Before you buy Salesforce's new Shiny Thing, remember the old ones

AgentOmniWhatever is the current Shiny Thing Salesforce would like you to be excited about. Here’s how *some* of Salesforce’s past Shiny Things played out.

They’re often focused on addressing specific business requirements and built on rigid structures hyper-fixated on that. Recurring theme:

💎 Salesforce OG: Architectural decisions made about Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, and Campaigns 3 decades ago still constrain the platform today.

💎 Service Cloud: Rigid SLA and Entitlements structures had customers building elaborate workarounds.

💎 CPQ. Designed for widget-style pricing. I’ll admit I haven’t worked with it since it evolved, but it’s no longer being sold so 🤷🏻‍♀️

Alternatively, Salesforce buys an existing rigid structure, jams it onto the side of the platform, and never fully integrates or fixes the inherent zero-day issues:

💎 Pardot and Marketing Cloud. Third-party marketing tools that got enough traction to be purchased and crowned Shiny Things but never truly merged into the core CRM.

💎 Financial Services Cloud. You’ve seen my rants, or can in my Featured section if you'd like.

💎 Omniscript (OmniStudio). Low-code flows that promised flexibility (but wait, didn’t we already have the infrastructure for that in Flows?).

Don't get me wrong, you can get value from those Shiny Things, but too often they’re strewn with clunky functionality and limitations, especially for customers who try to use Salesforce the way Salesforce preaches: customize it, make it yours.

Those Products could have evolved into the promises of the AEs but… then there’s a new Shiny Thing! And the old Shiny Thing? That’s hard to make work the way you whiny customers want it to. But did we mention there’s this new Shiny Thing over here?

So that’s my warning. I’m seeing a lot of Agent Specific-Business-Requirement products rolling out, and I’ve been to this rodeo before. Before you sign, evaluate the nitty gritty. Don't feel qualified to do this yourself? Find someone who's technically skilled in Salesforce and skilled at understanding business requirements and solutioning for them. I know a few. 😉

Will Agent Shiny Thing be fully suited to your specific requirements? Is it maybe too specific to your requirements in a way that won't stand the test of time? Could it be just another of Salesforce's Shiny Things, to be tossed aside like a child's former favorite toy, trapped in the back of the closet beneath a pile of dirty clothes? All worth considering before you sign the dotted line for that Shiny Salesforce SKU.