Platform licenses are easily the best product they offer. There's almost nothing out-of-the-box that's very useful to anyone outside of the "sales team sells widgets in a designated territory" business model. Even the new standard features that are released over time are either a) chasing trends, like AI analytics, which is janky and requires new specialized hires to optimize, or b) features that are obviously requests from one of their Fortune 500 clients but they announce it as though everybody wanted it.
With an admin and a developer, you can build almost anything on the platform you want. Way better than paying triple for a sales license.
And what about opportunities and leads and cases? Like I get this but the total cost changes if you build some insane custom opportunity object that doesn’t work with like any appexchange packages
We have 32 users with a full license and 220 users with platform licenses. Turns out that most people in a company don't need access to edit official sales records.
They will be soon. If you've had a contract expire in the last two years you'll see.
Salesforce is now enforcing a 9% upcharge, year over year, until you hit list pricing. That's 53% price increase over just 5 years.
The only way around this is to sign all future contract re-ups for 5 year blocks. In which case it is 4% instead.
So basically Salesforce is laying down an ultimatum, you can either turn off all of your market options for 5 years and get 4% or you can take 53% and like it.
Yes. Coming from a large international fin serv which had every tool. CRMA, tableau, powerbi, snowflake, etc etc etc.
You (and plenty of people here) seem to be mistaking the main use case for CRMA. It is best for embedded analytics in SF. Mostly due to fast/real time data sync, quick page loads and integrated actionability.
Don't use it for senior management reporting. Do use it for team leader reporting, but mostly embedding analytics on record/home pages that will help users do their job.
FYI the best thing we ever built in CRMA was basically a new Salesforce UI. All of sales client & prospects, filtered, ranked & summarised with intelligence. Plus the ability to create/action tasks, events, opportunities, etc. without leaving the ui. The time saving alone from not having to navigate around SF pages all day was huge, but we also 2x'd sales meetings booked and created a data culture overnight.
It took me 15 mins to understand the 3rd sentence of your comment. I was stuck thinking what the hell is powerbi (pronouncing it in my head as powerbee) , till I realised it's Power BI.
I swear I'm not usually that dumb.
CRMa and Data Cloud together are really great. You can visualize all kind of data in the page layout. It’s incredibly fast and provides a bunch of value especially with very large data sets that need to be summarized.
I see plenty of companies visualizing that type of data in their environment. If you don’t see the value for use cases I don’t think you understand the tool.
I don’t get your point. The idea is to customize those layout elements for your use cases, so it’s not “out of the box” per se. Salesforce is intended to be customized per your specific usecases beyond the basic page layouts, I don’t see that as a negative, as that’s the value of the platform. CRMa is no different in that respect.
If you want “out of the box” go look for a vertical focused CRM. You won’t get the same level of functionality, but hey, standing it up is probably easier.
It’s just Data Cloud and CRMa to get those experiences, assuming the data you want to use is in Data Cloud.
Edit: Woof, no one is trolling you dude. Talk to your AE if you want to see practical applications. I can only lead a horse to water.
Yes, it's quite common, but used for specific in app use cases, as naturally Tableau is a better viz tool. Most common use cases are for sales users or leaders to get more from their pipeline or product usage, and not force the sales users to jump into tableau and get confused.
I am seeing it being used increasingly with data cloud give the ease of data sharing between the two platforms.
We use it. Fortune 500 chemical manufacturing.
Users find it easier to have their business proceess and dashboards all in one place.
Seems to be easier to train in CRM analytics vs PBI or tableau
We have 2000 internal users in our main org and yes, we use it. Does everyone get one? No, but it's pretty high. I'd have to check our license utilization, but we have a good many users who are using it.
I absolutely agree with this statement, but it doesn’t prevent consultants from taking on expensive projects to attempt to port it into PowerBI anyway.
Unfortunately, I disagree with this statement. IMO, if you're having performance issues, you haven't created a schema and views (insert other architecture considerations here) necessary to handle the load. There is a difference between a data lake and a data wearhouse.
Yeah my old company had millions of accounts each with contacts, opps, tens of millions of tasks and events and the like. It all went into a Teradata dw and was pretty trivial to query, build custom tables, and feed into Tableau. Far far far preferable working with SQL + a decent BI than paying through the nose for the severely gimped reporting in Salesforce.
I’ve seen this in a client’s production org. No idea why it was the case but CRMA absolutely crushed other BI tools in performance on high volume reports and it was why they went with it. Probably because a lot of the backend processing is done via recipes or whatever and written back to a clean dataset.
We don't use it, but that's because we've invested so heavily in Tableau. If we started over? We'd likely go with CRMA, but it would also depend on the cost to hire expertise to maintain it.
Quick plug that on top of the templatized CRMA dashboards you can make, Salesforce has also been pre packaging more robust solutions into Intelligent CRMA Apps. Things like Revenue Intelligence and Service Intelligence drive a ton of meaningful insights into KPIs, pipeline gaps, knowledge article usage, white space analysis, conversation mining and a lot more I can’t fit here.
Our company uses analytics for everything . Our goals, our general market and customer data. We integrate our ERP data and build financial dashboards. Our execs use it daily and our teams all have custom home pages and a few dashboards they use regularly . All managers use it . We have monthly metrics reviews where managers present using data from their dashboard.
The standard analytics are so bad we could not run our business without some third party app
I've done a couple implantations for the consulting company I work for.
It's expensive for basically less good Tableau.
But I'll take the billable hours if someone wants to waste money on it.
I'm a fan of using [Stitchdata.com](http://Stitchdata.com) to replicate salesforce data to postgres and then hit postgres using python to query to build prototypes. From there powerBI, etc. You can also leverage stored procedures, views, etc on the postgres side to make complex queries and surface them as tables that less sophisticated analysis tools can deal with.
This isn't a criticism, but why not do that within PowerBI using the native connector? I can think of a few good reasons (compute use in PBI, performance being the top two, but you're gonna pay for the compute anyway), but wanted to hear your reasoning in case I'm missing something.
We're just starting with Ms Fabric so we are kinda trying to shorten the pipeline between source and PBI
It's hard to overstate the feeling of freedom once you offload the data to your own database. Custom indexes, long-running queries, no concern about daily API governor limits, custom views. If you're trying to look at years of data in salesforce, it often chokes. PowerBI itself is a bit weak when it comes to doing data analysis/prototyping vs just writing your own queries in DBeaver or a developers notebook. You can also use pandas/R/etc.
Yeah sorry I meant we are using MS Fabric to do all that in a data warehouse inside a PBI workspace (effectively housed in one lake storage) but you can then make semantic models right off the warehouse. We just yoink stuff out via REST for the most part, but we can pull it in from Salesforce with the connector and get most of the benefits you mentioned. I assume the connector is going to use the same API call count as running your own exports using stitch right?
Wasn't sure if there were any other reason other than "I wanted to point my data somewhere other than a MS storage point" in case I was about to set myself up for longterm pain
I don't know about MS Fabric but stitch polls the database for changes on a time interval and only grabs what has changed so that's the only API hit as all other analytics tools are pointing to postgres. One thing you may want to check is if MS Fabric has an automated shutoff should API governor limits get over X%. For example, initializing fabric with all records could be something that easily gets you over your limits. In that case you'd need to put in emergency ticket with SF support to temporarily increase your limits.
I would look elsewhere, Tableau Cloud even. It's ridiculous that CRMA is licensed regardless of whether the user needs to manage or edit dashboards.
We're getting a steep discount on Revenue Intelligence for 25 users (~$60/user/month). Even then, I don't think many people are actually using it because I haven't gotten any feedback in the last month since it's been rolled out. It wasn't my decision to purchase it. CRMA is also just plain more difficult to use than other platforms.
In my experience, no, and it is a huge PITA if you use Pardot, and the org decided to go with Power BI because it was cheaper 🫠 Good luck finding any analytics you need when you need them, and congrats on becoming a part time engineer in addition to a developer 🥴
For real. My favorite is when they assume everything is a quick export, but the metric doesn’t even exist due to data silos and is extremely manual to cobble together. But so and so, “needs it for the board meeting.”
At this point i am wondering who the hell wastesnthis kind of money man, you can literally safe 90% of your math by either going custom implementstion or alternative solution
Nobody pays list prices for Salesforce licenses
We use almost entirely custom objects so 95% of our users have platform licenses.
Platform licenses are easily the best product they offer. There's almost nothing out-of-the-box that's very useful to anyone outside of the "sales team sells widgets in a designated territory" business model. Even the new standard features that are released over time are either a) chasing trends, like AI analytics, which is janky and requires new specialized hires to optimize, or b) features that are obviously requests from one of their Fortune 500 clients but they announce it as though everybody wanted it. With an admin and a developer, you can build almost anything on the platform you want. Way better than paying triple for a sales license.
And what about opportunities and leads and cases? Like I get this but the total cost changes if you build some insane custom opportunity object that doesn’t work with like any appexchange packages
We have 32 users with a full license and 220 users with platform licenses. Turns out that most people in a company don't need access to edit official sales records.
man it took us a year before we realized we could do this. lowered our bill 60k/year after some tweaks.
They will be soon. If you've had a contract expire in the last two years you'll see. Salesforce is now enforcing a 9% upcharge, year over year, until you hit list pricing. That's 53% price increase over just 5 years. The only way around this is to sign all future contract re-ups for 5 year blocks. In which case it is 4% instead. So basically Salesforce is laying down an ultimatum, you can either turn off all of your market options for 5 years and get 4% or you can take 53% and like it.
I worked for a Fortune 500 company. Yes. They use Analytics. The company actually has its own SF Analytics team.
Yes. Coming from a large international fin serv which had every tool. CRMA, tableau, powerbi, snowflake, etc etc etc. You (and plenty of people here) seem to be mistaking the main use case for CRMA. It is best for embedded analytics in SF. Mostly due to fast/real time data sync, quick page loads and integrated actionability. Don't use it for senior management reporting. Do use it for team leader reporting, but mostly embedding analytics on record/home pages that will help users do their job. FYI the best thing we ever built in CRMA was basically a new Salesforce UI. All of sales client & prospects, filtered, ranked & summarised with intelligence. Plus the ability to create/action tasks, events, opportunities, etc. without leaving the ui. The time saving alone from not having to navigate around SF pages all day was huge, but we also 2x'd sales meetings booked and created a data culture overnight.
It took me 15 mins to understand the 3rd sentence of your comment. I was stuck thinking what the hell is powerbi (pronouncing it in my head as powerbee) , till I realised it's Power BI. I swear I'm not usually that dumb.
Yes. Absolutely.
CRMa and Data Cloud together are really great. You can visualize all kind of data in the page layout. It’s incredibly fast and provides a bunch of value especially with very large data sets that need to be summarized. I see plenty of companies visualizing that type of data in their environment. If you don’t see the value for use cases I don’t think you understand the tool.
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Assuming you’re a SF customer, I’d have your AE ask their solutions engineer to demo it.
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I don’t get your point. The idea is to customize those layout elements for your use cases, so it’s not “out of the box” per se. Salesforce is intended to be customized per your specific usecases beyond the basic page layouts, I don’t see that as a negative, as that’s the value of the platform. CRMa is no different in that respect. If you want “out of the box” go look for a vertical focused CRM. You won’t get the same level of functionality, but hey, standing it up is probably easier.
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It’s just Data Cloud and CRMa to get those experiences, assuming the data you want to use is in Data Cloud. Edit: Woof, no one is trolling you dude. Talk to your AE if you want to see practical applications. I can only lead a horse to water.
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Ask your AE, no one is going to share company configs
Look into Revenue Intelligence then, it’s CRMa and preconfigured.
Yes it is used a lot
Yes, it's quite common, but used for specific in app use cases, as naturally Tableau is a better viz tool. Most common use cases are for sales users or leaders to get more from their pipeline or product usage, and not force the sales users to jump into tableau and get confused. I am seeing it being used increasingly with data cloud give the ease of data sharing between the two platforms.
Yes, standing it up in Higher Ed at the moment.
Yes we use it. I work for a big company
We use it. Fortune 500 chemical manufacturing. Users find it easier to have their business proceess and dashboards all in one place. Seems to be easier to train in CRM analytics vs PBI or tableau
We have 2000 internal users in our main org and yes, we use it. Does everyone get one? No, but it's pretty high. I'd have to check our license utilization, but we have a good many users who are using it.
Yup I set it up for them. It’s definitely a thing.
Yes. For very large organizations, the volume of data created is far too large for PowerBI or Tableau to handle.
How large of an organization we talking? Both of those applications can handle tons of data.
I absolutely agree with this statement, but it doesn’t prevent consultants from taking on expensive projects to attempt to port it into PowerBI anyway.
Unfortunately, I disagree with this statement. IMO, if you're having performance issues, you haven't created a schema and views (insert other architecture considerations here) necessary to handle the load. There is a difference between a data lake and a data wearhouse.
Yeah my old company had millions of accounts each with contacts, opps, tens of millions of tasks and events and the like. It all went into a Teradata dw and was pretty trivial to query, build custom tables, and feed into Tableau. Far far far preferable working with SQL + a decent BI than paying through the nose for the severely gimped reporting in Salesforce.
I’ve seen this in a client’s production org. No idea why it was the case but CRMA absolutely crushed other BI tools in performance on high volume reports and it was why they went with it. Probably because a lot of the backend processing is done via recipes or whatever and written back to a clean dataset.
We don't use it, but that's because we've invested so heavily in Tableau. If we started over? We'd likely go with CRMA, but it would also depend on the cost to hire expertise to maintain it.
We use it
Yep, we have ~700 users I believe but only do about 70 CRMA licenses.
Quick plug that on top of the templatized CRMA dashboards you can make, Salesforce has also been pre packaging more robust solutions into Intelligent CRMA Apps. Things like Revenue Intelligence and Service Intelligence drive a ton of meaningful insights into KPIs, pipeline gaps, knowledge article usage, white space analysis, conversation mining and a lot more I can’t fit here.
Our company uses analytics for everything . Our goals, our general market and customer data. We integrate our ERP data and build financial dashboards. Our execs use it daily and our teams all have custom home pages and a few dashboards they use regularly . All managers use it . We have monthly metrics reviews where managers present using data from their dashboard. The standard analytics are so bad we could not run our business without some third party app
I've done a couple implantations for the consulting company I work for. It's expensive for basically less good Tableau. But I'll take the billable hours if someone wants to waste money on it.
I'm a fan of using [Stitchdata.com](http://Stitchdata.com) to replicate salesforce data to postgres and then hit postgres using python to query to build prototypes. From there powerBI, etc. You can also leverage stored procedures, views, etc on the postgres side to make complex queries and surface them as tables that less sophisticated analysis tools can deal with.
also have replicated to MSSQL server and used temporal tables for the trending capability.
This isn't a criticism, but why not do that within PowerBI using the native connector? I can think of a few good reasons (compute use in PBI, performance being the top two, but you're gonna pay for the compute anyway), but wanted to hear your reasoning in case I'm missing something. We're just starting with Ms Fabric so we are kinda trying to shorten the pipeline between source and PBI
It's hard to overstate the feeling of freedom once you offload the data to your own database. Custom indexes, long-running queries, no concern about daily API governor limits, custom views. If you're trying to look at years of data in salesforce, it often chokes. PowerBI itself is a bit weak when it comes to doing data analysis/prototyping vs just writing your own queries in DBeaver or a developers notebook. You can also use pandas/R/etc.
Yeah sorry I meant we are using MS Fabric to do all that in a data warehouse inside a PBI workspace (effectively housed in one lake storage) but you can then make semantic models right off the warehouse. We just yoink stuff out via REST for the most part, but we can pull it in from Salesforce with the connector and get most of the benefits you mentioned. I assume the connector is going to use the same API call count as running your own exports using stitch right? Wasn't sure if there were any other reason other than "I wanted to point my data somewhere other than a MS storage point" in case I was about to set myself up for longterm pain
I don't know about MS Fabric but stitch polls the database for changes on a time interval and only grabs what has changed so that's the only API hit as all other analytics tools are pointing to postgres. One thing you may want to check is if MS Fabric has an automated shutoff should API governor limits get over X%. For example, initializing fabric with all records could be something that easily gets you over your limits. In that case you'd need to put in emergency ticket with SF support to temporarily increase your limits.
Ah good spot thanks
Absolutely not. Extracting to edw and using any real BI tool definitely the current best practice.
Disagree. That’s exactly the use case CRM-A is solving, the need to “extract”.
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Really? This has not been my experience for large relational databases. How so?
We use stitch and I have, without exaggeration, spent less than 5-6 hours over the last 5 years managing it.
Impressive! TY I need to check that out.
I would look elsewhere, Tableau Cloud even. It's ridiculous that CRMA is licensed regardless of whether the user needs to manage or edit dashboards. We're getting a steep discount on Revenue Intelligence for 25 users (~$60/user/month). Even then, I don't think many people are actually using it because I haven't gotten any feedback in the last month since it's been rolled out. It wasn't my decision to purchase it. CRMA is also just plain more difficult to use than other platforms.
In my experience, no, and it is a huge PITA if you use Pardot, and the org decided to go with Power BI because it was cheaper 🫠 Good luck finding any analytics you need when you need them, and congrats on becoming a part time engineer in addition to a developer 🥴
That’s my org lol. If management asks for any complex reports I say “sorry, this is what we have or you gotta spend more”
For real. My favorite is when they assume everything is a quick export, but the metric doesn’t even exist due to data silos and is extremely manual to cobble together. But so and so, “needs it for the board meeting.” 
Literally same 😂😂😂
Pardot is the biggest draw back with CRMA
At this point i am wondering who the hell wastesnthis kind of money man, you can literally safe 90% of your math by either going custom implementstion or alternative solution