I kind of built my career on it. While reading some forums, including some threads on HN, I see a lot of misconceptions about Salesforce. When it started,it used to be purely software for sales and how to manage leads,deals and contacts. However it's been around for 20 years and now it covers much more. For instance,I work for a company that delivers training to thousands of people every year.The entire business runs on Salesforce.The sales manage their leads(tens of thousands) and interactions with them(calls,emails,sms), while operations book the courses, customer service manage complaints, finance team tracks products, invoicing,and vendor manager tracks their performance, contracts and etc. At any given time I can go on Salesforce and see how much money the company made,what are the issues, how's marketing doing and etc. Alternatively to this kind of unified system is a mish mash of number of applications, endless Excel spreadsheets and bottomless email server. Since I joined, the company tripled revenues,yet we have same number of people managing training and customer service...The sales reps pulling in twice as much of revenue. I know there are a lot of developers here on HN: even if you don't want to use Salesforce platform,you can leverage free developer edition for rapid prototyping.You could literally mock up things within hours,including interface,database and sometimes even automations. For those who are planning to hire sales people: the absolute majority of decent ones( especially in the US and to some degree in the UK) most likely used it in their previous jobs and it is very likely they will expect it in your company as well. What companies use it? All of them,including Google,Amazon,Coke, Shell, Barclay's and etc..