Imagine a company that is driven by actual salespeople β like car dealerships, or any telemarketing or charity operation β where someone is making phone calls and trying to make sales.
Salesforce is their CRM, a Customer Relation Manager. You can get a complete history of an individual and their buying history within your company.
I worked for a travel-adjacent company a couple years ago, the entire thing was predicated on a half-dozen sales reps making handfuls of deals worth $50k+ each. Nothing like e-commerce. Salesforce was their Rolodex and their beating heart.
That said, it isn't a good CRM. It's nineties tech that became very essential to very very big companies. Someone else here described it as akin to PhpMyAdmin and he absolutely nailed it.
I think Salesforce is likely to be worth more someday for their Slack acquisition, not unlike how Meta is worth more for Instagram than Facebook.
What this results in is that upper management sees all the features and capabilities in a flashy sales pitch, they close a deal with Salesforce (probably after some less-than-noble negotiation tactics deployed by SF salespeople), and then the mandate comes from the top: "We must implement Salesforce!" And all the tech people look awkwardly at each other not having the faintest fucking clue what that even means.
It seems to be a hard and fast rule of the universe that the more things your thing is designed to do, the worse it does all of those constituent things.
I'm sure it has some actual legitimate functions too but they're so utterly lost in a deluge of MBA bullshit that I don't think it's remotely worth the price. We don't have one where I work. We run a pieces-parts setup of custom apps alongside ancient code in our website, and it definitely has issues and we are addressing, but the CEO has no desire to buy anything like Salesforce. He calls it "data noise:" it looks like data and it looks important but it doesn't mean shit.