There are two scenarios where you must learn Salesforce. If you don’t, you are squandering an opportunity:
First, are you building or working at a SaaS company? If so, you “must” learn Salesforce. Because it’s is the largest and most successful SaaS company. At $11 billion in ARR and growing ~30%. You need to understand intuitively why that is. Even if you aren’t building something remotely like it.
and
Second, are you building a 10+ person traditional sales team? If so, get to know Salesforce. Your VP of Sales, your reps, and everyone will already be using it. Don’t force them to use something else they don’t know. And Salesforce CRM scales. It’s clearly the default choice for 50–100+ reps. The earlier you start, the less painful it will be to migrate your data into Salesforce.
But …
If neither of those are the case. If you aren’t in SaaS or building SaaS. And your sales team is tiny or nonexistent.
Use something like Pipedrive. It has 50,000 customers and is 10x easier to use.
…
We run SaaStr, Inc. on Salesforce. We’ll have 20,000 attendees, 200 sponsors, 1,000 prospects, and hundreds of email campaigns to manage. Even with a tiny team, we need the power and familiarity of Salesforce here. Our VP of Sales knows it. Our Director of Marketing knows it. I know it. It’s powerful.
But we manage our lead funnel for the little ole’ SaaStr CoSelling Space in Pipedrive.
