Why Salesforce CRM is the Ultimate Game-Changer: A Personal Perspective on Business Software Selection

In today’s fast-paced world of business and technology, organisations often go into a dilemma while making a crucial choice: should they invest in an enterprise platform like Salesforce CRM, or venture into custom development for building something specific which fulfils their business needs? This article explores the complex world of software selection, benefits of investing in Salesforce CRM vs doing the custom development.

In Just Eat Takeaway.com (JET) we use Salesforce for various things like sales, onboarding, incident management etc. I am a passionate advocate of Salesforce because I believe that it’s benefits outweigh those of other CRM systems on the market, and it has been a key component of our success.

Why invest in Salesforce CRM?

Salesforce CRM can be used as your Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Software as a Service (SaaS) that eliminates complexity of evaluating, purchasing, configuring, building and managing custom software and hardware. Furthermore, this can serve as a catalyst for communicating the Single Source of Truth of data to other systems, which is often the most challenging aspect of a business process. Using Salesforce CRM has dual advantages — technical and business.

Let’s look at the advantages for the technical team.

Speed — Developers can customise the pre-built processes on Salesforce CRM with point-and-click, define workflows using drag-and-drop components. They get access to code libraries, pre-built functions, templates, standard reports, charts and many more things like pre-integrated apps from Appexchange. So the speed to release the developed feature is faster.

Cost — Upfront costs are reduced, since there’s no time and money to be invested in infrastructure setup like servers, database, before you begin developing. Using a platform like Salesforce also helps with the standardisation and consolidation of resources, version history. Since it is cloud-based, developers can deliver software applications over the internet using remote servers, which drastically reduces the deploying cost. Capital costs are completely eliminated, which are usually tied up in depreciating IT assets like hardware, infrastructure etc.

Expertise — Access to self-paced learning material, resources, trailheads, hands-on challenges, global communities inspire every individual to skill up for the future and learn new things from anywhere(without any infrastructure setup).

Now that technically it is convincing that it is going to be easier to work on Salesforce CRM as a platform, let’s understand the benefits for business users.

Implementation Time and Deployment : The Salesforce platform enables us to build our solution by customising some out-of-the-box components, using custom settings, global picklists, pre-built functions, which makes the implementation process faster and easier.

It is implicit that businesses evolve, and so the processes too. In such cases, making those changes in the system is easily possible. On the other hand, custom development requires longer implementation time, an army of developers including backend, frontend and UI/UX resources.

Flexibility and Scalability : Unlike custom software with backend and frontend engineers, we can customise the salesforce platform with 80% no-code and 20% coding functionality, which helps us scale this faster and smoother. The platform can adapt to changing needs of the business, while custom development provides unparalleled flexibility as solutions are built from the ground.

Integration Capabilities: Salesforce CRM has extensive integration capabilities with a wide range of third party applications, providing a cohesive ecosystem. In contrast, custom development integration capabilities depend on the team’s technical skills and may require additional efforts to build connections with third party apps.

Maintenance and Updates: Being an enterprise software, Salesforce ensures that the platform is up-to-date with the latest features and security patches. All the users benefit from periodic upgrades, security enhancements and continuous improvements which saves time and cost as compared to custom development.

Training and Skill Set: Salesforce and its intuitive user interface, pre-built features, and trailheads facilitate business users to prepare outstanding SOPs (standard operating procedures), user manuals, in-app guidance. On the other hand, custom development emphasises on coding, programming and changing even a layout of the page from vertical to horizontal requires frontend, backend, UI/UX resources, so creating user manual or guided tour of an application is not as easy as it is with an intuitive UI like Salesforce.

Cost-Consideration : While Salesforce CRM has a subscription model, initial investment can be lower or higher depending upon the number of users. However, when you buy salesforce, you do not just purchase a licence but you become part of a whole ecosystem which gives you exposure to the new technological features and pre-built innovation. E.g. Generative AI, Data cloud, GPT, Einstein etc. so in short you invest in an enterprise platform which can run the show for the long term.

In conclusion, while custom development offers tailored solutions, it certainly comes with challenges such as time implications and overall implementation cost considerations, technical resources etc. On the other hand, Salesforce, with its comprehensive CRM functionality, cloud based accessibility, scalability, customisation capability, proves as a compelling investment for such complex and ever evolving business requirements..

Salesforce excels due to its comprehensive CRM capabilities, strong scalability and extensive ecosystem of sales, service, marketing, analytics and data clouds, making it ideal for businesses of all sizes and all nature.

I feel the best and smartest decision we made to fulfil dynamic requirements of our business is to invest and use the platform — Salesforce.

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