Lionel Sujay Vailshery
Research expert covering cloud computing and emerging tech industries
Salesforce.com - statistics & facts
Salesforce, best known for its customer relationship management (CRM) product, was founded as a cloud computing and enterprise software as a service (SaaS) company in 1999. Software is one of the fastest growing categories of enterprise IT, and global spending on it is expected to amount to around 856 billion U.S. dollars in 2023. Salesforce popularized the SaaS model, offering B2B, B2C, and B2B2C e-commerce products.
In addition, it continues to expand its solutions which run entirely in the cloud. This service model eliminates expensive in-house hardware, computer servers, or setup and maintenance costs for customers. With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), Einstein 1 Platform was introduced to unify data, AI, CRM, development, and security into a single, comprehensive platform.
Salesforce products
The Salesforce CRM service is offered through several cloud products. These include Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, Analytics Cloud, App Cloud, and IoT Cloud. The combination of these products enables organizations to manage business processes by integrating customer collaboration with other data in a central place. Notably, most Salesforce CRM customers belong to either professional services, manufacturing, or banking and financial services.
Salesforce competitors in the CRM market
Salesforce took approximately 22 percent market share of the global CRM applications market in 2023. Its competitors include major software companies such as SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft. Further, there are many smaller and less well-known companies in the market offering their CRM software to businesses that strive to align customer service teams with sales. These may be more interesting for smaller businesses that do not need a wealth of features such as Salesforce’s offers.
Outlook
In the future, adoption of CRM products is expected to remain strong, as the software becomes more intelligent and thus contributory in developing better customer-centric insights and experiences. To maintain its lead, Salesforce partners with companies including Accenture and IBM to deliver better industry-specific solutions and more sophisticated customer intelligence. In addition, Salesforce offers training to customers to empower them to get the most out of the platform, as well as badges and certifications to professionals to demonstrate their expertise.
