Salesforce Platform

Lots of resources to help you get started with this platform. All of the prebuilt components are documented well in the Salesforce documentation, and it is extremely easy to get started with developing. Trailhead is extremely helpful in introducing the concepts that are important to developing for the Lightning Platform, so it is not hard to know where to go next in your learning journey. The other benefit is that it is extremely popular and there is a lack of qualified developers, so the barrier to entry through learning about the Lightning Platform is lower than it is with other technologies.

There is a relatively steep learning curve because it is VERY opinionated. In addition to learning the Lightning framework, there are many other pieces that you will be required to learn. Apex and SLDS are two examples of that. You won't be proficient in Lightning Platform development unless you have all of the pieces.

Salesforce allows us to quickly launch a Minimum Viable Product for teams within the companies we we work and then iteratively build up on those structures. The wide range of standard objects and the easy of creating new custom objects means that we can get the core of a product built in a fairly short amount of time compared to having to build solutions completely from scratch or in less flexible alternate CRM products. The Salesforce Platform allows us to get users using the custom apps we build for them in Salesforce.

Salesforce requires advanced training to be able to build it and is expensive. It also isn't an out-of-the-box solution and requires an investment of time and money to get built. Costs per user can quickly add up for companies.

While I was used to the traditional salesforce platform, and quite partial to it- Lightning was useful for being able to bring new leads/opportunities into your sales pipeline and a fast speed, without having to create and dig through reports, but the results were hit or miss. The platform is much more simple, and perfect for a large corporation who would perhaps need to limit access to certain reports and files.

Using artificial intelligence to find the best opportunities to pursue may sound like a good idea, The results were hit or miss, with miss being the more likely of the two. This leaves little to no room to be strategic in finding the best leads to pursue at the right time. Certain common features seemed to be available but did not produce content- such as the “follow” option for opportunies/accounts to see when the stage or opportunity owner or anything else had changed, since there is no news feed to view this in.

Salesforce is the go-to CRM and market leader for a reason: solid lead and pipeline management. I like the integration with outlook and the depth of reporting features.

It takes some time to learn how to use it. Also the settings around standard lead fields and different lead views are confusing to me.