What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is a massive infrastructure of software products that helps marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT teams connect with their customers.

Although Salesforce started as a Software as a Service (SaaS) company, it has grown into a Platform as a Service (PaaS) company.

It means that their customers can buy not only a ready-to-use Salesforce CRM system but also build their framework components (Lightning components) and custom apps on top of the Salesforce Lightning platform (Force.com), become Salesforce partners and then market these software products on its app marketplace – AppExchange.

Also, Salesforce encourages users and companies to know their platform capabilities and features better and join their online training hub, Trailhead where they can get educational resources from learning modules like “Salesforce Platform Basics” or expert support from the Trailblazer Community.

To date, Salesforce has had over 150,000 customers worldwide and is behind the scenes of business behemoths such as American Express, Sony, and the Coca-Cola Enterprise.

Also, since 2015 the company has partnered with Apple to improve apps for businesses and started collaborating with Facebook in launching Facebook Analytics for marketers in 2017.

Now, Salesforce dominates the CRM market with a 20% market share, and its share prices will only increase.

In 2019, Marc Benioff, the Salesforce co-founder and CEO was named 4th in the list of America’s most innovative leaders by Forbes.

The company is famous for its company and product acquisitions. Among the latest and most significant ones are ClickSoftware, Mulesoft, and Tableau.

What makes this company so popular, and why do so many businesses, from start-ups to Fortune 500, jump on the Salesforce train?

To understand it better, we need to dig into the Salesforce and CRM market history and the history of the CRM market first.

A Bit of Salesforce & CRM Background

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a technology aimed at improving your company’s relationship and interaction management with customers and potential customers. CRM software helps companies stay connected with their customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability.

Salesforce revolutionized technology and the CRM world in 1999, being one of the first cloud computing companies. What was unique about it? Salesforce started delivering its software through Internet browsers instead of company-hosted servers, thereby reducing building, installation, maintenance, and support costs.

Also, Salesforce enabled users to access their software from anywhere, not only from the office building.

On top of it, one of Mark Benioff’s goals was to make using CRM as easy as using Amazon services. At that time, CRM solutions were bulky, non-flexible, and challenging to operate.

In contrast, Salesforce offered a combination of simplicity, scalability, and online accessibility to data from any point on Earth in its software solution, making them an instant hit and a global leader in the market.

Salesforce Used for

Salesforce’s ecosystem hosts a number of various cloud platforms that allow you to interact with different data and service your customers in multiple capacities.

It helps you understand your customers better by providing a 360-degree view of your customer’s lifecycle, improved and centralized data management, streamlined workflows, and integrated systems in a zip.

Despite numerous products, CRM is still the lifeblood of Salesforce’s entire model, optimized for different business niches in Salesforce Clouds.

Let’s discover these significant products.