SFDC is the best of the best. People complain because as sales people any admin work is not directly making us money and we like to complain. As an IC you really shouldn’t spend much time in there, It’s just to manage your pipeline and put notes in.

Anyone saying “salesforce sucks” is a moron. I’ve used dynamics, sugar, zendesk, oracle (if that counts) and a homegrown piece of shit. Everyone grumbles about their CRM, but salesforce is by far the gold standard. Don’t be petty.

Salesforce is amazing, if it is Implemented and used correctly

I just started at a company which relies on SF *heavily*. Think entire customer and partner management. It is an incredibly robust tool and coming from an org that didn’t use it, it is invaluable.

It’s a part of most technical sales jobs, and you just have to deal with doing data entry which is a pia. People just like to complain about having to do work.

Salesforce is a highly capable system but is not really set up for anything right out of the box so if your organization doesn’t have a strong idea of what processes should look like or a competent manager discovering and constructing the workflows in the system then the implementation of Salesforce will reflect the lack of cohesion in your organization and the system will be nothing but a pain in the ass for your entire career. It’s garbage in garbage out to an even greater extent than most other CRMs. The issues you should anticipate? Who could possibly predict. I’ve seen tons, but the worst implementations generally suffer general disconnection between workflows despite the fact that the system should have them connected. If any of your training includes “email xyz person when you do abc in Salesforce” then they fucked your system up.

It's slow like just like hubspot. It depends on the admin who set it up too ect. I hate it but data and managers like it cause it's easy to make reports and stalk employees with

The whole “no software” crap they used to brag about sucks. In lots of situations I need to access a CRM but can’t if I’m not connected to the internet. They need a thick client with their thin client. Dashboards are miserable, reports are a pain, and it’s clunky and honestly straight garbage. From an ownership standpoint good luck leaving sales force with your data without a whole lot of taxes to pay to sales force on the way out to get your data. They bill their crap as a knowledge management solution but it’s crap. Marc Benioff is just (allegedly in my opinion) awful. I could keep going all day.

usually the person who sets it up for the company and all of the parameters that come with it has no idea what’s actually useful to the sales team doing the work and responsible for the integrity of the data

Working for them sucks, but as a crm it’s the best

Salesforce OOTB can ruin a salesperson’s experience. And if a company buys it just for the sake of having a marquee CRM, without going through consulting and testing with users, then that company doesn’t have the right to complain if leadership can’t get the info they want.

SFDC can be the best of the best. It 150% depends on implementation and who is driving. Is it 'the board'? You're going to have a bad time. Is it someone other than sales? You're going to have a bad time. Is it sales? You're most likely going to have a bad time. Key points of failure: 1) Unrealistic timelines. SFDC often estimates your timeline. Your org will ask them to do it in half that. SFDC will concede. It won't work. there will be issues. 2) Your organization doesn't know what they want. Are we measuring new logos? ARR? MRR? When everyone is asking for different things, nothing gets done and you get a half baked system. 3) When we have failure from the above, it rolls over to everything else. There ends up being no automation towards IC tasks, reports are useless, data is all worthless and the end result is lots of extra time and clicks to deliver meaningless data. SFDC is NOT for more organizations. 95%+ of all sales orgs could suffice on just drive+sheets because most of them barely tap into the power of SFDC. I've been apart of 3 SFDC conversions now. They've all left us worse off than our previous CRM. Half baked, broken systems that require more of my time than the previous system to tell me less about my deals that I previously had.

Your feud with Salesforce will be as unique as your fingerprint. Come back to the post in a year and share your story 😂

I'm sure this is just a company thing, but our Salesforce is insanely slow. To the point that I have workarounds to add things on the fly, because the actual site is so slow it takes 20 minutes to create an opportunity. Could this vary company to company? Our whole sales floor has complained about it, but management just says they don't know how they can make it faster. We switched to lightning and you have to get an exception to use old school, which works way faster than lightning from what I can see.

As many others have said, Salesforce is the best. However, it is not the best out of the box, especially if you are a medium or large business who just thinks they can sign in for the first time and have it work flawlessly. You need your employees to understand (and use) the software, from the intern to the CEO (if applicable), and while you may not need a full time administrator, you certainly need a salesforce expert on your staff to solve problems and the like. So when I hear people say “salesforce sucks” they probably should have actually said “the way salesforce was implemented at my company sucks.”

Pretty sure it’s the norm to hate one’s given CRM, because it is the main back office task. I’ve worked with a few and SFDC is the most robust IMO. Where the devil resides is how granular your employer expects you to be…. I loved it as a tool to keep track of next actions on slow burn opportunities, but I would have hated having to log every call or email.

My company used Oracle's Siebel up until 2020. You couldn't even use the back button.. so I will take SFDC ANY DAY!!!

Salesforce is the best of the best. People talking shit are likely too dumb to use it right or there companies are too cheap to properly build out the system.

Perhaps this is coming from people who find Salesforce 'clunky / confusing / complicated' (which are most often what I hear). SF was the pioneer of CRMs and in my opinion, the gold standard in sales orgs. It has everything. Trailhead is a really great training resource which I don't think is utilized enough by SF users. Some people just jump in and expect to know everything - it isn't like that. HubSpot is much more that.

SF is awesome, whoever is complaining is either not educated enough on it, or does not like the fact that they have to do the extra work they would have to do with any other CRM anyways. To this day I have not really run into a solution that I needed to implement that wasn't doable with SF.

HubSpot does not scale nearly as much or as robust as Salesforce can be. We use Salesforce and Dynamics 365 (2 different companies). I personally like Dymanics more, does the same, cost less. Both are easy to find support for. Most complaints come from a poorly designed implementation. Salesforce and Dynamics are basically a toolbox. It’s only as good as what you build with it. HubSpot is entry level in comparison, it also require less end user configuration to be useful out of the box. There comes a point where a company can outgrow a product. So keep that in mind as you grow or plan to scale.

Biggest issue I've come across is it not recognizing duplicate accounts. For example not flagging another rep working an account that was the same exact name as one I was about to close, but all caps. There are duplicate checks in place but they're not foolproof.

Going from Pipedrive, Hubspot to Salesforce is awful experience for me. I think we have more fields in our salesforce implementation than employees. In our sales team we need 5 field to use. Opportunity Name, Product Type, Notes, Stage, Price Book. Each time to enter a new Opp or update, Im 50/50 will it work and I not get an error. This new feature "ServiceCloud" is supposed to be the single source of truth for everything but of course - people are cutting and pasting info out into PPT and slack because of complexity trying to find any data. reports are a joke and not useable.

I like Salesforce classic, not a fan of “the lightening experience” unless I’m building out new leads

Excellent and it can do a shit ton. It’s the best. The biggest problem is companies not spending the time and money to customize it to their needs. When you buy basic salesforce you’re buying a customizable powerhouse. It’s not something you want to run out of the box. Most of the complaints come from a shitty and half assed setup. My first experience with salesforce was exactly that, a half assed and shitty setup. My current company has it customized in a way that it’s extremely useful.

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If you don't have a good design to fit your specific business needs, then I'd anticipate people complaining. I'm a Salesforce consultant and I usually improve the usability and value for clients by a significant margin compared to the out-of-the-box functionality, which I'd personally consider almost useless other than tracking contacts, businesses, opportunities, and tasks. That may be all some companies need, but I've built entire systems to optimize these functions and other complex business processes including expenses, commissions, logistics, shipping, staffing, project management, etc.

What apps do you suggest to add-on to SF? I use Veloxy which is great and would be interested in learning about others.

New hires that come from places where they had SF with every suite and Microsoft integration are literally the most annoying employees. I swear they’re better at selling me SF than our product.

Sales Force is a CRM and has a lot of potential. In my experience each company develops the software specifically to them. They also rename it and would rather you use that name and never mention "salesforce". What it boils down to is the build out and workflow. Often times the salesforce solution will condense the need for so many systems. If you understand the basics of social media, you should be fine. Good luck with the new software. I am sure you'll learn to navigate it fine!

There is nothing I hate more in this world than Salesforce. It’s redundant, all input is manual and the majority of the fields are pointless.

are there any good youtube videos explaining how to use sales force?

A lot of what you're talking about can be explained by the fact that the client isn't willing to pay for those things. I work for a consultancy, and we very rarely provide documentation, we deploy using change sets or packages (unless it's a particularly large project with multiple developers etc.), and I'm often putting in workarounds or skipping better practice functionality after advising the clients because they won't pay for that. Admittedly, things like no code coverage and 'textbook' consultants and developers who don't have enough real world experience are an issue in a lot of consultancies - and that wouldn't fly where I work. But usually clients get what they pay for, as they go for the lowest bid. Working as a consultant is very different to being an in-house resource. You're often working on multiple projects at a time, all of your time is billable against the project and so there is less time to invest in making everything perfect. Most of the time we're aiming for an MVP solution to get the client up and running and hand it over to them to continually improve, or come back to us for another phase. So whilst I do feel your pain (I too have worked in house and experienced all the things your talking about), if a consultancy adheres to all of those practices they will generally charge more as it takes more time, and therefore will be outbid by lower rate consultancies as the clients are not willing to pay for those things (because they don't understand why they're important). Hence why the better consultancies are more picky over their clients.

Long answer short, this is what you get with consultants. The issue isn’t necessarily the fault of the consultants, but really that the model is generally a broken one. First, who hires consultants? Those that don’t want to usually pay what should be paid. These same people make the key decisions along the way, ensuring that economics trump quality development. Second, consultants work piecemeal. Don’t expect a unified architecture. Their work is ad-hoc, even when they say it’s not. Third, they say yes. You want something absurd? Can they get paid for it? Many will take the money and build something they know will fail, because that’s what was asked and paid for. Can’t really blame them. I have to sometimes do this internally whether or not I like it. The symptoms you’re seeing are the norm. It’s the sign of a broken model, but it’ll keep being used because it allows business leaders to get quick wins on the cheap, which is how they tend to get paid.

Implementation partner (IP) dev here. There are two main problems with IP companies: ​ 1. Trying to reduce costs, by introducing junior developers as middle developers (sometimes as senior) to the client, while leaving a code quality job on senior dev shoulders (if a senior dev is even in the project). 2. The client not willing to pay a single more euro for anything other, then they requested. ​ Usually, it is a lesser combination of both, so the resulting solution is usually not perfect, but good enough based on what we can achieve given the client's budget and quality of the developers. Working in the same company for 5 years I thought that was the case for most of the IPs, god was I wrong. Some of the clients that came to us with small fixes actually needed a whole org overhaul, since what they got from another IP was awful. There was one client that got ridiculously ripped by a famous IP, wen to us and we had to start over from the very beginning. ​ All of the problems you described are very real, and it feels like they're not that many companies that genuinely try to produce quality code, rather than try to milk the client. The dev in IP is getting hourly pay, and the payment doesn't correlate with the code quality - so why bother writing more, right? ​ Partially, you can blame salesforce, since getting dev1 cert is a piece of cake (and in some places you are already considered a dev once you get cert), partially it's IPs fault, for trying to maximize income by introducing less qualified devs. In my experience, the code quality is purely in senior dev's hands - unless you push and control everyone's code, you won't get any quality.

The formula field for 18 character ID (or casesafe ID) is invaluable for those who run reports and perform VLOOKUPS on Id as VLOOKUP is not case sensitive and 15 character ids exported by reports are not.

I’m a Salesforce consultant and I can answer most of this from client experience. So it all comes down to money. I am by no means an expert at Salesforce but I make it a point to spend time researching best practices and I consider the full implementation before suggesting any builds and fixes to the clients immediate problems. Why do I do this? Because I’m a senior consultant. I have become senior because I spent time learning and understanding the platform and my clients needs. So I was rewarded with a promotion. And now? Well now the clients won’t pay for me. Instead of paying for me or one of my architects, they pay for inexperienced BAs or consultants. And it is always like that. Last week I delivered a CPQ build and I was asked to only spend in total 1/4th of the time as our consultant. Problem is, our consultant had zero experience with CPQ and had no idea what to do. The client gets what they pay for, and of course they then complain about the result. It’s a frustrating cycle. Additionally - and a lot of people will probably take this very wrong but this is what I have experienced: The clients also don’t want to pay for European developers (we are European based). Instead they want to use our Indian team because, well, they are much cheaper. We have some incredibly good Indian people in our team - we have actually invested in moving them to our country so they can work client site. But then of course they are too expensive. So client only wants offshore developers who are never on-site. And also, the request to keep them as cheap as possible continues, and so it continues as BAs and consultants. Language barriers, difference in time schedules, differences in culture and a complete lack of experience and seniority... and then you get projects, that can’t lift off. Builds that don’t follow best practices. Unhappy clients. And (not surprisingly) unhappy consultants. It is of course easy for me to point fingers at the clients but I am so tired of hearing people complaining about the consultants. It all comes down to the price. And for some reason, these huge transformational projects always have to save money on experience.

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We’re hip deep in probably a €2.5mil, 3 year consulting project, that should be 40k and 6 weeks. Buuut, the project manager is uni friends with the consultant’s ceo, the organisation has zero technical aptitude (no it director, despite a global footprint) and more money than god. They aren’t as bad as you’ve described, and most of the partners that I’ve worked with previously haven’t been that bad. However I’d stand up an internal team any day of the week over getting an implementation specialist in.

Much of this comes down to the client. I currently am on a project with many of your above complaints. We don't have a lot of code so we aren't too deep into the world you're talking about, but even our basic change management/devops process is a mess. I try to enforce sandbox usage but their own admins will just build in prod or our UAT environment. I can call it out as much as I want, but it never changes. So when you live in the change set world, you just wind up with out of sync environments and the inevitable problems that arise from that. For overall build, when your advice is repeatedly ignored and you're expected to crank out MVP after MVP or that POC you made for a demo now is going to prod because they demand it, you get things like unscalable processes, redundant fields, etc. Often it comes down to the SOW. If there isn't something specifically calling out documentation as a deliverable, it is unlikely to happen. Not because it isn't something we want to do, we just have no time to do it. I often find the client has no documentation of their own processes, so we also are talking about documenting their process, and our technical solution. Documentation is one of my pet peeves as I hate not having it, but I'm also not working extra hours for free to give you it. Many companies pay for consultants and feel that if new functionality is not delivered every sprint (for some literally something new in prod every DAY) then they're getting ripped off. Rather than having a slightly slower, properly documented, scalable solution built, they want quick wins that just get forgotten about and increase tech debt. I hate it, but I also want to eat and pay rent, so I pick my battles of when to try and push back on awful ideas. Almost everything I push back against these days we wind up doing anyways, so the cycle continues. It goes both ways, there are also bad consultancies out there. I worked for a horrible one that just underbid like crazy and most clients were unhappy that their work quality was bad when their "SA" was really just a BA with 6 months total Salesforce experience.

Reading through the issues makes me think people are finding the wrong partner. If you are looking for the cheapest partner, you will get the cheapest result. The extremely large partners will do some of the role switching you are alluding to, which can be expensive and inefficient Overall my consultants deliver consistent high quality projects for clients and make it right if we have any misses. My team is more certified with more experience, which means less profitability, but more successful work. I think it is important for there to be a clear expectations from both teams with a clear set of requirements. Consultants should bring both business/industry expertise along with a team of people to create awesome technical solutions. If you are not receiving that, then maybe the business needs to evaluate their selection criteria and understand what each partner can bring.

Consultants only work well if the company has the skills to make it work well - AND is willing to pay the price. Sounds like the companies you report this from were missing one or the other factors, or maybe both.

There’s a saying that rings true in the consultant world, fast, cheap and good. Pick two.

I'm someone that has been a Technical Architect, Tech Lead, Sr. Dev, etc for some time now. I've worked for several years in house and several years at a consultancy firm. I've helped design contracts and statements of work for clients at a consultancy firm and I have helped revise them when I worked in house. Here is the problem: Clients cutting corners to save money. When I design my initial proposal as a a consultant I add in all the stuff you're complaining about not having: Senior dev/architect oversight Documentation Test scripts Version control CI/CD automation Post-Deployment support etc Then what happens is the clients see what that costs and they say, "We could save 300k here if we just cut out the dev lead, why do we even need a lead? We could get two developers for the price of one lead." Or they say, "Why do we need a CI/CD pipeline setup? Salesforce provides change sets to avoid that process." Then because the consultancy firm still wants the business from the client, they strip those things out at their request and you get a less than stellar end result. Sometimes exceptional devs will still do those things even under the extremely tight timelines they get roped into, but I can't really blame them if they don't a lot of the time. Timelines get stripped down to as bare bones as possible so often it makes it nearly impossible just to produce an end product (this is typically more of a problem as smaller firms, not the larger ones in my experience). Also if you go to the more "boutique" consulting firms that can offer you lower prices... you get what you pay for. I worked for one of them for 6 months, they put me on 11 clients at the same time. I was working 100+ hours a week and every client wanted to kill me because all my work was less than adequate due to being split so many ways. When I worked in house for a few years I tried to advise to keep those "less attractive" expensive things on a consultancy firms contract. I provided numbers and statistics on how in the long run it would be better. I showed them intrinsic value numbers that were as accurate as I could make them, but nearly 100% of the time I was denied by the business arm investing in it because they didn't think it was important and they wanted that money for other things. It's a flawed system... and I hate to say it but if you go with one of the larger consultancy firms the only reason you get a bad product is because the business cut corners in one way or another. Sometimes I will interview 40-50 devs before I staff one on a project at the giant firm I'm at now. I quality control everything as much as I can to make sure the absolute best product is produced for the client. We have so many devs to choose from between our staff and contractors we'll never put bad developers on the project unless explicitly told to do so by a client (staff with only jr devs or something to save money).

I could write a tomb explaining the systemic issues but I’ll just make two notes: 1) people complaining about cheap clients are mostly full of it. The consultancy is making 50-60% profit. It’s the aggressive profiteering that’s causing you to not have an architect on the project, not a “cheap customer”. 2) most salesforce developers are bad. I’ve interviewed dozens of Salesforce developers with 5-10 years of experience with no concept of clean code, design patterns, and sometimes even SFDC best practices. 3) many project managers and architects are spread across 3-4 projects, which means that they’re going to half ass everything.

I can see a lot of people are already weighing in here and I can imagine this thread is going to become a hotbed of accusations and counter-accusations. However, I think you have some fair points. Unit tests are often under-attended. They're certainly never written before the feature implementations on my projects. Happy to talk about why if you'd like. But you're right that salesforce devs have, historically, not been S/W engineers. They don't need the fancy design patterns on systems that don't have long code execution paths. And with triggers starting off static, there's a tendency to just create more static methods. I come from a server-side java background where statics were frowned up on severely, but that's a different world. When a trigger + trigger helper is the extent of your code execution path, then insisting on OOD is unnecessary. As for your last question, I will often create legacy_id__c fields on objects if I'm migrating data from an old salesforce system (or any external system that it might be useful to trace back to). Finally, it's always easy to re-implement a project faster and cheaper than the original implementation. Always. Never seen a project I couldn't re-deliver in half the time. All the requirements are stable. No more scope creep. You've got a reference implementation to work from.

In my opinion, most clients don’t want to pay for a good architect. Most consulting firms want to employ their cheapest consultants on projects to have a good profit. I noticed the problem on larger projects at my company is that no one wants to understand a clients solution end-to-end, which is usually the architects job. People don’t realize just because you’re building and deploying one piece of the solution doesn’t mean you have to understand the other pieces. News flash they’re all connected in some way. :-)

To simply put it: yes. There's a lot of bad consultants out there and they are useless. ​ I have been working for a small Salesforce-focused consulting start up for a year and a half. We are based in Denver, CO. My boss was one of the first 500 ever certified Salesforce professionals ever. He's been working within Salesforce since 2003. And between him and his business partner who started our company, they have almost 35 years of running Salesforce projects (implementations, integrations, optimizations, custom solutions, app development, API/APex, you name it) across various industries. The reason he started his own consulting company 8 years ago is because of all the piss-poor implementations he had to clean up over the years as an internal lead for Salesforce ecosystems. The #1 thing we try to do to put ourselves above the rest of the field is doing exactly what you're talking about: providing documentation, tracking every project in Jira, being completely transparent with the client, and the biggest thing: spending a lot more time up front in the beginning stages of the project. Our design phase usually takes far longer than most others. We truly want to get a large scale view of how the systems are running now and what exactly the client wants it to do differently. Then we lay out a plan for the technical changes as to mitigate any re-work that tends to come at the end of these types of projects. The ultimate goal is to provide value for the client.

I understand you can't tell us who they are but are they on AppExchange ?[https://appexchange.salesforce.com/consulting](https://appexchange.salesforce.com/consulting) ​ If so, how many stars, certified experts and reviews do they have on AppExchange?

Outside of slightly faster solution on issues that are salesforce internal and the accelerators, nothing to be honest.

Accelerators are nothing more than a very thinly veiled marketing attempt. Last time we scheduled one that would be 3 days. Pretty much 90% of the group didnt even attend the the 3rd day because the previous 2 were just long sales pitches trying to sell us on this & that & the the other thing.

The response time has already been mentioned, but I would look into Accelerators to see if that’s what you are looking for in terms of your learning and productivity. You should also get your AE to connect you with someone to discuss what kinds of engagements you can expect. Premier also gives access to specialists and architects that could help you with best practices (not implementation). Premier is dev support, faster response time on tickets, accelerators and success guidance (pool of experts you can engage on best practices) (Disclaimer, I work at SFDC)

Depending on your level, it could be helpful or not. Once you get good, they’re more overhead than anything. They are extremely slow, and you’re going to have better luck with google and other forums. If I was just starting out, I would consider them.

Premier support is not worth it. The technical support team is good for basics, but anything out of the box forget it.

If you already have your admin cert, you’re better off finding a mentor on the Trailblazer community and joining the discord. Accelerators and Success Managers are just a way for Salesforce to learn your internal business processes so they can try and sell you more features. I’ve been down that road with them, it’s a waste of time. Premier+ Support is a joke most of the time. They can only “review up to 200 lines of code”, the courtesy admins are useless unless you spend an inordinate amount of time spelling out exactly what you want them to do, and the actual help desk people seem to be the same folks from standard support, and they usually don’t solve anything faster for me than standard support would (usually a couple of days). My advice: Use that money to get another Partial sandbox instead. You’ll learn far more from playing around in that than you would from Premier+ support. Also, try to find a local SFDC meetup near you. In my experience, other admins love to brainstorm.

May I also ask, how are you currently getting support? Do you like the support you are getting from Salesforce? If your company can afford premier support, go for it. If not, then there is no point in getting premier support. I worked with premier support and I certainly did not get proper responses from them. I had to rely on externals forums (Stackexchange, Reddit, Trailblazer Community etc.) to get what I wanted.

We have premium support and while response time is pretty quick the technical knowledge of the agents is really poor. I recently did one of the trailhead academy courses and the other 6 participants were Salesforce support agents. Their level of general knowledge and initiative was honestly shocking. Suddenly it clicked why support is so bad. We are a very large client of Salesforce. We have had complaints for months about the level of support and they have done nothing.

Most of what you will need help with they cannot/will not help you with. The accelerators are basically alternatives to just reading whitepapers and doing trailhead. Save the money and invest it in the team and development