Isn’t building a CRM a sort of rite of passage for tech entrepreneur failures?
Not open source ones, since community will just need to fork it in the end
This article sounds a bit like a press release, but the documentation for the tool itself looks good.
“Twenty” seems a little basic so far, but “Salesforce” is such a far-reaching platform it would be hard to compete across the whole landscape. Salesforce’s CRM functionality is a lot easier to copy tho.
What are features of Salesforce that is not possible to keep in spreadsheet?
I know spreadsheet don’t scale but genuinely curious dif there is something that is not possible with excel.
everything is possible in excel… someone wrote a DOOM clone in excel.
I once worked at a company where someone hacked together a PO generating tool in excel 10 years prior and it just kind of stuck around even though the company grew into a billion dollar market cap public company
Salesforce specifically? Global availability for 1000’s of users simultaneously. While integrating with mail and VoIP services are easy ones off the top of my head. It’s extremely expensive but a hidden cost on top of that is actually configuring and maintaining it well. The initial fine-tuning for large orgs will take years for example. But if it’s done it’s actually a joy to work with, especially if you switched from a half-baked solution like a graphical shell over a FoxPro database or something.
At a previous employer of mine the helpdesk side was integrated to it and it was brilliant. All calls and mails were autoregistered and after using it for a while more and better answer templates were included. (Templates we could modify with situation specific parts as well) The template approval process was another great example as technical experts from different continents were part of a review committee to make sure only good solutions were allowed, and after that local experts could add translations of the templates.
I’m sure there are many things morally wrong with Salesforce the company, but a well implemented instance of it is a dream to work with.
Salesforce as a company ranks as one of the good ones, at least so far.
I think the more valuable features of a platform like Salesforce are the WYSIWYG automation builder and the fact that it’s running on someone else’s processor (cloud-based). Excel only has VBA, Macros, or writing out functions for building automation and then slows your computer down to a crawl to execute them.
CRM is “customer relationship management” i.e. a system to manage interactions with customers such as tracking calls, marketing emails and collateral, meetings, quoting, support tickets, and more. It tracks the lifecycle/pipeline of a sale from prospecting, lead qualification and solution mapping, demos and meetings, proposals, negotiations and commitment, opportunity win/loss, license generation, onboarding, renewals, and a ridiculously huge number of other things.
It’s not just tracking the numbers but giving you a centralised system that all other business operations can hook into so you’ve a single source of truth about customer state so that various other operations can be triggered.
When you’ve hundreds of sales people, numerous systems, marketing people, support teams, and more all reading and writing to the same CRM system, if that “system” was a spreadsheet, you’d be constantly deadlocking and race conditioning the hell out of it, not to mention how absurdly huge that file would become with all that historical data (since a big part of CRM is also projections and other analyses across all the data you have).
It’s a well-known problem in the upper management that they only understand Excel.
I’ve seen inventories, statistical calculations, databases, project plans, calendars, address books, password management and even presentation slides done in Excel.
