💃 Reasons Salesforce Customers Choose Salesforce🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd! Most companies don’t choose Salesforce.

They choose a story 📖.

A story about visibility 👀. A story about control 🎛️. A story about finally getting answers instead of excuses 🙌.

And Salesforce is the most credible character in that story.

But it’s not perfect. You’ve been around Salesforce long enough that you’ve seen this play out 👇

…the platform gets purchased for different reasons, under wildly different expectations. Sometimes it becomes the backbone of the business. Sometimes it becomes the most expensive mirror a company has ever bought 😬.

What’s interesting isn’t whether Salesforce is good or bad solution.

What’s interesting is why businesses believe it will solve their problems…and why they’re often surprised by what happens next.

Let’s start with the most common reason of all 👇

RIGHT REASON! DISAPPOINTING RESULT 🙁

Salesforce Reporting

Salesforce reporting is usually a headline feature in the buying conversation.

😃 Executives imagine clean dashboards.

😃 Sales leaders imagine instant pipeline clarity.

😃 Finance imagines one version of the truth.

And to be fair, Salesforce can deliver all of that (with time ⏱️ and money 💸).

But here’s the part that doesn’t get said out loud 👇

Salesforce reporting works best when the business already agrees on what it’s trying to measure.

Which is almost never the case.

What actually happens is Salesforce becomes the place where long-standing disagreements finally surface.

Definitions collide.

“What is a Lead? What is an Opportunity?” becomes a debate.

“What differentiates our stages ‘Contacted’, ‘Needs Follow Up’, and ‘Offer Sent’?” turns political.

Fields get added to satisfy one team, then another, then leadership and suddenly the reports are technically correct but emotionally distrusted.

This is where critics say, “Salesforce reporting isn’t that great.”

And they’re not wrong (long live Excel 😜) but not for the reasons people think.

The limitation usually isn’t the reporting engine, it’s that Salesforce can’t guess for you 💯.

❌ It won’t decide what a lead really is.

❌ It won’t fix a sales process that changes by region, rep, or quarter.

❌ It won’t reconcile incentives that were misaligned long before a dashboard existed.

So Salesforce reporting becomes a mirror…and not every organization likes what it reflects 🫣.

NOT A REASON, EVEN THOUGH SALESFORCE WANTS IT TO BE!

Salesforce AI

AI is where Salesforce expectations go to get… complicated.

On paper, Salesforce AI sounds incredible-

🤖 Smarter forecasting

🤖 Direct customer engagement

🤖 Automated insights

🤖 Custom AI Agents, less manual work (less workforce 😳)

And…Salesforce may get there. But many businesses hesitate because AI today doesn’t deliver Jarvis-level expectations 🤷🏻.

And lest we forget, AI in Salesforce is only as good as your data quality 💯.

❌ Leads aren’t clean.

❌ Stage/status aren’t up to date.

❌ Fields aren’t consistently used.

❌ Historical data is… aspirational.

So when AI produces underwhelming or confusing outputs, the conclusion isn’t “our data needs work.”

It’s “Salesforce AI doesn’t work.”

There’s also a trust gap. Business users are comfortable with automation they can see and understand. AI feels opaque, a black box. When it makes a recommendation without a clear “why,” skepticism kicks in and that’s tough when deals are on the line.

Not to mention added licensing (or usage) cost, implementation, support and maintenance.

Suddenly, AI feels like something you buy into, not something you rely on 😐.

ONE STOP SHOP, BUT NEEDS SUPPORT

One Platform to Access Them All…But At What Cost?

The one-stop-shop promise is still one of Salesforce’s strongest advantages 💪.

Salesforce offers something few platforms can - a single, extensible data model that spans sales, service, marketing, revenue, analytics, and automation - all speaking the same language.

When everything lives in one ecosystem, users thrive….or at least have less to complain about 😂.

For leadership, this is gold. One system of record. One security model. One place to ask, “What’s actually happening in the business?”

But there’s a price to pay for this unicorn solution…literally and figuratively.

The actual cost for a Marketing Cloud, Experience Cloud, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud, Tableau, Slack, etc etc is astronomical! And then the implementation and ongoing support and maintenance costs 🤯.

Then, figuratively the cost is your Salesforce professional’s sanity 😅. The brain power needed to support a complex solution that delivers a seamless user experience is significant. Generally, keeping a stack like this humming takes an army and is going to be a bold line on the customer’s P&L 💰💰💰.

WHAT IS IT?

Best Case, Worst Case, Most Likely

• Best Case = BC

• Worst Case = WC

• Most Likely = ML

(BC + 5ML + WC)/ 7 = Peace of Mind Estimate

Here’s how it works-

Let’s use Connie’s estimates

• BC = 55hrs

• WC = 140hrs

• ML = 80hrs

(55 + 5×80 + 140)/ 7 = 85hrs

85hrs is pretty close to Connie’s original 80hr estimate.

Best Case and Worst Case are, by definition, the least likely to occur.

Most Likely is….most likely to occur 🙄 😎, so it gets weighted with the 5x 🔥.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

For Salesforce customers, every decision is a trade.

💁 Automation gives you scale, but demands engineering discipline.

💁 One-stop-shop is a gift to users, but a 5000lb necklace for Salesforce professionals.

💁 AI offers acceleration, but exposes data integrity issues.

💁 Supportability challenges aren’t bugs, they’re consequences.

Businesses don’t choose or reject Salesforce because of a single capability. They decide based on whether they believe their organization are ready for the responsibility of power.

When Salesforce works, it’s not because the platform is magical.

It’s because the people behind it are intentional. And that formula may work for every CRM, but Salesforce can squeeze the most juice out of it 🧃!

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes