r/technology
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u/jacobhong
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Feb 28 '23
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Salesforce has been reportedly paying Matthew McConaughey $10 million a year to act as a 'creative adviser' despite laying off 8,000 employees last month Business
https://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-reportedly-paying-mcconaughey-millions-despite-layoffs-2023-25.7k
u/gullydowny Feb 28 '23
They hired him to do commercials. This is news? “Creative advisor” sounds less insulting than “dancing monkey”, that’s all
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u/5kUltraRunner Mar 01 '23
I work for a big company that has A-list celebrities doing our commercials and it's insane how much budget the PR guys get compared to the rest of the company honestly. But yeah this really isn't news at all.
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Mar 01 '23 edited Mar 01 '23
It’s insane how much of a difference an extremely famous person endorsing your product makes. What does he know about Saleforce? He would never be a user. Why does Matt Damon care about Crypto?
I’ll trust Magnus Carlson when he tells me the best chess timer, not a movie star advising about tech.
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u/BigBeagleEars Mar 01 '23
I’ve always trusted Dr. Mantis Toboggan to tell me what condoms to use
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u/ISAMU13 Mar 01 '23
Why does Matt Damon care about Crypto?
Because fortune favors the bold.
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u/Pzychotix Mar 01 '23
Matt Damon passed on Avatar, which would've paid him $250 million.
He gotta make that up somewhere.
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u/AllModsAreL0sers Mar 01 '23
If chess ever became a cash cow, Magnus would cash in with the rest of them and use his niche celebrity status to push a line of cheaply made, shiny chess timers that he personally doesn't recommend or use. Something similar happened recently with Faker, regarded as the best League of Legends player, coming out with his own Razer mouse. He doesn't use it.
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u/PM_ME_GAY_STUF Mar 01 '23
Top tier chess players make bizarre bank, though it is very top heavy. Magnus used to have a Rolex sponsorship iirc
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u/Spork_the_dork Mar 01 '23
very top heavy. I think Hikaru said some time ago that really only like the top 10 in the world can actually make a living from it alone. The rest do something else on the side, like streaming or youtube.
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u/BB-r8 Mar 01 '23 edited Mar 01 '23
Chess has been evolving into a cash cow over the last 3 years. The largest chess website in the world chess.com went from 33 million users to 100 mil currently since 2020. Magnus has a chess company that he used to aquire more chess companies. Chess.com bought Magnus’s company last year with at least a 8 figure valuation. Dude is making way better moves than pushing cheap products.
Edit: 8 figure not 10 it’s been a long day
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u/ent3ndu Mar 01 '23
10 figures, are you counting cents or something? It was under 90 mil.
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u/QuietThunder2014 Mar 01 '23
Thing is what he does or doesn’t know about Salesforce isn’t even the biggest issue here. Do companies really believe that if they pay him 10 million a year he will generate 11 million a year in added revenue? And that’s their best return on investment? How many people really say “We’ll I was going to go with another company, but man if Mcconaughey says to buy Salesforce then I’m 100% onboard!” I honestly don’t know how much of advertising is science and how much is a bullshit she’ll game where they are just making shit up to pretend to be the next Dom Draiper.
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u/RisingChaos Mar 01 '23
Has anyone ever been on the fence about who to bank with and chosen PNC because they spend $2mil/yr sponsoring the Pittsburgh Pirates' stadium? I think one time I read about how some large percentage of advertising is bullshit but we don't know how to tell the effective ads from the ineffective ones.
I've even wondered things like how much does Coke really need to put out a new polar bear ad every year? I feel like you've got people making art projects (guys trying to make something stick in the cultural zeitgeist), and you've got companies engaging in dick-measuring (plastering their names on sports stadiums) or virtue signaling (plastering their name on fundraisers), but very little useful marketing in advertising.
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u/QuietThunder2014 Mar 01 '23
Oof. That one stung. My wife has told me several times she choose her bank largely due to them sponsoring her favorite sports all team. Lol
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u/RisingChaos Mar 01 '23
I didn't for a long time, and I don't think I'm alone here, even realize Great American represented an insurance company and just thought Great American Ball Park was all about embodying wholesome American family values. Y'know?
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u/li_314 Mar 01 '23
Has anyone ever been on the fence about who to bank with and chosen PNC because they spend $2mil/yr sponsoring the Pittsburgh Pirates' stadium?
Yes I guarantee this has happened
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u/ThePissyRacoon Mar 01 '23
Can’t speak for salesforce, but there’s a reason A-List celebrities are paid ridiculously high sums of money for commercial endorsements. There’s great returns on high budget ads with huge names during expensive air time, it’s rarely a question on “if” it’ll work, it’s if they have the budget.
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u/nokinship Mar 01 '23
It seems weird for Salesforce because their customers are other businesses not your average consumer.
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u/monsterosaleviosa Mar 01 '23
Businesses are run by people. Here’s the thing - rich, successful business people aren’t actually any less susceptible to advertising than your average Joe. It seems like they’d be above that all, but many of them are highly impressionable. And they live in a world where image and perception means everything, so yeah. The right actor with the right appeal to them really will influence how businesses move.
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Mar 01 '23
Yes and it allows execs to get face time with him and pretend they’re friends or whatever.
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u/Bright-Ad-4737 Feb 28 '23
But this should be instructive. Being in sales is WAY more profitable than any other part of the organization outside of the C-Suite. Buffett says that if you have a offer from Wall St of being an analyst or a salesman, go into sales, because that's where the money is.
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u/SilentThunder-00 Mar 01 '23
Flip side: you can be an OK or mediocre analyst and make a career. In sales you are out of a job if you go from rockstar to dry wells for a period.
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u/pysouth Mar 01 '23
Also sales just sounds so miserable for some of us. I’m a SWE, I’d probably blow my brains out if I had to do sales. I respect our sales people a lot but I could never do it.
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u/SixPackOfZaphod Mar 01 '23
This right here. I am an extreme introvert. Been a software engineer for nearly 20 years now, worked remotely for all that time. I do well, I make enough to pay the bills and have some savings. If I had to talk to people all day long I'd have a nervous breakdown.
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u/columbo928s4 Mar 01 '23
yep. i am in sales and im good at it, i make solid money, but if i could go back and start over i'd pick a career that required more education and was more stable (doctor, lawyer, SWE). it is a stressful fucking job, and like another poster said it is very "what have you done for me lately." you simply cant ever relax and coast, ever.
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u/bombayblue Mar 01 '23
I work in a company with 250 salespeople.
80 will be gone within the year
150 make honestly average to above average tech worker salaries
15 will make executive-level pay
5 will make more than the CEO
If you can sell you can make a killing. My buddy sold the largest deal in the company last year and cleared $1m on his W-2. But a lot of people in sales don’t make an insane amount of money. It’s not this gravy train.
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u/a93H3sn4tJgK Mar 01 '23
But to be fair, 150 people making average to above average tech worker salaries with little to no formal technical training or skills is a win for them.
You can take a high school dropout and make them a salesman and they can make six-figures, that’s a win.
You take someone with an MBA and connections (via their Ivy League MBA) and they can make more than the CEO without spending 20+ years working their way up the corporate ladder.
The downside is that sales is very much a “what have you done for me lately” job. It doesn’t matter if you sold $100 million in product last year, it’s about what your numbers are this quarter.
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u/Durbanpoisonyo Mar 01 '23
Another downside of sales is that you’re in sales.
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u/a93H3sn4tJgK Mar 01 '23
One of my first jobs about 30 years ago was in sales (stockbroker). I hated it with a passion.
Our quota was 100 dials a day where we actually spoke with someone.
The math was, 100 dials a day would result in 10 warm leads per day and 10 elea leads should result in 1 new account.
So, you did 100 cold calls, then followed back up with your warm leads, and hopefully open 1 new account per day.
You think I was working for some boiler room like in the movies?
Yes and no. It was a boiler room atmosphere but this was with top tier brokerages like Smith Barney (which became Smith Barney Shearson which is now part of Morgan Stanley) and Dean Witter (now a part of Morgan Stanley).
Hats off to all the folks that stuck with it. They’re making tons of money. But I just couldn’t do it. It sucked my soul right out of my body.
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u/g00dintentions Mar 01 '23
Is this from Wolf of Wall Street
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u/bombayblue Mar 01 '23
A lot of people in sales think they are in wolf of Wall Street.
But they are in Glengarry Glen Ross and we all know it.
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u/Outside-Flamingo-240 Mar 01 '23
Coffee is for closers
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u/cougrrr Mar 01 '23
Third prize is you're fired.
This movie is such an amazing, sad bummer.
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u/zvug Mar 01 '23
Investment bankers are salesmen. At the highest level it’s all relationship-driven. The firms offer the same services, it’s just about who you know and who you trust when it comes to making a billion-dollar deal.
Analysts themselves aren’t doing that kind of work, but as they rise through the ranks to the VP/MD level, more and more of their time is spent on salesmanship.
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u/DragonRaptor Feb 28 '23
I prefer the more relaxing approach of a analyst. Money isn't everything
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u/Jarvisweneedbackup Feb 28 '23
It’s all fun and games until you make more than your bosses, they get pissy about it, and then find excuses to fuck you over
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u/mtcwby Mar 01 '23
That's a stupid boss. Most bosses have incentives that are tied to what those guys bring in.
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u/Artistic_Yam_183
Feb 28 '23
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The only tool that works at Salesforce
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u/Muuustachio Mar 01 '23 edited Mar 01 '23
Salesforce imo isn't a bad tool. It's how companies develop and use Salesforce that's trash. Our parent and child objects make no sense. And custom field names are stupid. Human errors make the Salesforce so awful
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u/RemarkableEditor26 Mar 01 '23
You know, the more I dig around in SF and look at their documentation, the more I’ve been convinced that my loathing is really only about 15% Salesforce and 85% that our company has no goddamn idea how to maximize the potential…or frankly even make adjustments.
Several of us found a pretty major issue with a feature and our SF devs or whatever the proper name for them is were like, “we have no idea how to fix this or if it can be fixed but maybe we’ll look into it in the future.”
I found the fix using Google within about ten minutes, sent it to them, and lo and behold, the issue has been magically corrected. It was literally just a checkbox they needed to toggle on.
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u/Muuustachio Mar 01 '23
Totally agree. I load data into Salesforce and query from SF. SOQL is actually a pretty versatile querying language. And there's SO much documentation. SF documentation is like known for being amazing. And the API is so easy to use.
Our SF 'tech team' is just as incompetent. So when I do run into issues it's mainly associated with them and not SF itself.
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u/arakwar Mar 01 '23
This is my exact experience.
I’m a Drupal developer. Being in the open source side of things made me used to being able to do whatever I want to. But following stabdards usually make it a ton easier to share my work and get feedback/help. So I got the habit of following documentation closely.
I only poke around in Salesforce so I can make projects we depend on move forward. And every time, I always get bullshit like “oh but that can’t be done” or “it’s complex”. And once we start a screenshare and I start asking questions they fix things in less time than they lost trying to say in 10 different ways how it couldn’t be fixed.
And when you look at average wages on job posting, those people are paid 3-4 times my wage.
I stopped being professional about this. If someone is full of shit I call it out loudly in meetings. When people try to bullshit me, I make sure they are forced to face that shit. They can fix something on my site in 2 minutes ? Here’s the control of my screenshare, do it. You can’t fix something ? Show me why, show me the error message.
The ones that are not bullshitting us and who truly understand the platform gets their chance to show their expertise, and we push to have them in charge of more stuff. And the idiots who constantly get called out lose the trust of their own team and eventually leave.
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u/xDulmitx Mar 01 '23
The problem is nobody wants to rip it all down and rebuild. You may start out with a good concept and have it fit perfectly to your current business... and then the business changes. Ohh, it is just a small change though so we can make it work without it being that bad. Then after 5 or 10 years of constant little changes everything sucks and nothing fucking works right!
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u/Perfect-District Mar 01 '23 edited Mar 01 '23
Striped down Salesforce was a good crm but I started hating it when they introduced the lightning experience. Glad the new company I am at doesn't use that shit. Half the features they added had nothing to do with my line of sales.
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u/ctothel Mar 01 '23
Salesforce might be functionally good, but I can't think of a single thing about it that isn't at least slightly annoying, slightly too slow, or both. Usually both.
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u/Eskipony Mar 01 '23
This is probably the end state of a stagnating SaaS company. No desire to improve features, just coasting on a customer's tight Integration with the core product to retain their revenue.
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u/stupsnon Feb 28 '23
If you have a problem with Salesforce hiring actors with crazy titles, I have even bigger news for you about the Fortune 1000
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u/0verstim Feb 28 '23
they hired 20-25,000 people in one year during covid, this is a correction.
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u/pmotiveforce Mar 01 '23
Yeah and $10m is like 25 to 30 employees, has nothing to do with 8k layoffs.
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u/Private-JO Feb 28 '23
I know $10 million sounds like a lot but 8,000 employees making at least $50,000 a year equals $400m in just salary.
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u/Surgeboy99 Mar 01 '23 edited Mar 01 '23
Dont forget there can be a 20% overhead costs including benefits, workspace, licenses, insurances etc. The true cost is much higher.
edit: 25-40% according to the SBA
also, $50,000 salary seems way too low for a tech giant like salesforce.
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u/DietInTheRiceFactory Feb 28 '23
And $10 million split 8,000 ways is $1,250. I hope the employees were making more than that.
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u/clubba Mar 01 '23
If you figure the average fully-loaded (salary, benefits, taxes, etc.) expense for each employee laid off was $200k then the cost savings to Salesforce was $1.6 billion. The difference between that savings and what they pay MM is about $1.6 billion. A serious rounding error of about half of one percent.
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u/mattalxdr Mar 01 '23
These kinds of headlines rely on people not thinking about it for more than 10 seconds...
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u/Gustomaximus Mar 01 '23
Also those getting annoyed at MM... he accepted easy money, who wouldn't. Its not him being a bad guy.
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u/night_owl_72 Mar 01 '23
yeah it’s a very stupid headline
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u/ric2b Mar 01 '23
The implication is not that not paying him would save all those jobs, it's that if you're going to cut the fat, maybe start with this before you do layoffs.
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u/VehaMeursault Mar 01 '23
And that doesn’t account for employer’s expenses. To pay you 10,- of salary the employer pays another 5,- or more for insurances, pension, etc.
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u/Pale_Height_1251 Feb 28 '23
$10 million is pennies compared to employing 8,000 people.
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u/OutAndABoot Feb 28 '23 edited Feb 28 '23
Yes, it turns out that advertising costs money, and you have to pay actors for acting. Shocking. $10 million is also a drop in the bucket of their operating costs. It's equivalent to $1,250 per person laid off. So it's equivalent to probably around 2% of the cost of employing all those people.
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u/rawmerow Mar 01 '23
10 million dollars isn’t what it used to be.
That’s 100 people’s 100K salary.
(I mean Im just saying)
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u/-Blixx- Feb 28 '23
It would be easy to argue that the advertising for Salesforce is 1000 times more effective than the application or training.
I see what you're getting at, but it is a painful product to implement and use.
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u/kmsc84 Feb 28 '23
$10,000,000 is 250 employees at $40k.
Or would give each of those laid off $1,250.
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u/Zobmachine Feb 28 '23
Salesforce, I worked for a company that used their software. I best described it as "the latest and greatest from information technology from 20 years ago".
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u/Biobooster_40k Mar 01 '23
My company switched to it in the last few years. Consolidated about 4 programs I personally use but our systems were crazy outdated before that so anything new is an improvement.
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u/theannotator Feb 28 '23
But it’s cloud native! /s
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u/newsreadhjw Feb 28 '23
Take that, Siebel!
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u/TheGravespawn Mar 01 '23
As someone that had to use both Siebel and Salesforce all day, every day- this made my eye twitch. I never wanna think about Siebel again.
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u/TheFotty Mar 01 '23
I still support a client who's parent company has a web platform running on Siebel and it only works in IE. Instead of fixing/modernizing, with IE being lowered into the grave, they rolled out citrix environments so people could run IE through a VM.
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u/anormalgeek Mar 01 '23
Lol, we finally retired our 20y old Siebel deployment. Felt good.
An IE dependency was the final nail on the coffin.
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u/SWithnell Feb 28 '23
That may well be true. All things are relative. I did a deal for Salesforce CRM for a FTSE100 over 15 years ago. It was 20 years ahead of its competitors! They were competing with stone age competition. I asked one of the sales guys how they were finding the new SF CRM deployment. "You'll have to prize it out of my cold dead hands mate if you want it back".
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u/SquizzOC Mar 01 '23
I work for a company that currently uses Salesforce and out of all the current CRM platforms it’s the top and has the easiest integrations into all other tools. Does it have its quirks? Sure, but compared to others, Salesforce is light years ahead.
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u/SuitcaseInTow Mar 01 '23
This sounds like it may be true and people love to hate big companies but it’s completely false. There is a good reason Salesforce dominates the CRM space. Have you ever managed a CRM for a large company? Clearly not…
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u/eandi Mar 01 '23
Yeah we migrated from hubspot to it recently. It's a beast and requires an in house ops team to just make it go brrrr but God when you build it right you get so... Efficient.
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u/RagingWalrus1394 Feb 28 '23
As a dev that works in Salesforce primarily, this comment is wildly confusing. The vast majority of people have moved to lightning and that’s about as modern as it gets. It’s got low code solutions and high code, everything is as customizable as you want it to be. There really aren’t limitations if you know how to code. Using LWCs and the lightning blueprints also provides a modern UI. Saying it’s “the latest and greatest from 20 years ago” just says you had one bad experience and now use that to reference your ill formed opinion
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u/Amazing-Steak Feb 28 '23
the problem with SF isn't the quality of the tool, it's the challenge of integrating it well.
it seems like many organizations fail which impacts its reputation.
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u/Agent00funk Feb 28 '23
We tried SF at work for a year and then ditched it.
It was a "garbage in, garbage out" scenario. It didn't integrate well into how we did things, we even hired a consultant to customize it and train us to use it. But nobody ended up using it because our ad-hoc method of doing things just worked better for us than trying to squeeze everything into SF's format. It just slowed us down and made everybody miserable for having to do extra, unnecessary steps. So we just reverted back to shouting at each other across the hall.
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u/uponhillsandvalleys Feb 28 '23
The kind of story that keeps an ERP/CRM implementation specialist up at night lol
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u/Agent00funk Mar 01 '23
I imagine it's like introducing an uncivilized tribe to toilet paper, and coming back a year later just to see it's being used as roof shingles.
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u/RagingWalrus1394 Feb 28 '23
Okay that makes more sense. Without an architect directly from salesforce, integrating with a current system can be daunting at best. That being said, if someone with the right experience and knowledge on the platform is on the project then things can go pretty well. The problem is that SF architects cost outrageous amounts of money
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u/knellbell Feb 28 '23
I find that big organisations left their Salesforce org completely unchecked for years and it just ends up being this bloated mess that no one understands.
Data architecture and architecture is so crucial but so often left behind because "MUH FEATURES!1!" .
Yes, low-code can be handy but there is a balance to be had.
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u/CatCiaoSki Mar 01 '23
Bloated mess accurately describes me and my experience with Salesforce.
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u/ktr83 Mar 01 '23
Any tool is only as good as the people or company using it. If your Salesforce is a bloated mess then that's a reflection of the business.
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u/peepeedog Feb 28 '23
Doesn’t sales force have external consulting companies that do integrations for people?
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u/anormalgeek Mar 01 '23
In my experience that is the challenge with EVERY single CRM solution. Integration is a challenge no matter what tool you're using.
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u/-Osiris- Feb 28 '23
I have about 8-10 transformation and visualization options available at my work and anything having to do with SOQL is automatically my last choice by default
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u/bubbalubdub Mar 01 '23
I’ve been working with SF for the past 7 years across many companies, and I truly think companies that use Salesforce need to invest heavily into the tool for it to be successful. Depending on the number of users, it needs a whole product team or many more. They need headcount, a large budget, and all kinds of push, encouragement, and sponsorship from the top down. Otherwise, the tool sucks and all employees hate it. I’ve been at a couple organizations now where Salesforce has made a huge difference positively in their day to day, and employees can’t live without it. Then the other 50% of companies just mess their instance(s) up, leaders don’t care, etc, and it ends up being a huge waste of money.
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u/savageo6 Feb 28 '23
Having worked there for an acquisition for a bit. I wasn't at all surprised that Salesforces internal iteration of Salesforce sucked as much balls at every other company I used it at
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u/moonman272 Mar 01 '23 edited Mar 01 '23
Lots to hate on salesforce for, but if they’re using him for ads, most companies keep a very close eye on ROAS (return on ad spend) and can see exactly how much a new campaign costs and how much money it brings in.
It’s not a matter if ads create sales, even at small companies you can very easily increase sales with advertising, it’s just usually a question of if it brings in more than the spend. Usually you want ROAS to be at least 1.2 to consider yourself net positive ($1 out brings in $1.20)
So it’s probably more likely that MM’s 10M a year brings in at least 11M in sales, rather than the company has zero marketers that know what they are doing and zero C suite folks above them looking to trim all expenses that don’t bring in money so they can claim cost savings and up their bonuses.
It just happens that what Becky in HR adds to the bottom line is much harder to quantify, so she’s much easier to let go. Ad spend is very easy to defend.
If they have a problem, it’s optics.
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u/EatBrainzGetGainz Mar 01 '23
If they got rid of him they would only have to lay off about 7700 people
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Feb 28 '23 edited Feb 28 '23
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u/munchi333 Mar 01 '23
Honestly the average is probably even more than $100k. Lots of tech jobs in HCOL areas.
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u/SashimiRick Feb 28 '23 •
"That's what I love about Salesforce, man. The workforce gets smaller, my paychecks stay the same."