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by durpkingOP 2223 days ago
Why is salesforce the center of attention?
4 comments

Because it is the source of truth for all of your customers both current and future.

And surely customers should be the centre of everyone's business.

Like OP, I'd love to understand better what Salesforce does (so well, it seems).

Its a bit hard to imagine, just like SAP software (for me), since all your experience is on industries far from that world.

In their documentation Gitlab explains the usage they have of Salesforce, you may get a non-Gitlab specific view of it, for example: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/customer-success/using-sal...
Because this is the Business Operations tech stack.
Correct! If someone is more interested in what GitLab itself consists of please see https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/architecture.html#com...
The diagrams are nice, but it would be so much better if the nodes were linked to documentation.
I agree. BTW I’m not sure that mermaid allows you to link items in a diagram to the docs.
I was thinking the same. Nice vendor lock-in... I would love to know how much that costs yearly.
How much money do you wager that Salesforce license costs?

I know there's the whole build-vs-buy debate, but with the cost of Salesforce, might it not be better to just stick everything in a database and throw a MySQL WYSIWYG tool like phpmyadmin in front in order to let non-engineers see the schema and build forms?

I suppose if you're earning money hand over fist (or keep getting VC funds) then the cost of your Salesforce license doesn't matter. But I bet that hurts. And unlike a lot of the other software in use, Salesforce comes with steep lock-in.

You severely, severely, underestimate the complexity and business value of a CRM
Been there, done that. Agree with dtech.

You also get to a point in hiring where the field of sales/ops people judge you & your maturity based on whether you use a commercial tool like Salesforce/HubSpot vs build your own.

Can you imagine joining a tech org and they have a half baked phpadmin wysiwyg as a standin for github + code reviews?

While yes, you could calculate out how much the subscription is vs development time to build a simple CRM, the maintenance & mental overload is righteously terrible. Better to spend that effort integrating your foos to your bars than building a sales crm.