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).
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.
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
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…
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 )
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… :(
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).
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.
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
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…
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… :(