[tiffanyh]

80/20 rule.

What most startups / new products fail to realize is that you can get 80% of your needed CRM capabilities just from a shared Google Sheet.

But that last 20% is brutally difficult and long.

It might be:

- sales rep compensation

- customer billing

- contracts management

- eSign

- usage reporting

And much much more.

Salesforce has most of this. And for what they don’t have, they created their platform so 3rd party’s can add it.

You’re not competing in having a “CRM alternative”.

You’re competing on having that long tail of 20% other functionality that’s core and critical.

[codegeek]

You are also competing against a beast that locks in multi year contracts and is embedded so much within a company's ecosystem that it is almost impossible to replace them. Sorta like JIRA/Confluence.

[pantulis]

Sorta like Oracle, I'd add.

[listenallyall]

> You’re competing on...

Purchase decisions for products like these are almost always at the C-level. Very rarely do they actually understand the details of each product's feature set, especially the deepest 20%. You're competing on your ability to convince that decision maker to commit to a new product, as opposed to "nobody ever get fired for buying IBM (Salesforce in this case)" syndrome.

[kube-system]

It's the same thing, by proxy. They may not know the details of that 20%, but they can be comfortable knowing it is capable of accomplishing it because of its use at other orgs.

[samanator]

Salesforce is slow (the lwc frontend I mean), and has legacy (aka governer) limits. E.g. you can't have synchronous code run for more than 10 seconds, you can't update more than 200 records in a standard transaction, the query language has only very basic joins, and much more.

If you can build a crm without these limitations, why not get your 80% without the limits?

[altdataseller]

Because Salesforce is already tightly integrated into many companies workflows, and already has incredible mindshare? And for the majority of conpanies, those limitations are just nuisances, not dealbreakers?

[samanator]

Mind share isn't necessarily an issue when you build a platform based on standard tools (e.g JavaScript, graphql, etc.).

In my experience those limitations are not just nuisances,they are expensive. They require a lot of custom work and and less reliable since you're leaving what's well known and supported. For example, many companies hit the "100 active concurrently scheduled jobs" limit very quickly. Then they need their own scheduler, or deal with the consequences of stale data.

Those limitations are not just nuisances, they change real business workflows.

Yes, there are definitely good business justifications for choosing Salesforce, but I definitely think there is real business value to be found in improved CRM systems.