this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2024
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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.
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.
Obligatory
The Williams Formula 1 team managed everything in Exce until this year. The new team principal was stunned at how outdated their systems were and moved everything to more modern systems. The transition caused some major problems with inventory near the beginning of the season though. They didn't have enough replacement parts for a single crash. Hopefully they can make better progress now with the newer systems.
TL;DR; A CRM is what makes all your interactions with companies so fucking terrible these days, like programmers now everyone’s got a ticket they just want to close out.
Honestly, it’s very likely just Salesforce since that cantankerous, janky beast is so easy to use poorly.
At it's core, Salesforce is basically a database. You can create custom objects (tables) and fields (columns) tailored to your business' needs to store anything and everything. But you can't just easily replace it with a database because they have tons of layers of automations and workflows built on top to make it insanely user friendly: Customer sends an email and it's automatically logged and tickets opened, sales person has a call and can create quotes and they are automatically sent to the correct people for approvals, managers can get access to accounts managed by their team but not the entire company, etc. It's the "works out of the box but still let's you customize them" business process automations and UI that make Salesforce what it is.
You can even hook it up to your PBX and route calls depending on the number recognised and let the agent responding to the call read the customer data right as they answer. Tbh, a good CRM (there are good alternatives) is absolutely worth it
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.
I've worked in sales for 25 years and I have yet to encounter this mythical "well implemented salesforce instance".
Fair enough, though from my use case, which was mostly support, it worked fantastic.
Salesforce as a company ranks as one of the good ones, at least so far.
I honestly don't know. Just figured that if I see them on Formula 1 cars with other despicable companies they most likely are horrible too.
I know that they started a lot of philanthropic corporate efforts and encourage companies they work with to follow suit. Their CEO has also been vocal on LGBTQ+, abortion, and gender pay gap issues.
Well that's cool at least.
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.
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
I made a poc for a company that wanted to replace the way they programmed their pick and place robots that were powered by... Excel.
( the excel made an connection to the plc and wrote the data. It took 30+ minutes, while the poc took less than 3s xD )
That must have been terribly satisfying.
I'm sure the workbook still exists somewhere, though, 'just in case'. And someone argued that the new way is much less accessible than the workbook.
Sadly, it was just a proof of concept, writing random bits the size of the actual data to the plc. We swore it would result with the project being assigned to our company, but the other company's project manager quit soon after and we lost all contact with the company.. :(
Wrote excels that controlled building automation and heat exchanger settings, collected water and electricity meter data automatically and created bills ready to print and mail to tenants.
That was about quarter century ago.
Excel is a dev environment for us folks who aren't 100% sure what a dev environment actually is.
I've at least evolved to the point that I know better options exist, and higher ups should talk to the people who know what those options are and how they can leveraged. Those people are busy, though, so the cycle continues...