Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

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I worked on a "Salesforce killer" that was actually meant to make Salesforce stronger by fixing its biggest known problem: that sales people hate using it. Our goal was to let sales people send text messages, which we would then use NLP to interpret correctly, and then add to salesforce. A sales person might sell a million bottles of shampoo to Hilton Hotels, then she might get in her car and drive home, on the way home she could talk to her phone, using voice-to-text to create the text message that would go to us. We would then use NLP to convert that text to appropriate objects and actions in Salesforce. The idea is that no sales person would ever again have to log into to Salesforce.

Of course, the leadership of the startup was a complete disaster, and the startup ended as a disaster, so we were never able to fulfill the potential of that vision, but I do think the future must involve NLP technology that allows sales people to talk to CRMs.

For anyone interested, I wrote a fairly popular book about this misadventure, How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps:

https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-eboo...

I may have too limited an imagination, but using NLP to interact with a computer UI is a Very Hard Problem. To me it feels like the old joke you know, 1 - Use NLP to interact with SalesForce competitor. 2 - something something. 3 - profit! Apologies in advance for the snark, I'm really curious.

I mean, how much time would be really saved by talking to the phone vs more traditional inputs? Is it the dictaction which saves most time? If not, what is?

It’s the advantage (like they said) that you don’t have to login into Salesforce. This tool slows them down, and via voice they don’t have to use the salesforce application directly. Imagine you have awesome ideas and plans and have 8 hours a day. But if you can only be productive for ~6, you’re losing a ton of time just because the tool is bad designed/planed/slow/{insert more words here}.

If you want more about that, I would recommend reading the book. Quite interesting read :).

I just feel that "via voice" is what makes me having doubts. Almost any tool could be adapted to a "via voice" interface, but which tools will become better for it?

I have a hunch that almost any custom interface on top of Salesforce would improve it.

Yes, I guess that’s the thing. The custom interface would be voice commands then.

And if a voice interface is a great improvement, how much of that is because a voice interface is a good choice for this application, and how much is because Salesforce sucks.

I wonder how much of that could be solved by Siri + Shortcuts (+ Salesforce)

It is still a good goal. Having to input details into forms is why even the most user-friendly CRMs can still not be enough to get staff to use them. Unless you work in a trendy youngish hipster startup, most companies outside of that bubble have the constant challenge of getting employees to use new tools. I have a client company whose employees only use WhatsApp and email, barely use OneDrive and resist using Slack or Salesforce or any other tools.

If they could just dictate a note and a contact record in Salesforce gets updated, and it does so with near 100% reliability, that would definitely be a game changer.

Yes, I also think logging calls/meetings will become a thing of the past with LLMs and good integrations.

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