Why Salesforce?
Salesforce found me in 2017. One year out of university and into a career as a Commercial Credit Analyst with a bank.
This bank chose to implement Salesforce to deprecate historical, on-prem applications and provide transparency across all departments with Salesforce's cloud. I had used the application throughout college internships and I found myself chosen for the role of Admin. This meant it was my responsibility to upkeep the day to day functions of the CRM. I worked alongside a consultant group out of Chicago to tackle the migration work which took 1.5 years to complete.
I learned a lot the summer of 2017 where my first week as an Admin entailed going to the Salesforce offices in downtown Chicago to attend Admin 201 training. What a whirlwind for a girl from the cornfields of Indiana. My career in Salesforce has opened up the world to me as databases run everything in modern times. Salesforce is the premier, low-code database application on the market. There are others like HubSpot that can support more mid-market business.
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If your business already has engineering resources for a proprietary application, I would encourage you to have them develop a custom CRM too. This would be way cheaper than paying for the Salesforce premium. I believe the original intention of Salesforce’s Cloud was to remove systems from traditional IT and allow business users hands on control of CRM features. It eliminated miscommunication and increased deliverable timelines.
I believe it makes the most sense to continue with this original idea as I don’t find Salesforce to be a good development platform. Salesforce is just AWS with a pretty user interface and special declarative metadata capabilities. AWS can provide these database features for way cheaper, while you would have to invest in engineering resources.
The general principle is ‘the more you put in the more you get out.’ Salesforce is for those who do not want to invest in engineering resources to support custom applications, but then you have to work within what is available from Salesforce. What are you looking to put into a database? What might you get out of it from tracking your own activities?
With love, Namaste — Abbey
