Salesforce

Salesforce is a company from San Francisco that offers programs for businesses. These programs don’t run on your own computer, but in Salesforce’s data centers. Customers pay monthly per employee and access the software through a browser. The focus is on everything related to customers: who made an inquiry, who made a purchase, who filed a complaint. Salesforce was founded in 1999 and is today one of the largest software companies in the world. On the New York Stock Exchange, its stock is traded under the ticker symbol CRM.

The company that made the software subscription big

Before Salesforce, companies bought software as a package and installed it on their own servers in the basement. That was expensive, slow, and had to be laboriously renewed every few years. Salesforce offered the same capability as a rental model over the internet. This principle is now called Software as a Service, or SaaS for short. Almost every modern software company now works this way.

Economically, this is attractive because revenue is predictable. A customer doesn’t pay once, but again every month. Analysts therefore look less at individual sales than at recurring revenue. Salesforce generates annual revenue of around 35 billion dollars and employs several tens of thousands of people.

For the AI industry, Salesforce is additionally interesting because it holds enormous amounts of business data. Whoever manages customer data can sell AI features built on top of it. That is exactly what the company has been trying to do for a few years now.

What’s actually inside a CRM system

The core is the so-called CRM, short for Customer Relationship Management. You can think of it as a very large, shared address book with a memory. For each customer, it stores phone calls, emails, offers, and outstanding invoices. All departments see the same status, whether sales, marketing, or support.

Technically, many customers share the same software and the same servers. Experts call this multi-tenancy: the data is strictly separated, but the underlying program is the same. This allows Salesforce to roll out updates centrally without customers having to install anything. Customizations are made through toolkits that let companies create their own fields, workflows, and reports.

Around the CRM, the company has integrated numerous acquisitions. These include the chat service Slack, the analytics platform Tableau, and the data integrator MuleSoft. Newer are AI offerings that draft responses to customers or evaluate sales opportunities. Salesforce markets such systems, which handle tasks partly on their own, as agents.

Where you encounter the name without noticing

As a private individual, you almost never use Salesforce directly. You encounter it indirectly when you call a hotline or open a chat on a company website. The employee on the other end often sees your history in a Salesforce window. Automatic confirmation emails or surveys after a purchase also frequently come from such systems.

In business news, the name appears for other reasons. Quarterly results are seen as a mood barometer for how much companies are currently spending on software. Media also report on acquisitions, layoffs, and disputes about the usefulness of AI features.

A common misconception: Salesforce does not sell finished products for end consumers like a phone manufacturer. The customer is always a company, a government agency, or an organization. Related but not identical are providers like SAP, Microsoft, or HubSpot, which offer similar systems. The difference lies mainly in the focus: SAP comes from accounting and inventory management, Salesforce from sales.