Salesforce (SFDC) provides the customer relationship management (CRM) solution where your entire sales team will view prospects and do data entry on their status in the sales cycle. People build entire industry-specific solutions on top of its (IMO horrid) API and have been doing so since the early 2000s; they had an App Exchange long before Apple had a consumer-facing App Store: https://9to5mac.com/2011/08/26/salesforce-boss-tells-a-story...

It's absurdly complex and had a reputation for being annoyingly slow for any user interaction (though reportedly that's improved in the recent half-decade). If your needs are unusual (say, for a B2B2C multi-sided marketplace where dynamics are counterintuitive and your schema constantly changes) it may be difficult to iterate fast enough with Salesforce. But if you're doing any kind of B2B sales, and you want something that everyone knows, that will grow (however painfully) with your organization, it's the default choice.

Also worth noting that they acquired Slack last year for $27B, and overall have a $128B market cap.

I was in the same boat and finally did an implementation just recently. Salesforce is a crazy beast. At it's heart is really just a CRM. A tool for tracking and nurturing customer relationships. Different businesses have very different kinds of relationships with customers if you're like a giant retailer vs something like selling industrial equipment to manufacturers so making a tool to cover all those cases is hard. Salesforce to me really feels like a UI-on-a-database kinda tool surrounded by a load of data manipulation tools. It's also rife with DSLs (Apex, derived from Java and two custom flavors of SQL). The big thing about Salesforce is just how big it is. It integrates with everything, they have a robust app marketplace and dozens of integration partners, they've acquired loads of complementary software companies like Exact Target, Tableau, Mulesoft and now Slack and Heroku. It's expensive has a ton of operational overhead but everyone in that domain knows what it does and how to use it.

I was in a similar situation until Retool blog enlightened me [0].

[0] What's Salesforce. https://retool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers/

I added some code for our Salesforce integration, but I never actually used it, nor did I see it used. So I don't have any insights there beyond what's already on their own page.