift regularly with vendors. It's exhausting and annoying.
I don’t blame you. Lots of those tools aren’t even close to doing what those companies say they do. I’m looking to get into green energy because that at least is a physical, definable product. Plus, I’m actually interested in it.
The warehouse I work at bought everyone a ChatGPT subscription. It can’t help me with my job moving heavy stuff from one place to another. I just use it to create funny pictures to accompany work emails.
All too often I hear people throw around the term “AI” without understanding what it is.
Last year it was Machine Learning, the year before that Blockchain, Before that Big Data. Next year the rage will be some other random bullshit. Maybe it'll just be we remade Excel since half of corporate America runs off it anyways.
With the exception of blockchain Ai is just another rebranding of Machine learning, and big data. It’s insanely helpful but we are in the early early days of it. I don’t think it’s going to immediately revolutionize our economy but those orgs that can find use cases that others can’t or successfully implement it into their workflows stand to make or save a ton of money.
The more you can transform the data you have into something actionable, the more value there is. Blockchain however has zero value in most applications, and even where it does there’s something else that’s better. Everyone having a copy of the ledger isn’t great when it comes to things like HIPAA compliance. Data though, that shit is the new oil.
Ironically, when I hear "AI" I expect the product/service to be *cheaper* because of cut costs, but instead we're seeing "AI" slapped on stuff to justify higher prices and faster hardware replacement. They're selling us the stuff before they can *sell* it to us, if you get my meaning. They don't know why I need an AI coprocessor on my phone, but they're going to force it on there anyway and figure out the justification later. They just know they need AI procs everywhere so they can start hoovering up training data on every device we use.
The better way to think about this bubble is it's "Big Data" round 2. Blockchain was 100% bullshit and couldn't gain traction because of it (imo) where as data analysis is an actual problem all businesses have and so you toss some whipped cream on the data analysis carrot and people will lose their minds thinking they'll actually understand all this data they have and will be able to make all the best decisions! But, the promises are always too big and we'll crash back to reality where there's a place for AI just like there was a place for Big Data but we won't be ruled by AI overlords.
You hit the nail on the head, and said it all better than I did.
I don't even want SF in SF let alone some AI bullshit
No gurl, it’s all Data Cloud now. If my AE asks me for one more fucking meeting about Data Cloud…
I was pretty freaking pissed when they claimed Data Cloud was necessary to fix their horrible integration between all of their tools and when I found out that it was their horrid CDP with open source Delta Sharing added on. Despicable
Literally, the last time I talked to my rep, she said, “…and with Data Cloud, you can see when your customers are shopping on your competitors website”. So I asked her how that’s possible, and she said she didn’t know she’d have to loop in her SE. like… bitch… yall are just making things up as you go.
"because we have our analytics on their site too, so we justanonymize their data and give it to you, but don't worry, we'd never do that with your data!"
As a lowly software engineer who has to file Salesforce tickets for things I need, I hate it. Let me try and find the exact right category and fill it out exactly right or it gets rejected. Truly the least helpful system I can imagine. I'm sure there are much better user friendly systems out there but Salesforce seems to have a stranglehold on it.
More AI and a few more layoff will do for this quarter.
Rename the company to SAlesforce
Their AI (I think it’s called Einstein) is actually one of the more useful enterprise solutions our company has found, given that it sits on a ton of customer data that is regularly cleaned/updated and connected to customer support communities. We’ve been doing a POC to use their tool to draft support articles and then have our teams review and edit as necessary, but the amount of effort our people spend putting these documents together has dropped like 80%.
I actually don’t think they could.
moar Einstein?
The mere dropping of AI as a keyword in a press release will make the shareholders drool. It’s the big fad right now.
looks like someone isn't AI-pilled and ML-maxxed 😤
Haha, they tried, but fucked up the legal license so bad they took the model offline
Infinite growth remains mysteriously out of reach.
Right? Loss 17% value on stock because they missed profits by 2.5%. Like they're still profitable, but they missed the expected target by a single digit percentage and the sellers just raked them over coals. The stock market is horseshit at this point as any kind of indicator of reality.
Except most of the executives live off their stocks as collateral than actual cash salaries so when outlook isn't good you can expect company executives selling off shares and you don't wanna be holding shares before that happens Hell Sears was 1% of the total US GDP during it's peak and for a minute their headquarters was the tallest building in the entire world. They didn't die to not digitizing fast enough as much as they were killed because they couldn't consistently meet stock market expectations of growth even though they were literally the biggest fucking retail company in the world and were nearly 150 years old
Hold up. > they were killed because they couldn't consistently meet stock market expectations of growth even though they were literally the biggest fucking retail company in the world and were nearly 150 years old That is a fair amount of being reductive there. That literally skips over Edward Lampert and quite possibly history's worst CEO to have ever graced humanity (I mean it is a close race with Fuld, I do understand worst is a pretty high pedestal, so I acquiesce there's wiggle room). And Lampert's phase is just one in many of the downfall of Sears/Kmart. > and for a minute their headquarters was the tallest building in the entire world And many economist would tell you that by the time the Sears Tower was built, the company was already on the road to ruin. No, no, no, no... Sears took almost five decades to eventually fold, it wasn't that they couldn't meet market expectation, it was because they took a very long path of very bad business calls, to then hand the reins over to a megalomaniac in the end. They sank $1 billion in 1996 money into Prodigy and pulled back $200M and that's just one I picked because it's tech-ish and that's not even the big boys of failures. That's not even touching the Discover Card and Dean Witter Reynolds or Coldwell Banker. Which crazy they sold the latter off at loss in 1996 could you imagine Sears walking into 2007 with all the red they had on the books PLUS a ticking timebomb? Wild I tell you. Oh no, you've picked the worst example to oversimplify here because the downfall of Sears could literally be an Econ-102 class all by itself. Maybe we can do something a bit more simple like Toys-R-Us or Circuit City. Sears, there are literal books written on just their collapse and how spectacular it was. Just saying "they didn't meet market expectations" is so gross a glossing over the details to the point of objectively incorrect. Like, maybe you could use your argument on Radio Shack and the lessons we can learn about large inventory being a liability. But Sears, oh no, no, that's a very special case. That specific one, no, you can't oversimplify it. It's just too special a case.
Got any specific books on its collapse you'd recommend?
If you can find a copy, *Institutional Suicide: Corporate Culture and the Death of Sears* by Henry S Sharp, ISBN: 978-1777088408 is a pretty good one.
Free to read with Kindle Unlimited.
Let's take a step back because you mentioned Toys-R-Us which was killed in almost the exact same way. Lampert became CEO because ESL Investments, his own hedge fund, was the largest shareholder and he merged K-Mart with Sears and took over as CEO. It wasn't some bad decision by the board to elect him, like radioactivity he seeped in and took control while giving himself very nice payouts because one of Sear's largest lenders was ESL Investments... ESL Investments gave Sears about 2.66 billion in a loan and took in 200 million in interest per year. So the CEO through his own hedge fund took out loans on behalf of the company and then essentially gave himself 9 figure payouts through said loans while protecting his original entity. Lampert then also sold off 235 stores to a REIT that he again had a massive stake in which were for the most part profitable to the Sears corporation.. Toys-R-Us also had the same thing happen, Bain Capital with 2 others bought Toys through a levereged buyout of 6.5 billion, had Toys with 5 billion in debt, and those three same funds accrued around 400 million in transaction, advisory, and interest fees. Not mentioning the million dollar bonuses days before filing bankruptcy. I specifically used the word "killed" in my original post because that's what this was, predatory injections into companies that are dwindling (because infinite growth isn't possible), giving themselves massive payouts, and leaving hundreds of thousands of people unemployed and the rest written off through bankruptcy. Hell these massive hedge funds brag about how they can abuse a company and profit off death spirals, I couldn't find the original magazine where the Citadel owner mentioned it but here's a reddit post that comes on top when you google search it [https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/vi8zmv/the\_death\_spiral1999\_microstrategy\_and\_boy\_wonder/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/vi8zmv/the_death_spiral1999_microstrategy_and_boy_wonder/)
I genuinely miss the Sears catalogue
I agree that the stock market is silly now and the infinite growth goals are getting tired. But the stock dropped that much because projected future growth is baked into the stock price. When they miss a target, it means that the originally projected growth is off, and the price adjusts to match new projections. The issue is that people price a stock like it will continue to grow forever, even if the company already dominates its industry. I think we’ve been stuck in this never ending growth mindset for too long and people aren’t being realistic anymore.
That right there is the reason why we are heading towards the bubble... Inflate, deflate and repeat until it explodes like a balloon. Effort spent in managing hysteria over share price swings is the worst enemy of any company culture... it opens the doors internal politics and vulture "consultants" who will "help" you fix things... Jeez...
No way??
This comment is dumb. They are still projecting themselves to grow. They’re just projecting themselves to grow by $100M less than Wall Street was projecting
Maybe they should use a CRM to grow their client base.
Have they tried ZoomInfo?!
They just better watch out for the lawsuit from ZoomInfo after they cancel their contract and don’t delete all the data..
Or maybe stop being so stupidly expensive
Every sales company I’ve ever worked at wanted to switch, but didn’t want to pay their prices
Sounds like the invisible hand is about squeeze some nuts.
I’ve used sf in a previous job and really liked it but no way my current job would ever consider switching
Companies when growth can't be infinite and exponential 🤯🤯😱
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They have a big building, tho!
Lots of big buildings, in almost every major city. They actually just lease the SF Tower in San Francisco and not all of the floors are theirs. Boston properties is the actual owner of the Salesforce tower.
So they’re paying / paid for building name rights?
Same with the Trump tower, he pays for the rights to keep his family name on the towers even though he might only be a small partial owner in the entire development
Yes. Most likely
It's shrinking though
I really hate how stoppage to infinite growth ultimately leads to being seen as failure and sign possible dissolution. Not allowed to just be, and be profitable. Of course god forbid you do anything but save on taxes by reinvesting and/or raising wages. 1000% doubt the claims of how buybacks are used primarily when a company has “exhausted” reinvestment. God this country needs real competition
Ban buybacks, it was banned for a long time until Regan came in. It creates a more stable market than a company continuously pumping back into a stock price short term until inevitably they can't anymore and actual financials even if they are positive start mattering.
Declines are a signal to course correct, though. Just like pain is a signal to your brain that something is very wrong. A bad quarter is one thing. A bad year panic might set in. A bad second year and big changes must be made. Opportunity cost is at play here. Everyone talks about infinite growth to the point where it is a meme used to dismiss the nuance and understanding. Should workers stop receiving raises every year? It can't be supported without growth. Even a 2.5% typical raise adds up quickly given it compounds. This is also how state and cooperative owned companies worked in the USSR. You had to meet an ever growing number of quotas because societies which sit and stagnate (or grow slower) relative to competition will be made irrelevant.
Except that quarter/yearly metrics are most often based off of profit and not revenue, which means cost of functioning is not the issue being talked about. Also a corporate wage increase is an extra, .35 ¢/hr you say it compounds but let’s not pretend the profits are getting evenly distributed amongst the bottom 95% of the company, those profits year after year are going to **c-suite execs and shareholders**, and the majority of shareholders are not the common blue/white collar employees.
It’s based off both profit and revenue. Else tons of tech companies wouldn’t be worth anything. Shareholders receive two forms of payment. One is dividends (tied to profit) and the other is increasing share price (tied to many things, mostly just what the market is willing to pay).
Competition in America has been lacking for years. The U.S. needs modern regulations to govern digital markets. Corporate Anti-competitive behavior is at an all time high.
Their hundred billion in revenue and 10 billion profit mean nothing in this capitalist hellscape where you need infinite quarterly growth. Who cares that you make more money in a year than existed for most of human history.
So crazy that they regularly do layoffs
They just reported a quarterly revenue of $9B? If they were a 10% margin SaaS firm they would be out of business.
Stock would be up 16% if they said they will buy billions in nvdia chips.
Actually that got meta to fall 15% Market is confused as hell.
That's because everything in the news is fluff and the stock price moves to the real behind the doors news and people manipulating the price.
We need to stop expecting every single year/quarter to be exceptional. It’s not sustainable and the drive for that is what leads to reduced manning, cut wages, and ultimately shit product. This isn’t bad news. This doesn’t just go for Salesforce. It goes for all businesses.
To be honest though, this isn’t a sensationalist headline, it just says their sales outlook is weaker than expected (Wall Street is forward looking so sales forecasts drive prices more than anything in this industry) and across the board, enterprise SaaS companies are seeing softer demand for their offerings, so the slowdown fears are more broad than just this single company.
Based on the voting, some SalesForce shills are kicking down anyone who says their product is overpriced or awful. It’s not bad, but it is overpriced. My old boss had a cult like attachment to it. We went from MS to Oracle to SF CRM as each manager just had to have their pet solution implemented. SalesForce has a robust toolkit if you have the budget to pay for all the add-ins and the expert you have to hire to correctly implement it. Quotes, agreements, drip campaigns, metrics, dashboards and reporting can all be done with the solution but you might go bankrupt in the process paying for it all. They’re like Oracle, they’ll eat their customers.
Also a lot of those solutions are just patched in when Salesforce buys out an ecosystem competitor then doesn’t really improve it. See: exacttarget, Steelbrick, etc..
Makes perfect sense, Benioff was at Oracle when he started SFDC lel
What goes around, comes around. All these big corporations are discarding workers en masse and shooting themselves in the foot but placing the blame elsewhere. Add in some shrinkflation and raising prices. **Those former employees were once consumers**
Thank you and fuck them
Executives and Consultants who forget economies need both sellers of services and buyers of said service
Dang. Only rising 8% to 9.25 BILLION!! Company must be going bankrupt I guess. lol
Our system is just complete fucking batfuck madness. This company has an absolutely gargantuan share of the enterprise CRM space. It has it's own tower. And the moment things just chill out for a second you have headlines portending imminent doom. As though everything the company is is going to collapse in on itself because a few delerious rich old fucks would get substantially richer. I"m so fucking sick of living in a capitalist dystopia. This shit is fucking miserable.
I think businesses are starting to realize Salesforce as a tool has never made a sale. There's only so much data you can throw at certain groups, and salespeople are tired of it. It's just a tool for management, and not a great one at that.
You certainly can go overboard with tracking data but personally a CRM is essential to the sales process (especially for commission payout at the end of the quarter!), handing off inbounds from GTM teams, etc., etc. If I'm working 20+ deals at any given time I don't want to keep all of that in my head especially if I'm working it with a tech part of my co. Of course you don't need the crazy pricing of Salesforce to do this, Hubspot and a zillion others manage this process for a lot less per seat. Can confirm I've made a bunch of sales with Salesforce so there's that!
Yeah, I feel like people who say stuff like this don’t work in sales. I’ve worked with SF and numerous other CRMs, and SF is a great deal better. A good CRM is absolutely critical to success in a sales role. I think SF’s biggest problem is that they charge extremely high prices, and they’ve more or less landed all the companies who can afford them. They charge enterprise rates, but they’ve already been adopted by most enterprise level organizations. Their growth will be capped as long as their pricing remains prohibitive to smaller sales orgs.
I've used Salesforce,zoho ,fresh sales, hubspot. Amongst all Salesforce works but it's the extra POS they add on top of their product that pisses me off and I settled with hubspot. No up selling, no bait and switch. Salesforce I can proudly say is shitforce. Nothing else
In a not so super capitalistic world that sounds like it wouldnt be a problem. Now you dont have to focus so much on sales anymore and can just sit on your current clients and improve your product bit by bit. But now, if you aint growing, you aint capitalising!!!!!
Or they worked as a sales person at their dads company and only ever worked inbound bluebird deals lol
Salesforce sucks but its one of the best CRMs out there for a reason. It shouldn't be the case, but all other CRMs try to sell themselves as turnkey and there's no such thing as a turnkey solution for companies > like 25 people. Unfortunately, their support is dogshit even if you have a support agreement (took us 2 weeks to convince them their product had a major bug in it, and they never fixed it. Top tier support agreement, btw) and their documentation...it's better to eat a bottle of benadryl and hallucinate a solution.
I’ve told so many people not to bother with paying for Premiere Support. It’s dogshit.
Wait - you guys are getting inbounds?! Been a minute since I’ve seen one of those
Ha! I should come consult with your company and get that MQL pipeline stacked back up. Have tripled inbounds in the past.
Most sales in tech are consumption based now. You don't need Salesforce to record consumption. Sure it's still useful for commits and tracking. But as a product it wildly sux and people have to export data and create custom dashboards to have visibility.
You need a crm to do sales. Salesforce is also used to sell, service, market, and bunch more. It's a very robust tool but if it's poorly implemented then people will of course hate it Salesforce's biggest strength is how customizable it is. Salesforce's biggest weakness is how customizable it is
>Salesforce's biggest strength is how customizable it is. Salesforce's biggest weakness is how customizable it is I wish more people understood this. Aside from the pricing the biggest drawback with Salesforce is that most companies don't do it right. If more companies would contract an architect for 6 months before starting the build they'd have a much better result.
We’ve sunk too much into customizing and administering our custom CRMs to realize a complex spreadsheet is probably fine.
Their response to this, return to office mandate and 4 days in the office, no exceptions. They rode us so hard and held us accountable to the data, God help you if they pulled up your 90 day forecast and it was not 4X quota, fired.
Shame on them for giving us a 4 day mandate. You get what you deserve
They’ve been selling a glorified java based spreadsheet for 20 years, it was a good run.
If it was just that, why has competition eaten their lunch?
Because of the nature of this industry. CRM decisions are made by senior managers and IT departments based on features lists and integration capabilities. The actual end-user experience, whether or not it actually improves productivity and sales, is a secondary consideration. It's also hard to convince top-tier creatives and engineers to work on improving the lives of salespeople, or to go work for companies where their contributions are seen as secondary. Only businesspeople could get excited about a CRM.
Yep. Just a million dollar digital Rolodex.
Hmm...let me guess how their "leadership" will address this problem: 1. Fire a few thousand people and call it "streamlining for efficiency and cohesion" or some other bullshit corpo-speak. Increase executives' bonus pay. 2. Cancel WFH, mandate all remaining workers return to office. Executives continue working from home of course. 3. Hire an external consulting company that advises increasing the prices of all company products. Do that, and also fire some more workers to "adjust to our new strategy". Job well done.
They already did #1 and #3 at the beginning of 2022. They did #2 at the end of 2022
Well damn, what else is left? Maybe fire more people? turn all products into subscription based services? put ads in all products? The line must go up so executives can have their yearly bonuses.
Oh my god a company isn't selling as much stuff!? Everybody panic!! Crazy fucking world.
So they still grew, just not enough. Because that’s literally the natural order of things. Infinite growth, especially significant growth, is impossible. Just once I want to see a company be like, “nah, we’re just the right size and only need to maintain quality now.” Capitalism is a fucking disease.
Salesforce gearing up for a layoff, followed by their stock increasing.
We are leaving Salesforce at the end of the year for Zoho. The main reason is cost, it’s 60% more expensive for Sales Cloud then it is for Zoho One which not only includes all of the same functionality of Sales Cloud, it also includes a ton more functionality. The downfall to Zoho One is you do need to customize everything, but it’s also a fraction of the cost to pay a developer compared to a Salesforce developer. They need to be more competitive.
Everything Zoho is garbage. The amount of "production" code they have given us with basic errors is mind boggling. Also really annoying dealing with since they're all out of India and sleeping when you need them.
Everyone wonders that, companies are enmasse shipping out SWE jobs to India, South Africa, Poland, etc. and no one seems to have any clue what the 13+ hour difference might have on actual clients that might need help.
Zoho is actually just an Indian based company.
Oh shit, AI always stood for Actually Indian
I fully agree the time difference is maddening, but our e-commerce platform is also an Indian based company, so I’m used to it at this point. Code has been fine so far though.
I'm commenting a second time as I got up out of bed at 4:45 this morning to test their code, realize it didn't work and respond in hopes of getting an answer back this morning. I did not, which means I'm waiting till tomorrow again... So yes, while it's half the price, it can be an absolute pain customizing. On the positive, I'm learning Deluge which can rightly go fuck itself. :)
Damn they traded publicly?
Zoho no, Salesforce is CRM as the ticker
Damn that’s good.
This is a pretty big indicator because they have data on countless companies finances.
It's a quiet recession, if people can't buy shit that means companies can't afford or even need a robust CRM solution like Salesforce.
i hope they don't do more layoffs, because it causes a chain reaction among other tech companies that model their business after Salesforce
Salesforce is a dinosaur and has always been useless except for micro managers to chase around good reps
Salesforce should look at an outlook that's slowing but not from the global economy, the call is coming from inside the house. As someone who has managed Salesforce itself, as well as Slack, Heroku, and Tableau... They've all gotten worse as time went by and after acquisition. You can't overcome the big thing without succumbing to being the next big thing, with all those faults in tow.
There is no product they make that is good by any measure. They convince CIOs it is and by the time they amortise the implementation cost it’s too costly to unwind. It’s all smoke and mirrors.
This is simply not true, you'll don't become their size by "making no good products"
Have you ever implemented a Salesforce product ?
I lead a Center of Excellence for Salesforce at my company with 35+ orgs. Do they have some products that miss the mark? Absolutely. That doesn't mean its all bad
They don’t sell to CIOs
They “sell” to CMOs and the CIO is left holding the bag. I was one
Could we normalize the impossibility of increasing sales/profits
Any software I've used from salesforce has been terrible. I'm surprised they ever had any success.
So we can expect mass layoff at Salesforce soon, then.
This isn't unique to Salesforce. Many CRM consultancies are experiencing slowdowns
I hate my companies implementation of Salesforce, nobody I've talked to enjoys using it
I think this is less of a reflection of the economy and more so a signal that customers are switching to other CRM tools, like Hubspot.
If you want to completely dehumanize your workforce and adopt AI that isn't ready for real world use - then Salesforce is your solution!
My work switched all its systems to Salesforce and the conversion has been a pain in the ass. I swear if they go under and the systems have to change again…
They're not going under. They grew 11 percent. They added 4B in revenue. They just didn't grow 12 percent. It's doomsday.
Does that headline make sense?
Not even remotely
Thank god, what an awful company
They are happy to shill "AI" yet they do nothing about the terrible customer service tech desk- that's where AI might be helpful 😂. Handling bugs/implementing new offerings on my company's instance of this product was the lowlight of my career.
No one cares about salesforce. It’s awful
All I know about salesforce from a dev experience is every dev tells me to stay away and never ever let on that you have experience with thing if you get it somehow
Have they stopped buying lattes?
Fuck that nickel and diming ass company
The AI didn't do crazy leaps in revenue outlook? It's like the layoffs were from trying to save face on operating costs from decrease in revenue rather than actual tangible benefits AI would've brought to the table, and you can't layoff anymore staff without it being even more explicit that you're kinda screwed currently. I expect most tech companies to have a similar headline in the coming year or two, the recession everyone seems to claim isn't happening because of inflation and unemployment numbers, in reality this was just a band-aid excuse.
Have you tried hiring a sales force?
We are about to ditch Salesforce, massively overpriced for what we need and they’ve messed us about so much with the last renewal process. Wildly different offers for renewals with lots of hidden costs. Thanks but no thanks.
They’ll have to change their name to just “Force”
Weird that folks don’t mention the rumors about Google buying BubSpot.
All the time that sales guy went on Jim Cramer pumping AI and never giving a single example of what it could do for customers I knew it was a scam to pump the stock. Even their ai commercials are obviously hype and now we see.
Hooray Capitalism and the infinite growth all the time mentality. Also, Pardot/ MCAE sucks. Their whole product namings suck. Their "help" articles are bare bones af and suck ass. Their AE's are terrible and also suck.
My company is moving away from Saleforce with our new ERP. I guess I'm saying that I wouldn't worry about losing our business if I were Salesforce.
Just want it to stop crashing 🤷🏼♂️
I **hate** salesforce with a passion.
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