Odoo: am I a joke to you?
This article sounds a bit like a press release, but the documentation for the tool itself looks good.
“Twenty” seems a little basic so far, but “Salesforce” is such a far-reaching platform it would be hard to compete across the whole landscape. Salesforce’s CRM functionality is a lot easier to copy tho.
I know a few guys who helped author some vertical specific CRMs that are in retirement age. A project like this might be good for them as it would give them something to do. Passing this along.
This sounds very non open source to me, it already has a per user price, vc funding, etc. Are you able to take it and host it yourself if you want? Can you fork the code?
Using it, it’s still very early and basic features not working yet. Great potential however
Isn’t building a CRM a sort of rite of passage for tech entrepreneur failures?
Every company wants a custom CRM or a customized one instead of choosing a CRM that fits the most important features that the company need and adapt the other processes to fit with the stock CRM as much as possible.
Fighting a CRM is a money pit and in the end, it becomes the worst of both worlds (expensive and shitty to use with the company processes)
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.
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
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…
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).
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.
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.
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
Don’t we have like 4 of them already?
