This is the same story with Salesforce. I am building a new age quoting solution (CPQ) at my latest startup and talk to businesses of various stages regularly. Our biggest "competitor" out there right now is Salesforce CPQ. There is not one person that I have met so far who has not said that onboarding, configuring and then successfully using Salesforce CPQ is a painful process. What SF CPQ does in weeks, sometimes months, we (and our contemporaries) are able to accomplish in hours. And yet the huge entry barrier exists for startups like us is because SFDC has got the CRM market completely covered. Just because they are able to do CRM well, they are then able to build a walled garden around it.
they are then able to build a walled garden around it.
Really what it boils down to is you are completely outmatched on the sales and marketing side. The decision makers have already worked with the sales exec and that relationship has been cultivated over countless steak dinners, expensive bottles of wine, and boondoggles disguised as "technical education."
And given they already have the tentacles in these organizations, all they need to do is turn the knob to zero for their <insert_shitty_complimentary_product> and practically give it to your potential customer for free. Now the CIO looks like a real winner to the CFO/CEO, the relationship moves forward, maintenance contracts get renewed, and the back slapping continues.
Is everything in Salesforce land like this? I worked with a nonprofit and we tried to implement their nonprofit solution, and it was exactly like that.
One of my current clients was trying to onboard one of their industry specific solutions that was only available through a channel/partner engagement. Decided to add SFMC into the mix but it was out of scope for the partner so she sent me the documentation. A 400 page PDF of absolute garbage which was impossible to implement because it was filled with references to missing information, deprecated or removed features, and bizarre directives to do things that weren’t even sensible or possible. Ended up scrapping the entire project after four months and six digits in billables to Salesforce and the partner with nothing to show for it.
Unfortunately yes. The fact that you cannot do anything without a partner is truly mind boggling. From what I have learned so far, you end up paying anywhere between 1x-3x of the licence cost to the partner just to get it implemented and make small changes here and there. It's crazy how high the TCO of this software is in this day and age.
Reminds me of the spam text generated for linkfarms and such --- probably because they use the same algorithm. It gives the same "uncanny valley" feeling of looking like it was written by a human, but upon closer inspection becomes much less believable.
Then again, some of them don't look "Markovian" enough and appear to be verbatim real article titles.
You should leave. But give them time to find a replacement or mend their ways. Moreover you would not want to put the entire blame of a failed(lets hope not) product on you. Also leave only if that is the last resort. Working in startups is a great leaning experience, especially for developers. You being the some developer must be taking care of everything from ideation to execution and deployment. Very few people get to do that. But if you are unhappy with the work, the people are not nice and the product is dodgy its better to call it quits. Its not cowardice, its practical. This is not adding any value to you or them
