Platform Not Product
Summary
Salesforce excels as a customizable, reliable, and secure platform, especially valuable for nonprofits through programs like Power of Us, but its standalone products often fall short in quality and value. The article critiques Salesforce products like professional services, backup, forms/surveys, Data Cloud, and AI offerings such as Agentforce, suggesting many are either mediocre or not worth the cost compared to third-party options. It challenges readers to reconsider paying for industry-specific products like Nonprofit Cloud and Education Cloud, advocating a focus on leveraging the platform itself or alternative solutions. Salesforce professionals can take away a clearer distinction between platform capabilities versus packaged products, guiding more cost-effective and strategic Salesforce implementations.
Takeaways
- Distinguish between Salesforce platform features and separately charged products.
- Evaluate third-party tools before committing to Salesforce products like backup or forms.
- Be cautious about paying for complex Industry Solutions without clear benefit.
- Leverage Salesforce platform flexibility for customizations over default product features.
- Understand that Salesforce AI offerings like Agentforce may still be immature and less effective.
Salesforce makes a very good platform but not very good products. There, I said it. Some people might accuse me of heresy. [Maybe I9m jeopardizing my partner status or my membership in the MVP program.] Feel free to disagree with me, of course! Obviously, I9m going to need to define "product" because in the world of software engineering just about everything is "a product," in the sense that there is a "product manager" in charge of it. But most of those things that product managers work on are what you and I would call a "feature." (I guess "feature manager" didn9t sound like a good title?) I have no beef with plenty of Salesforce features1re what make up the platform. I think Salesforce9s features are great, from reports and dashboards , to the powerful declarative automation tool Flow, to user access, permissions, and record sharing. It9s the features that I group together under the heading "the Salesforce platform" and frequently endorse.