Can You Disrupt Salesforce?
Or can't you?
Every now and then I stumble upon a question of Salesforce CRM dominance. Opinions on forums are split, to the point where one sees it as a product of two radicals: folks who hate it and folks that love it.
Seeing things from inside of Salesforce (2017–2019), what I think we, the techies, the weirdos, the startup founders don’t get is that Marc Benioff is a founder too. He’s giving people exactly what they wanted, the way they want it.
I looked at top customers of Salesforce. The list is long (below). While they may have requests for features on the roadmap, McDonald’s or Coca-Cola aren’t really asking Salesforce for dramatic, disruptive change.
Customers of Salesforce were asking Salesforce to ship less often. It shipped via waterfall model, three times a year with big moratorium around buying seasons past November.
Salesforce Classic is their UI that’s twenty five years old, and there are people still trained on it and using it. They put Lightning UI (UI-next-gen) ten years ago, but customers were refusing to move. Until now you have two docs for Salesforce: Classic and Lightning. Reddit posts often stated people preferred Classic.
The large accounts have it configured very well — Salesforce sucks when it’s un-configured or misconfigured, but folks that have it configured well swear by it. When you get a good salesperson, they want Salesforce. And the huge shops are using Salesforce more like an ERP: they have the CRM part of it, but all forms/inputs and resources are in Salesforce, with mobile SDKs integrated in their apps that are on the App Store.
This thing is the last thing you want to go down is your sales system, where downtime is counted in millions. When Salesforce was down it’s all $20M+ of loss. It’s the last thing you want hacked.
For bigger corporations, the replacement cost is higher than the value those big shops would get out of it. And many of big customers aren’t firms where a good engineer that knows how to hack with AI-assistance safely would go for now. I’m not saying those companies don’t have good engineers per-se, but it’s more likely that a good engineer presented with a menu of choices on the “Careers” page of BMW or Sony will prefer to work on new Z5 Roadster or new gaming console, and not the sales system that would end up looking the same as what they already have.
Top Salesforce customers
The list below is from InfoClutch’s roundup of successful companies using Salesforce CRM.
| Company | Headquarters | Revenue ($B) | Employees | Industry |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Toyota | Aichi, Japan | 314.4 | 383,853 | Automotive |
| UnitedHealthcare | Minnetonka, MN, USA | 298.2 | 125,000 | Health Insurance |
| Ford Motor Company | Dearborn, MI, USA | 184.9 | 171,000 | Automotive |
| JPMorgan Chase | New York City, NY, USA | 177.6 | 317,233 | Banking |
| Mercedes-Benz | Stuttgart, Germany | 168.3 | 166,000 | Automotive |
| BMW | Munich, Germany | 165.3 | 159,104 | Automotive |
| Verizon | New York City, NY, USA | 134.8 | 99,600 | Telecommunications |
| AT&T | Dallas, TX, USA | 122.3 | 140,990 | Telecommunications |
| Humana | Louisville, KY, USA | 117.8 | 65,680 | Health Insurance |
| Amazon Web Services | Seattle, WA, USA | 107.6 | 146,094 | IT & Technology |
| Target | Minneapolis, MN, USA | 106.6 | 440,000 | Retail |
| The Walt Disney Company | Burbank, CA, USA | 91.36 | 233,000 | Entertainment |
| Sony | Tokyo, Japan | 84.72 | 113,000 | Conglomerate |
| Procter & Gamble | Cincinnati, OH, USA | 84.04 | 91,985 | Consumer Goods |
| T-Mobile | Bellevue, WA, USA | 81.40 | 92,873 | Telecommunications |
| Citigroup | New York City, NY, USA | 81.14 | 198,004 | Financial Services |
| Deloitte | London, UK | 70.50 | 500,358 | Consultancy |
| American Express | New York City, NY, USA | 65.95 | 82,130 | Banking |
| Pfizer | New York City, NY, USA | 63.63 | 101,261 | Pharmaceuticals |
| IBM | Armonk, NY, USA | 62.75 | 293,400 | IT & Technology |
| L’Oréal | Clichy, France | 50.48 | 89,945 | Personal Care |
| Coca-Cola | Atlanta, GA, USA | 47.06 | 47,857 | Food & Beverage |
| NBCUniversal | New York City, NY, USA | 45.11 | 60,016 | Entertainment |
| Schneider Electric | Rueil-Malmaison, France | 44.35 | 176,962 | Energy |
| Uber | San Francisco, CA, USA | 43.98 | 31,100 | IT & Technology |
| Thermo Fisher Scientific | Waltham, MA, USA | 42.88 | 125,000 | Biotechnology |
| The Emirates Group | Dubai, UAE | 39.59 | 121,223 | Aviation |
| GE Aerospace | Cincinnati, OH, USA | 38.70 | 53,000 | Aviation |
| Visa | San Francisco, CA, USA | 35.93 | 31,600 | Financial Services |
| GE Vernova | Cambridge, MA, USA | 34.94 | 76,800 | Energy |
| Canon | Tokyo, Japan | 29.52 | 170,340 | Manufacturing |
| Adidas | Herzogenaurach, Germany | 27.49 | 62,035 | Fashion & Apparel |
| U.S. Bank | Minneapolis, MN, USA | 27.46 | 70,263 | Banking |
| Marriott International | Bethesda, MD, USA | 25.10 | 418,000 | Hospitality |
| 3M | Maplewood, MN, USA | 24.58 | 66,836 | Manufacturing |
| Macy’s | New York City, NY, USA | 23.01 | 94,189 | Retail |
| GE HealthCare | Chicago, IL, USA | 19.67 | 58,452 | Medical Technology |
| Spotify | Stockholm, Sweden | 18.19 | 7,691 | Entertainment |
| The Hershey Company | Hershey, PA, USA | 11.20 | 21,000 | Food & Beverage |
| Hilton | McLean, VA, USA | 11.17 | 450,000 | Hospitality |
| Airbnb | San Francisco, CA, USA | 11.10 | 7,300 | IT & Technology |
| ALDO | Montreal, QC, Canada | 10.00 | 47,269 | Fashion & Apparel |
| Transamerica | Baltimore, MD, USA | 6.101 | 10,400 | Insurance |
| Western Union | Denver, CO, USA | 4.210 | 9,100 | Financial Services |
| American Red Cross | Washington, D.C., USA | 3.845 | 17,967 | Nonprofit |
| Citrix Systems | Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA | 3.217 | 9,700 | IT & Technology |
| Bentley | Crewe, UK | 3.051 | 4,289 | Automotive |
| United Way | Alexandria, VA, USA | 0.075 | 245 | Nonprofit |
Source: InfoClutch — Successful Companies Using Salesforce CRM.