I think of Salesforce like an octopus that puts immovable tentacles into the organisation that are almost never removed. It provides as much opportunity to be misused as possible!
The basic answer is that when an certain type of organization gets to a certain size, they hire professional full-time sales people, and those sales people have been trained their whole career on Salesforce, so that's what they're familiar with and that's what they're going to want to use.
I've tried twice to buck this trend at small startups. I was successful in getting the companies to use a lightweight, elegant, user-friendly, not-Salesforce CRM system when they were small (<10 people). And everyone was happy. And in both cases, as soon as the organization got large enough that the professional sales people came on board, they said "what is this garbage where is my Salesforce", and that was that.
This is a VERY hard pattern to break, unfortunately.
I did the same thing. Then the lightweight, elegant, user-friendly, not-Salesforce CRM system that I had convinced the company to depend on (Highrise CRM) was mothballed by 37 Signals. Yes it's possible to export data, but there are usually things that we couldn't export (like notes and files/attachments) and it was a nightmare I will forever avoid at all costs.
After another client found that their Batchbook CRM solution was also being EOL'd, I started to feel like going for the biggest most well-known market-leading CRMs ends up being a good choice just from the point-of-view of data longevity and peace of mind.
I really wish 37 Signals open-sourced Highrise, or that CiviCRM or any of the other open source CRMs managed to get to a level of polish and ease of use so that I could ditch Salesforce, but I've yet to find anything that could justify such a move away from the Salesforce behemoth.
> I have never used nor worked at an organization that is built on top of Salesforce.
You probably do. Salesforce has all kinds of different products from Slack to Mulesoft and Tableau. Salesforce starts their pipeline by solving one problem, making that work well from a business ROI perspective, and then they pitch you on another and another and another with package pricing. This is basically the Oracle model and how Larry got his blood money.
Benioff started his career at Oracle and was a prodigy there - becoming the youngest ever VP or something like that. It's not surprising if his playbook is inspired by Larry's.
