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Following!

Following !

A few reasons that I can think of 1. Have you heard the phrase “Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM” ? It means that, rather than buy a more suitable or competitively priced product from a less well-known technology company and take the chance you’ll be in the firing line if something goes wrong, IBM was the tech industry’s safest bet. They had such a strong reputation that, if a problem with their product did occur, IBM would inevitably sort it out, and the purchaser would be shielded from any repercussions. If you chose IBM and it didn't work out, well, it was a reasonable decision and people would just blame IBM. But if you deviated from the norm and chose something else that didn't work out, people would blame you for it. Now replace IBM with Salesforce - same applies. 2. Once you get past a certain point - the business reaches a certain size/level of complexity - purchasing decisions are less about "what is the best solution?" and more about "what will look the best to the various stakeholders within the org?" This is the same reason you have these big consultancy firms coming in and charging five or six figure sums when smaller/cheaper ones will do the same job. Hence why the expensive, massively over-spec'd solution sometimes winds up getting preferred over the substantially cheaper - but perfectly adequate - solution. 3. The SF sales rep isn't afraid to play dirty and take your CTO & CIO out for 18 rounds at a country club, then go out for a $1k-per-head dinner at a restaurant, then follow up with hospitality/VIP room tickets to whatever sports team is biggest in your area. They'll happily spend tens of thousands of dollars on entertainment to snag a multi-million dollar sale. #GandaHaiParDhandaHai

"…..purchasing decisions are less about "what is the best solution?" and more about "what will look the best to the various stakeholders within the org?"

@Anuj Adhiya Thank You so much this detail reply. Make so much sense now! And thanks for IBM phrase💯

Also the level of customization you do is unmatched and out of the box which in otherwise would need lot of heavy lifting

Anuj is spot on! In the startup world after series B (sometimes A too), startups don't want to do any major experiment and that too with rev ops as now they are neck deep in the game of funding. The set of questions revenue leaders and CEOs get from the investors make them think if they have the proper tech stack and data architecture for revenue. And the next suggestion from investors is obvious - get Salesforce. They even suggest consultancies that can help setup Salesforce properly. Also, scalability seems a bit easier with the level of customization, integrations and vast Salesforce consultancies network. Not sure but sometimes I think this partnership strategy with consultancies is one big lever for Salesforce

@Niranjan Bala How/What do you define customisation here? Customisation is terms of query to fetch any particular data or something else?

custom sales flows - lead assignment etc - custom logic for lead assignment - deal flows - they have in house programmatic access - provision to create custom data structure within CRM

Understood. Make sense ✅

these are the under the hood reasons but in reality i think primary drivers are the ones mentioned by Anuj

Yes. Especially the point

what will look the best to the various stakeholders within the org?

“Nobody ever gets fired for buying Salesforce”