Why Salesforce Gets a Bad Reputation

Spend a few minutes on Reddit and you’ll see it:

“Salesforce is clunky.”
“Salesforce is slow.”
“Salesforce is painful to use.”

Yet the same platform runs some of the world’s most efficient sales, service, and operations teams.

So what gives?

The uncomfortable truth is this: Salesforce isn’t hard, bad implementations are.

At JSBC Labs, we rarely see Salesforce fail because of technical limitations. We see it fail because of poor design decisions made early and left uncorrected.

Salesforce Is a Platform, Not a Product

Salesforce does not enforce a single way of working.
That flexibility is powerful — and dangerous.

You can:

Build elegant, intuitive workflows

Or bury users under fields, buttons, and tabs

Salesforce allows both.

When teams complain that Salesforce is “hard to use,” what they’re really saying is:

“This system was not designed around how we work.”

The Most Common Salesforce Implementation Mistakes

Across dozens of projects, the same issues appear again and again:

1. Designing for Objects Instead of People

Users don’t care about objects, relationships, or schemas. They care about completing tasks quickly.

2. Over-Customising Too Early

Custom code where configuration would suffice leads to technical debt and higher costs.

3. No Role-Based Experience

Executives, sales reps, admins, and service agents should never see the same screens.

4. Treating Salesforce as an IT Project

Salesforce is an operational tool. Without business ownership, it quickly drifts.

5. No Post-Go-Live Ownership

Go-live is the beginning, not the finish line.

What Good Salesforce Design Looks Like

When Salesforce is implemented properly:

• Users see only what they need
• Automation handles repetitive work
• Data is captured naturally, not forcefully
• Processes flow without friction
• Training requirements drop dramatically

Good Salesforce design is often invisible — and that’s the goal.

Why “Clunky” Is a Design Smell, Not a Platform Flaw

Salesforce performance issues are rarely about the platform itself. They usually trace back to:

• Overloaded page layouts
• Poorly designed automations
• Excessive validation rules
• Lack of data governance

Salesforce is engineered to handle massive scale.
If it feels slow, something has been built incorrectly.

How JSBC Labs Approaches Salesforce Implementations

We start with one question:

“What does a good day at work look like for your users?”

From there, we:

• Design workflows before objects
• Automate before adding fields
• Simplify before customising
• Scale intentionally

Our goal is not to “use all of Salesforce.”
It’s to use the right parts exceptionally well.

Final Thought

Salesforce is not inherently complex.
It’s simply honest.

It reflects the quality of the thinking behind it.

When Salesforce feels hard, it’s a signal — not a verdict.

Fix the design, and the platform delivers.