That's already happening, and it's causing further fragmentation, so now companies are investing in "IPaaS" tools to merge their data. Which creates even more non-transferable knowledge. It seems customer and marketing data is a mess because marketers will invest in every shiny new tool that promises "actionable insights" from a mountain of data. As terrible as Salesforce may be, it's not as bad as Salesforce + Segment + Informatica + Looker + Lotame + etc.... But that's the world digital advertising has created. Anything for an extra click.
Each extra tool provides a date for a date when marketing will be useful. As a pm I was told that we couldn’t advertise because our marketing integration wasn’t done.
A CMO can go from shop to shop delivering nothing but broken ad tech integrations with the job of fixing the mess from the last person.
in my experience, every vendor we looked at who competes with salesforce is not interested in your business unless they are allowed to take over your entire backoffice. for example, we only wanted it for the CRM and order ingestion via manual entry & API, and that was okay, while other vendors insisted on also taking over our inventory management, invoicing, fulfillment, etc, rather than allowing us to simply integrate with the minimal set of APIs which we needed to sync our systems with theirs.
Give Hubspot a gander. We want to handle your entire front office. But we're also perfectly content just handling customer data and gdpr requests for you.
I will say that I feel better about our clients underusing a $2500/quarter HubSpot account than I do about our clients wasting $100k+ on Salesforce Pardot.
Well I was specifically responding to someone who couldn't find a salesforce replacement because they all wanted to manage the back office. So it seemed relevant rather than shilling in my eyes.
probably pipedrive. it's pretty good for small sales (and some marketing) groups to manage their pipelines. easy to get up and running and fairly flexible for what it is. it's not going to replace salesforce though.
hubspot is a mid-market marketing automation product, sitting between little pipedrive and huge salesforce. it's also pretty decent for what it is, helping medium-size marketing (and some sales) departments coordinate across various channels. it also won't replace salesforce, but is appropriate for a mid-tier company (maybe ~$20-200MM in revenue).
salesforce is a huge sales channel management platform with at least a couple marketing automation products bolted onto it, along with all sorts of other semi-related stuff, like SCM (supply chain mgmt). this is because they want to own the totality of "marketing", which encompasses all of product, price, promotion, and distribution.
(i've done some consulting in this area and have helped clients pick and set up these things)
I would love to have a chat with you - my company is in the middle of trying to decide on what route to go right now. We’re on Zoho right now and trying to make it work. Available for a chat?
I was pretty sure Firebase was in a position to kill Salesforce’s platform, but I guess they never sold it as business platform (plus Google wood never be able to execute human Sales and Support at Salesforce scale)
A calcified org like that can't move fast.