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Re:Salesforce is in talks to buy Slack by kbos87 on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @01:36PM (#25212592)
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.
Re:Salesforce is in talks to buy Slack by Touche on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @01:40PM (#25212632)
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.
Re:Salesforce is in talks to buy Slack by sb8244 on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @03:44PM (#25214102)
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.

Re:Salesforce is in talks to buy Slack by kbos87 on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @01:44PM (#25212690)
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.
Re:Salesforce is in talks to buy Slack by lobotryas on Wednesday November 25, 2020 @03:05PM (#25213662)
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.