[seanhunter]

Trying to change productivity at Salesforce is rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. The truth of the situation is their core product (Basically a layer which allows you to map your business problems onto a relational database + workflow thing) is losing some relevance because the world of tech has moved on, relational databases are not the hotness they were back in the 80s and 90s, people have realised you can model a lot of problems very simply using things like k/v stores etc and they’ve reached a certain level of saturation in their existing customer base. There’s only so many people that need to have the data entry/workflow screens or the reports they generate out of the system, and only so many big enterprises that are going to pay the kind of software license fees that will keep a tech behemoth like that running.

Secondly, their business model has attempted to diversify from just being about sales but fundamentally they are long the economy in general. If the economy is struggling, the appetite for “sales enablement” and collaboration-type tooling is going to wither. Some of the products they acquired (Tableau, Slack in particular) are pretty cool but came at a hefty price tag that is going to be tough to recoup as the environment generally gets tougher and their competition (free and paid) increases.

I don’t think either engineering or sales productivity is going to solve this and if there’s some magic there I’m pretty skeptical that BCG would find it.

[t0mas88]

> Trying to change productivity at Salesforce is rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.

I agree. But this Titanic has many more years to very slowly sink, because large enterprises take forever to migrate away from Salesforce.

And the Salesforce sales teams are even better than Oracle at selling a crap product at high prices. That will buy them a lot of time.

[seanhunter]

Absolutely. It takes forever to get an org onto salesforce so disentangling is probably basically impossible.

[toomuchtodo]

What would you say is today’s Salesforce?

[seanhunter]

Interesting question. If you mean enterprise software/saas offerings with a lot of stickiness, there are clearly a lot of them in the data space. Palantir, Snowflake, maybe Splunk etc are the sorts of fundamental pieces of architecture which people build an “enterprise data strategy” around, and those sorts of projects take a long time to roll out and are therefore intrinsically hard to roll back. There’s a long way to go to become as big as Salesforce though clearly so we’ll have to see how the next few years play out for them. It looks likely to me that some of the “enterprise AI” players (openAI, scale.ai etc) may well end up in the same position also as large companies build LLMs and other models into their workflows.

One thing about Salesforce (anecdotally) is that CRM systems are painful to put in place because they require people to change. They promise that once the processes/workflows are redesigned this “digital transformation” of the business will result in various benefits. This gives Salesforce an army of free sales people at the big consulting firms who essentially sell this transformation project and salesforce as an side-effect.

However people don’t want to change. For this reason at every org where I’ve worked where there has been a big project to put in a CRM system (not just Salesforce - I’ve seen it with Siebel as well) there is a huge painful project to get the CRM system in and afterwards there is massive management pressure to try to force people to use the CRM system in place of existing processes (typically using email to pass around spreadsheets). This pressure is because the benefits of the CRM don’t typically accrue to the people who have to put data into the system. Typically they accrue to the managers of those people. So CRMs often end up out of date, full of duplicate records, bad data etc rather than the perfect repository of institutional knowledge they are billed as.

The promise of the new gen I listed above is because they operate on the data sources (rather than requiring the people to change their existing flows) the analytical insights can come from existing systems and processes without as much organisational pain. It remains to be seen whether they end up as sticky in the long term.

[swang720]

"Basically a layer which allows you to map your business problems onto a relational database + workflow thing"

How is this different from any B2B SaaS product?

[seanhunter]

The primary difference is that they decided (like SAP and a few others) that rather than solving a particular vertical well they would produce a generic thing that could be used to tackle all business types, and then build an ecosystem of consultants and providers that sell and implement the product for them. So you have a thing that was originally for sales people now doing the loan application and credit approval workflow at banks[1] for example.

So the tradeoff is most b2b saas products which are special-purpose tend to be easier to deploy and more directly suitable for their purpose vs salesforce being a "do-everything but maybe not that well" solution.

[1] https://www.ncino.com/ have built an entire business out of getting salesforce to do this