I work in the sales and marketing world, and the best way describe Salesforce is it's the infrastructure sales is built on. Especially in the B2B world, it's just as big and heavy hitting as any of the other FAANG companies, if not more.
And I want to stress how big and clunky SFDC is even for people familiar with it. I am sure everyone and their mother can build a faster, more elegant CRM. But that misses the point. It's infrastructure. The fact that it's legacy is the feature! I'm sure we can design more elegant roads and pick smarter rail gauges today, but having consistent and interchangeable standards is important to build on. It's enough for a company to constantly track their changing market, they don't need to risk losing customers because they upgrade the CRM every couple of years.
My 2 cents is that its kind of like Microsoft Word or Excel but for Sales and Marketing teams. Nobody uses all the features of Microsoft Word or Excel which makes them super complicated and feeling clunky but take any one feature out and you'll have an angry subset of vocal customers who absolutely depend on that feature.
And I want to stress how big and clunky SFDC is even for people familiar with it. I am sure everyone and their mother can build a faster, more elegant CRM. But that misses the point. It's infrastructure. The fact that it's legacy is the feature! I'm sure we can design more elegant roads and pick smarter rail gauges today, but having consistent and interchangeable standards is important to build on. It's enough for a company to constantly track their changing market, they don't need to risk losing customers because they upgrade the CRM every couple of years.