Thoughts on Saleforce

I started this blog a while back now because I was dissatisfied with Saleforce.com in several material ways. I’ve blogged about a few of those ways but I have yet to blog about the main reason I was upset with Salesforce.com and why I started the blog in the first place; their not offering the Salesforce.com API or AJAX to users of Team or Professional Editions.  I’ve been waiting to write this to ensure that I would do the topic justice, but for reasons you’ll see in my next post, I can wait no longer to finally get this off my chest.

There are many other issues I have with Saleforce.com, but limiting their API to premium customers only is by far one of the most serious. I believe it is their dumbest decision, bar none. 

I knew from my prior experience as founder and president of Xtras that one of the best ways to improve the fortunes of a technology business is to cultivate add-on solutions for the business’ core offering(s). The existence of a broad swath of add-ons adds value to the core product (a.k.a. platform) and hence generates a lot more interest in the core product. Having a significant number of add-ons also adds greatly to a product’s market resiliency, especially if those add-ons are driven by actual market needs. Further, when there are many add-on developers with have a financial incentive in the core product maintain a large marketshare there is tremendous inertia generated for the core product from people outside the company. Those add-on vendors are essentially unpaid and uncommissioned sales reps for the company, and their marketing is in-effect marketing for the core product as well. You can’t get much better than that as Kevin Kelley wrote in New Rules for the New Economy when he said:

"Every time a closed system opens, it begins to interact more directly with other existing systems, and therefore acquires all the value of those systems."

And Salesforce.com knows this of they would never have created AppExchange.

But what Salesforce.com still doesn’t get is how limiting access to the API (in hopes to make an upsell) is only limiting Salesforce.com ability to grow its company’s value long term. I think it is probably a sales culture that has made them so short-sighted. They want to upcharge you for everything. They want to make sure there is never any money left on the table for an given customer. And that approach is just so incredibly short-sighted when you consider what is required to empower people to create add-ons.

Of course Salesforce.com and their apologists will argue "But the Developer Edition *is* free. Salesforce.com *do* recognize the value of empowering people" to which I just sadly shake my head and sigh. I know from significant experience that the best add-ons, the ones that truly meeting a market need are the ones developed by small scrappy companies that experience the need themselves. And small scrappy companies aren’t going to build add-ons with the Developer Edition if they can’t use those add-ons for their own business in their Team or Professional Edition accounts.

Large enterprises may create the add-ons but they have their own real business to run and won’t be bothered to bring their custom add-ons to market. Taht leaves the companies that develop add-ons for a business; they are essentially speculating on what the market needs and try to address those needs but they almost never have ongoing first hand experience as they only experience those needs vicariously through their customers.

And this is not an indictment of software companies; no, not at all. They are doing a great job offering the add-ons they offer. And the good ones have developed sales and support processes that are needed to serve their customers which is something the small scrappy companies I mention don’t start with. But this latter group, the software companies are rarely likely to identify a truly underserved need or innovative solution and then bring it to market simply because they don’t experience the need as a pain point on a daily basis like the small scrappy companies who have the need do.

But what differentiates the small scrappy company from the large enterprise is that the former often realizes that bringing their add-on to market would be a better business than they are currently running whereas that will never happen with the large enterprise. To paraphrase the name of a 1988 movie you might even call the former "The Accidental Add-on Vendor" as they don’t start building add-ons to sell them, they start building add-ons because they need them. Almost without exception, the market leading add-on vendors in my former business Xtras started developing add-ons because they needed them for their own business, not because they were trying to be add-on vendors and build software to sell to someone else.

And these small scrappy companies can’t afford Enterprise Edition so they are not going to use the Developer edition to create add-ons because they can’t use those add-ons they create for their own business. So the people in these small scrappy companies just do without, or do it elsewhere. Kevin Kelly also said in New Rules for the New Economy that you should "maximize the opportunities of others" which is something Salesforce.com just doesn’t do.

Empowering small scrappy companies to become accidental add-on vendors is the tremendous opportunity that Salesforce.com just fritters away because of their almost pathological need to upcharge for everything. And that’s the dumbest decision they have ever made.

UPDATE: Phil Wainewright of ZDNet talks about how AppExchange seems to be all hype and few success stories. Given the situation as I explained it above, is there any wonder at all in this?

The tone on this blog has been rather negative lately, I admit, but I generally rant about the things that bother me not about those that don’t.  

However, I really do have to give Salesforce.com credit for this one: IdeaExchange is one incredibly great idea (pun intended), and every smart company either will or soon should do the same.

I’ve been meaning to blog about this since they first released it but Mark Mangano’s post over at SalesforceWatch.com just reminded me to get off my duff and write about it.  By the way, another company now doing the same that Mark didn’t mention is Yahoo Suggestions.

Now if Salesforce.com will just listen to those submitted ideas…

One of my biggest complaints with Salesforce.com is how they seem focused on ways to nickel and dime their customers. I was just reading one of their help files[1] and found the following example (emphasis mine.):

Salesforce.com recommends that all customers back-up their salesforce.com data. All customers are advised to perform a weekly export. An export should be generated prior to any data project performed by an organization via the import wizards or DataLoader imports, updates, or deletions).

A weekly export service is available to customers, and is outlined below.

The weekly export service allows organizations to export a complete set of their Salesforce data, including all attachments, for archival purposes. A system administrator can request a data export once every seven (7) days. The salesforce.com service will automatically extract the organization’s data into compressed .csv data files and send an email confirmation to the administrator requesting the export.

The email will contain a web address to a secure page, from which the administrator can download the series of compressed data files.

To request a data export, follow the steps listed below.

1. Click on:

Setup | Administration Setup | Data Management | Data Export.

2. Select the "Include attachments" check box (if desired).

3. Select any data that you would like to include by checking the box next to the name of the object. Selecting the "Include all data" box will include data from all tables.

4. Click the "Data Export" button.

A confirmation email will be sent when the export has completed, with a link to the export files, as mentioned above.

The weekly export service is available for all Enterprise Edition customers, and is included in your license fees.

The weekly export service is available to Professional Edition customers as an add-on service, for $50/month.

To purchase this feature, please contact your salesforce.com sales representative, call us at 1-800-NO SOFTWARE, or send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Now isn’t it a little arrogant and self-serving to require customers to pay extra for data backup when the loss of their data will typically be because of Saleforce.com’s failure to protect the data, not their own?

Oh well, just another case of Salesforce.com nickeling and diming their customers…

1. I would have linked to it, but the URL won’t work unless you are logged in to my account. Grrr.

This is my favorite business book:

New Rules for the New Economy

Published in 1998, based on an article of the same name authored by founding executive editor of Wired Magazine Kevin Kelley in the September 1997 issue. It is out of print but IMO it shouldn’t be. But you can still buy used copies on Amazon. As of this writing there are 117 with a lowest price of US$0.21. 

If Marc Benioff has not read it, he needs to get a copy and read it. As a matter of fact, anyone who currently runs a business or who wants to run a business should read this book. It is not an easy book to digest, but the insights it provides are numerous and invaluable.

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while, but I kept getting side-tracked and never got around to it.  To date, every blog post I have made has been critical of Salesforce.com. Even my reason for starting the blog was to be critical, and no I’ve not blogged about that yet but it is coming, I promise.

My goal for this blog was to offer constructive criticism, but to date that constructive criticism has been pretty harsh…

Anyway, this blog post is actually in praise of Salesforce.com for the special offer of 50% their Team Edition and how that unforunately had Wall Street go off on a tissy.  That offer saw Salesforce.com loose as much as 8% of their share price, all because of skittish  investors with short-term thinking! The sad thing is that adding subscribers is one of the key things an annuity-based business really needs to do and it is incredible short-sighted of Wall Street not to see that.

But then Wall Street is for the most part short sighted by definition, is it not?  Is it not a shame that the only real mechanism we have for allowing large companies to exist is one whose very nature punishes them for taking necessesary steps for long term health if those same steps cause short term pain?  But I do digress…

Back to Salesforce.com.  It wasn’t until Tom Stefano of SalesBoom.com made his comments on my prior post that I was reminded to  comment on this topic.  Thanks Tom for reminding me (although I don’t think Tom would have preferred for his comments to lead me to praising SalesForce.com

So kudos to Salesforce.com for lowering your entry-level price, if at least for a while. They got a least one addition five (5) seat customer because of it; I signed up a Team Edition account for use with one of my projects. I would have preferred to have just used one Enterprise account, but it was cheaper to have one Professional account with three seats (two of which I don’t currently use, ahem) and one Team account with five seats than a single Enterprise account with five seats.  But that begs other issues, which I will definitely be addressing in future blog posts.