I think Salesforce is fine for large companies with teams of sales reps and a well staffed IT department, but it's overkill for most small to medium sized companies with just a few sales reps. If you can run on a creaky set of excel sheets, access would have been a far better and much more flexible solution. With minimal training it could be set up and run by a competent excel user.

Salesforce admin is a pain in the ass. There's mandatory updates 3 times a year that require low level software development expertise in order for the admin to understand what will break, building new functionality essentially requires tens of thousands of dollars of consultant development, and god help you if you want to run a report that involves objects that don't have a direct parent-child relationship.

I'm an analyst, and because I know how a database works, Salesforce stuff gets dumped on my desk all the time. I actively seek out alternative systems for everything it does, and would dearly love to see us drop this eye-watering expense.