Platform Not Product

Salesforce makes a very good platform but not very good products.

There, I said it.

Some people might accuse me of heresy. [Maybe I'm jeopardizing my partner status or my membership in the MVP program.] Feel free to disagree with me, of course!

Obviously, I'm going to need to define "product" because in the world of software engineering just about everything is "a product," in the sense that there is a "product manager" in charge of it. But most of those things that product managers work on are what you and I would call a "feature." (I guess "feature manager" didn't sound like a good title?) I have no beef with plenty of Salesforce features—they're what make up the platform. I think Salesforce's features are great, from reports and dashboards, to the powerful declarative automation tool Flow, to user access, permissions, and record sharing. It's the features that I group together under the heading "the Salesforce platform" and frequently endorse. From the first time I logged into Salesforce I could tell it was a database that was user- and admin-friendly. I have not yet seen another platform as easy to customize, as flexible and powerful, as secure, or as reliable. And as I've written often, thanks to the Power of Us program, Salesforce is quite cost-effective for nonprofits.

But Salesforce also offers "products," which I would define as anything for which they charge separately from regular user access to the platform. And I hate to say it, but I don't see a lot of evidence that those products are so great. Some are good, some are not. Just because it has the Salesforce name on it is no particular guarantee of quality. Within its core competency of providing CRM for businesses, Salesforce is a leader. Outside that core competency, I'm less convinced.

With no intent to be comprehensive, let me use a few examples to explain what I mean.

Professional Services

This one confuses me, to be honest. Salesforce offers professional services, otherwise known as "consulting." So...Salesforce has an entire program to certify partners and to grow a partner ecosystem but they also offer the same services in competition with those partners. I don't really understand that. (If I was a large partner, it would probably piss me off, in fact.)

But beyond the not understanding, it seems to me there is no realistic way Salesforce's professional services could be any better than what partners offer. Consulting is just too dependent on what a client needs, who the hands-on-keyboard staff are at the consulting company, and other human factors for any particularly consultancy to be consistently better than another. I'm sure Salesforce professional services does some great implementations and some terrible ones. I'm sure they've made some clients very happy and made others very unhappy. They are human!

Unless Salesforce's professional services department has special access to special ways of interacting with the platform technology due to being Salesforce, they can't possibly be much different than any other similarly-sized consultancy. I've never heard any suggestion that Salesforce's people can offer special technology access to their clients. (If it were true, that would be very unfair competition with other partners.) So how can their consulting services be materially different from any others?

Backup

About a year ago Salesforce announced that they had bought Own, the most prominent company offering backup services for Salesforce data. Salesforce actually had their own native backup option once upon a time, but it was apparently not much to speak of, and was fabulously expensive. So in the manner of big tech companies, Salesforce bought a competitor. I hear Own's product is pretty good. Before the acquisition they were quite a bit more expensive than other options, but they had some features to justify the price. So now Salesforce has a backup product to offer. But this wasn't a product developed by Salesforce.

[And side note: Many people would actually prefer that their backup service not be handled by the same company that is being backed up. That seems a not-unreasonable position to take.]

Forms/Surveys

If you've spent any time in the Salesforce ecosystem you've pretty quickly realized that webforms are their own special challenge. There are some fantastic form vendors that integrate with Salesforce. (FormAssembly is my go-to.) But they can be expensive. There is the possibility of embedding screen flows on Experience Cloud sites for free external forms, but that's much harder to maintain. And then there is the Salesforce Surveys product that, frankly, I've never heard of anyone using. 'Nuff said.

Data Cloud

I am no Data Cloud expert. I don't have the certification and I don't have any clients with needs that Data Cloud could solve. So I don't really have a personal opinion here. But I've heard from several people over the last several years that Data Cloud is fine, but it's nothing special. It might have some easier integration to Salesforce, but that's offset by higher pricing. No knock on Data Cloud here, just an example to show that just because it has the blue cloud logo attached doesn't mean it's necessarily better.

Artificial Intelligence (and Agentforce)

Let's start by disambiguating: "Artificial intelligence," at this point, is a meaningless catch-all term. It elides the differences between machine learning, predictive modeling, sentiment analysis, large language models, and so much more. Salesforce used to group it's AI offerings under the Einstein branding. Now they're grouping everything under Agentforce. But of course there are still several very different "AI" products.

I've written in the past about trying to use Einstein to get insight out of predictive models to see how it might benefit organizations at the scale of my clients. Nothing's changed in that space. But if you hear all the hype, you'd think Agentforce has changed everything about Salesforce.

Have you tried creating a new Salesforce support case using the Agentforce chatbot? I have. Or have you gotten an email from a Salesforce AE that was clearly written by generative AI (but not at all labeled that it was written by AI)? My clients have. The support chatbot regularly gives me wrong suggestions for how I might solve my problem and then eventually just asks me a series of questions that is not functionally different from filling out the old form. (But it's slower!) And the emails from an AE that answered questions wrong (including pointing toward nonexistent nodes of the Setup tree) were purely a waste of my client's time and mine.

Maybe Agentforce will get better rapidly. Or maybe it's not Agentforce's fault, it's problems inherent in large language models and generative artificial intelligence. But the reality is that Agentforce is a Salesforce skin on top of existing large language models. Salesforce is outsourcing the LLM work to another company, then trying to take the outputs and do something useful with them. To that extent it can't possibly be better than the other generative AI products out there. And honestly, I frequently hear people say that Agentforce is worse.

I'm in no position to judge. I think they're all mostly pointless hype.

Are Industry Solutions (including Nonprofit Cloud and Education Cloud) product or platform?

I would argue that Salesforce's "on core" solutions for particular industries are not "platform" but are, in fact, "product." What you get with Industries solutions are several things:

1. The Salesforce platform.

2. One or more data models.

3. Some template automations (mostly screen flows).

4. Access to few additional features (Omniscript, several Lightning Web Components, Data Processing Engine, Business Rules Engine, etc.)

Each Industry solution comes with its own data model, in the form of a whole bunch of new objects. (They're not really standard objects because you can't access them without the right Industries permission set license. But they don't have __c after their object API name.) But a data model is hardly a "product," since it's quite easy to create your own custom objects or for an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partner to offer objects through a package they sell on the AppExchange. A data model, objects, database tables, .... whatever you call it, it's not something you would probably pay for by itself. You pay for the functionality—the features—that go along with the data model.

In that case, I guess you could call Nonprofit Cloud, Education Cloud, or any of the other Industries solutions "product" or a "product/platform bundle," since they have some additional features that extend the Salesforce platform. But either way there is clearly an aspect of product to the Industries solutions. Which gets to the question I really want people to think about:

Is this a product I want to pay for?

Decide for yourself.

But in case you're wondering, I'm writing today because I want to apply this question to Nonprofit Cloud and Education Cloud, specifically. I started by stating my thesis that Salesforce is great at platform but not so good at product. I've given examples to argue the product case. And based on that argument, at a minimum I think it's fair to say that Nonprofit Cloud and Education Cloud are not particularly more likely to be great for nonprofits than other available nonprofit-on-Salesforce options.

If you look at a data model and think it's too complicated. If you look at additional features and think they're ones you don't need or won't use. (Perhaps because they, too, are too complicated. I'm looking at You, Data Processing Engine!) If you look at some of the features and know that you could replicate them pretty easily with your own screen flow. Then maybe the product you're looking at isn't for you. And what I'm saying in today's post is that just because the product "comes from Salesforce," doesn't mean it's necessarily the best one.

That's all I'm sayin'.

Paying for the Platform

As I've written in the past, I still think the Salesforce platform has no equal, particularly for nonprofits, due the Power of Us donation, the discounts, and the availability of expert support. But I'm clearly implying that some nonprofits might not use Salesforce's products but will still want to use the platform. And if that's the case they still need options for how to make the platform work for their situation. Which brings me right back to what I've been writing about Nonprofit Bridge.