Salesforce integrates with everything.

Every time someone at your company uses your phone system to call a customer, it is auto-logged in Salesforce. Every email is logged. Every sale, every transaction, every interaction.

Now when "Bob the amazing Sales Guy" leaves you have a central repository of every contact he's made in every company he's worked with on your behalf. This means you build institutional knowledge instead of tribal knowledge.

So now lets say a couple years have gone by, and you want to publish a white paper on pie consumption, so you hand the project off to your research and analytics team. Thanks to Salesforce they have knowledge of every person your company has ever contacted about pies, and therefore have a great jumping off point to start with interviews for the whitepaper.

This is how it's supposed to work. That's the promise that sold me on using it for my business for a couple of years. It never delivered. Huge waste of time and money. Never again.

This is actually a really good explanation.

...and testcase_delta's reply is a pretty accurate & common outcome. Snake-oil salesmen masquerading as a high quality software service. At best it's just lies and taped together functionality, which the buyer has to deal with post-sale. Name a high quality tech company using salesforce...

You have a sales team out talking to those grocery stores. You need to keep track of the relationships they have with those stores, the conversations they have, where those stores are along the journey to becoming customers. You want to understand how your marketing expenses influence that process. Further downstream, you’ll probably want to connect sales data to those stores over time to understand patterns and manage your operations. These are all pretty common use cases for something like Salesforce and there is a pretty widely accepted data model that most companies adopt to do these sorts of things which Salesforce out of the box is built around.

This is what I thought Salesforce was, and what I meant by a sales lead tool. I still don't get how this makes my pie making company a SaaS product though.

It doesn't turn your pie making company into a SaaS product. All of the back-office, sales, marketing, relations can be kept in SFDC (cloud SaaS) though.

The reason I don't call it a sales lead tool is that is about 10% of their use case now. They've expanded significantly and companies use them for just about everything.

I see what you mean. I understood the parent comment to mean that Salesforce can be used to basically build a bespoke saas app that you use at the heart of your operations, but I’d agree that doesn’t change the nature of your business as a commercial baker in this example.

Salesforce is a CRM. If you want to call that “sales lead tool” instead then go for it. Doesn’t change why people buy it.

Salesforce is a SaaS because it’s in the cloud. The first company to take a big het on the Cloud, in fact.

If you’re still confused, then spend an hour or so reading their marketing literature and kicking the tires in their free Developer Orgs. Simple as.