[kylerush]

Salesforce is a major B2B SaaS company. It’s primary product is an enterprise grade CRM called “Service Cloud” that helps sales companies manage the sales motion journey. It is the de facto standard of CRMs. The success of Service Cloud lead to an expansion that now includes tons of enterprise products that integrate with Service Cloud. Some of their other services are:

Commerce Cloud: Think enterprise grade Shopify. Competes with Oracle Commerce Cloud.

Marketing Cloud: Enterprise grade email service provider.

Customer 360: If you use multiple Salesforce products, you can connect all your customer data together with no integration code in one product.

A perfect client for Salesforce is an e-commerce retail company who’s differentiator is not technology. Casper (mattress company) is a perfect example. They can buy all this technology and avoid hiring a big team of software engineers. Instead they get all the features they need and can hire much cheaper Salesforce Admins / Developers that can easily be offshored.

I have worked with Salesforce for the past 6 years. I was the VP of Engineering at Casper that worked to replace a lot of open source/ customer tech with Salesforce products. A big advantage of this is easier SOX compliance and data security when going though an IPO.

[iamacyborg]

Salesforce's CRM is called Sales Cloud. Service Cloud is their case management and knowledge base product.

I am not convinced that Salesforce admins are cheaper than engineers. Sure you can offshore, but like offshore engineers, you get what you pay for.

[kylerush]

I had nearly a 100 person team at Casper. It was Software Engineers, Salesforce professionals, QA, SREs, Data Engineers, ERP professionals, etc. I managed a multi-million dollar budget. I can assure you that Engineers are the most expensive people to hire. Most of my Salesforce team was USA based out of our NYC HQ. A Salesforce Admin makes about half what a mid-level SWE makes and they are much easier to hire. In roles at other companies I had outsourced Salesforce teams.

[iamacyborg]

I think this is likely different in the UK vs the US. From what I've seen, Salesforce Admins/Developers will be earning around the same amount as SE's over here.

[cosmodisk]

The US, as always, is an outlier on salaries, however the difference between admin and dev comp in the UK does exist. Admin salary ceiling is probably about £60K, after which you are either very senior or bring a good mix of additional skills. For devs it's about £80-90K, after which you start looking into architect positions.

[iamacyborg]

I think admin salaries go higher than that once they start being process driven roles rather than pure "admin" ones, which the senior ones tend to be. ie admin progressing into consultant whereas dev progresses into architect.

[pivo]

> Commerce Cloud: Think enterprise grade Shopify. Competes with Oracle Commerce Cloud.

No more. Oracle laid off 90% of their commerce cloud team a few weeks ago. It’s in maintenance mode only now and will soon be dead.