Understanding Salesforce
Defining Salesforce as a Software as a Service (SaaS) Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is reductive nowadays. A CRM is a software meant to help and manage customer relationships (mostly sales and service processes) while integrating with legacy systems (where most of the data comes from, such as shipping tracking details or product logistic details, to name just a few), while SaaS means that the software is in the cloud and you have access to it without the need to take care of all the hardware and infrastructure you would need for other competitors' products.
Further reading
Read the post at https://crm.org/crmland/what-is-a-crm for a deeper explanation of what a CRM is; it will take you some time to understand how companies benefit from a well-structured and reliable CRM system.
Today, Salesforce is much more than a CRM, after successful and smart acquisitions, making the Salesforce ecosystem one of the most important cloud companies out there, bringing marketing automation features, custom application development with any language, e-commerce solutions, powerful analytics solutions, and, recently, a lot of artificial intelligence.
For the sake of this book, we'll cover the center of this ecosystem, and the oldest and richest of features, the Salesforce CRM platform, which will let you customize an environment to do practically anything you want, which might go beyond simple customer management.
Why is Salesforce so special? You decided to purchase a book about Salesforce customization, so you must have come into contact with the technology in some way.
The technological aspect is surely one of the most important aspects: the CRM platform is the center of the whole product ecosystem and it can be used to centralize all data (this is the so-called Customer 360 platform), and we can say that Salesforce is one of the first companies that centered its business in the cloud.
But in my opinion, what differentiates Salesforce from other companies and competitors is its genuine will to make people, whether they are customers, consultants, employees, or partners (let's generically call everyone stakeholders), feel part of an amazing community where profit is only one of the driving factors.
We'll talk about the Salesforce community and the Ohana value in Chapter 19, Salesforce Ohana – The Most Amazing Community Around.
Let's highlight the most important milestones in Salesforce's history, so we can have a better view of how huge Salesforce has become in these 20 years of its history.