Most people working in or around Salesforce already know that it’s more than just a CRM — it’s the operational backbone for everything from sales and service to marketing and commerce. But how you use Salesforce depends entirely on your role. For some, it’s a daily development environment filled with metadata and deployments. For others, it’s a strategic platform driving cross-functional customer experiences and long-term business growth.
In this post, we’ll explore what makes Salesforce so central to modern organizations. We’ll also look at the numbers behind its market leadership and why its mix of clouds, apps, and community offers something far beyond a traditional CRM.
Whether you’re building on Salesforce or shaping strategy at the C‑suite level, you’ll find insights here to help you get more from the platform.
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is the world’s leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform. The platform enables organizations to connect their teams and deliver unified experiences at scale. It brings together critical business processes in one integrated platform, giving organizations a single source of truth to drive decisions and growth.
According to the IDC (International Data Corporation), in 2024, Salesforce led all CRM vendors with a 20.7% market share and generated the highest revenue in the CRM market.
For developers, it’s a deeply customizable environment that combines declarative tools with programmatic flexibility, helping you to build, deploy, and iterate at speed. For leaders, it’s the backbone of a strategy that connects every stage of the customer lifecycle, giving you the visibility and agility to drive growth without adding complexity.
Inside the economy and community of Salesforce
When people talk about Salesforce, they’re often referring not just to the CRM, but to the Salesforce Customer Success Platform (CSP) — a suite of clouds and services designed to connect every part of your business.
This foundation has fueled the growth of a vibrant, global community. Salesforce’s ecosystem includes developers, architects, admins, consultants, and business users. Known as “Trailblazers”, these Salesforce users master the platform, share best practices, mentor others, and help drive innovation. Programs like Salesforce MVP and events like Dreamforce celebrate and connect the community, sparking collaboration at every level.
And the economic impact reflects that scale. According to IDC, the Salesforce economy is expected to generate $2.02 trillion in new business revenues and create 11.6 million jobs worldwide between 2022 and 2028 (Salesforce Ben). From in‑house Salesforce developers to independent app builders and consultants, this ecosystem shapes not only how businesses operate — but the careers and communities that grow around them.
The community is also supported by an extensive Partner Network, from consultancies to global system integrators, as well as the AppExchange marketplace, which offers thousands of prebuilt apps and components to extend Salesforce’s functionality.
Why businesses use Salesforce
Organizations don’t just choose Salesforce because it’s popular — they choose it because it brings together the tools, data, and innovation they need to keep growing. Let’s break down why it’s become the go‑to platform for so many teams.
A single source of truth
Instead of customer information being scattered across spreadsheets, siloed apps, or individual inboxes, Salesforce centralizes it into one single source of truth. Customer data, customer interactions, and business processes live in one place, so everyone — from a sales rep to a C‑suite exec — is working with the same, up‑to‑date information. In practice this means fewer errors and less duplication.
Platform innovation
With three seasonal releases a year, Salesforce continually enhances its suite of clouds. Innovations like Agentforce embed AI into frontline service, surfacing next-best actions and significantly reducing resolution times. This rapid pace delivers increasingly powerful tools — from low-code builders like Flow to robust APIs and metadata-driven development. As a result, the platform evolves with customer expectations, supports emerging channels, and empowers teams to experiment and scale with confidence.
Scalability
Whether you’re a fast‑growing startup or a global enterprise, Salesforce scales with you. You can start small, then extend across different clouds like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, or even Commerce Cloud as your needs grow — without having to rip and replace systems. Adding clouds as and when you need them means you can evolve your Salesforce implementation at your own pace, while maintaining a unified view of customers, operations, and performance across the board.
What are the Salesforce Clouds?
The broad range of Salesforce clouds are designed to solve different challenges across the customer lifecycle. While the platform includes many specialized solutions, a few stand out as the most widely adopted and impactful. Below are some of the most popular Salesforce Clouds that teams use every day to sell smarter, support customers better, and create more connected experiences.
Sales Cloud
Salesforce Sales Cloud helps teams manage leads, contacts, and opportunities while giving full visibility into pipelines and forecasts. It automates repetitive tasks and supports collaboration, streamlining entire sales processes from lead capture to deal closure.
Service Cloud
Salesforce Service Cloud is built for customer service, enabling personalized support through case management and omnichannel tools. Features like Agentforce help automate routine tasks and guide agents with next best actions, improving response times, and customer experiences. It stretches to customer service reps too, allowing them to benefit from AI‑driven suggestions and case histories, helping them respond with speed and context.
Marketing Cloud
Salesforce Marketing Cloud powers personalized marketing campaigns across email, SMS, social, and ads. Tools for marketing automation like Journey Builder and Social Studio help teams plan, execute, and optimize marketing efforts, ensuring the right message reaches the right audience at the right time. Marketing Cloud includes tools like Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot), helping B2B teams build smarter lead nurturing workflows and align sales and marketing efforts.
Commerce Cloud
Salesforce Commerce Cloud manages digital storefronts for both B2C and B2B businesses, centralizing catalogs, orders, and customer data. It supports multi-site and multi-language operations, enabling retailers to deliver tailored shopping experiences at scale.
Experience Cloud
Formerly Community Cloud, Salesforce Experience Cloud lets organizations build branded portals and self-service hubs for customers, partners, or employees. It improves customer relationships, enhances engagement, streamlines collaboration, and reduces support costs by securely sharing data and functionality with external users.
Salesforce Platform
Salesforce Platform — formerly known as App Cloud and before that, Force.com — is the foundation for building and customizing apps within the Salesforce ecosystem. It supports both low-code and pro-code development, offering AI capabilities and data management tools to help teams create tailored solutions, automate workflows, and extend the functionality of existing Salesforce Clouds. Using AI and automation, Salesforce’s technologies help enhance customer satisfaction and deliver excellent customer service at scale.
With a wide range of Salesforce Clouds, businesses can build their own platform to connect every touchpoint across the customer journey, all while breaking down silos between departments, channels, and regions.
Who uses Salesforce?
Salesforce isn’t just for one type of business — it’s used across industries and company sizes, from startups to some of the world’s biggest brands.
Enterprise adoption
Salesforce is deeply embedded in the enterprise space. In fact, 90% of the Fortune 500 companies leveraged Salesforce to manage their business relationships in 2022, up from 83% in 2017. Household names like Spotify, Amazon Web Services, Toyota, and Walmart Inc. are among those using Salesforce to connect their data, streamline operations, and stay close to their customers.
SMB adoption
Small and mid‑sized businesses (SMBs) also rely on Salesforce to scale efficiently, automate key processes, and unlock insights they might otherwise miss. Its flexibility means you can start small — a single cloud, a single team — and expand as you grow.
Key verticals and industry clouds
Salesforce’s reach spans every industry. From financial services and healthcare to retail, manufacturing, nonprofits, and education, businesses are taking advantage of Salesforce’s industry clouds. These tailored solutions offer pre‑built functionality and compliance features designed for specific sectors, so organizations can accelerate time to value while meeting the unique demands of their markets.
Why DevOps is unique on Salesforce
DevOps on Salesforce comes with its own set of opportunities and challenges that you won’t find on other platforms. Because Salesforce is a metadata‑driven, multi‑tenant cloud-based platform, changes aren’t just code — they include configurations, declarative customizations, and complex dependencies. Traditional DevOps practices don’t always fit neatly into the same mold, so teams need tools and processes built specifically for the Salesforce platform. When done right, Salesforce DevOps gives developers and admins the ability to move fast with confidence, automate deployments, and maintain a clear audit trail — all while protecting that shared single source of truth your business relies on.
Outcomes and how to measure impact
Salesforce delivers measurable results that directly support growth, efficiency, and smarter decision‑making. But to get the most from your investment, it’s just as important to track those outcomes as it is to achieve them.
Organizations that successfully implement Salesforce often start by defining clear objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs). Whether you’re aiming to shorten deal cycles, improve support response times, or boost customer satisfaction, aligning your goals with platform capabilities is the first step. Tools like Salesforce Analytics Cloud (also known as CRM Analytics) help teams visualize KPIs and uncover trends across large datasets.
From there, it’s essential to monitor user adoption both in terms of how teams are actually using Salesforce to capture data, but also how they automate workflows and collaborate. High adoption drives higher returns, with Salesforce reporting a 26% increase in employee productivity when teams fully embrace the platform.
Tracking productivity metrics like sales velocity or case resolution time can help you see how Salesforce is improving day‑to‑day operations. For example, organizations using Einstein in Slack have saved 50,000 hours in a single quarter by automating routine tasks and surfacing relevant insights at the right time.
Finally, a proper ROI analysis will capture the broader financial impact — from 25% IT cost savings (thanks to reduced maintenance and improved system efficiency) to a 28% boost in decision‑making speed when data is centralized and accessible in real time.
Measuring the impact of Salesforce isn’t a one‑off task — it’s an ongoing process that helps teams stay aligned, optimize their usage, and demonstrate value to the business.
The future of Salesforce
Salesforce is evolving fast — and three key trends are shaping what comes next: smarter AI, connected data, and more mature DevOps.
AI-driven automation
At Dreamforce 2024, Salesforce launched Agentforce, marking a shift from predictive insights to true agentic AI. Built on the foundations of Einstein and powered by the Atlas Reasoning Engine, Agentforce enables autonomous AI agents to execute tasks independently across sales, service, and marketing.
According to Salesforce, more than 5,000 businesses — including Indeed, OpenTable, and Heathrow Airport — are already using Agentforce to streamline processes and automate customer interactions at scale.
In our latest State of Salesforce DevOps report, respondents expressed excitement around AI, but also flagged concerns around trust, governance, and control. While our questions weren’t specific to Agentforce or Data Cloud, it’s clear that agentic AI is now driving the conversation. And as adoption accelerates, so does the need for new processes that balance autonomy with accountability.
Data Cloud expansion
Salesforce’s Data Cloud has become central to how businesses activate real-time data across marketing, service, and sales. It pulls data from across systems and turns it into insights that drive personalized, scalable engagement. With new licensing models and deep platform integration, more teams are adopting Data Cloud as their customer data platform. Salesforce is continuing to expand its capabilities, strengthening its role as a foundation for better automation, smarter reporting, and faster collaboration. The entire Agentforce platform relies on Data Cloud to deliver dynamic, tailored responses — helping businesses create smarter, more connected experiences.
DevOps evolution
As Salesforce becomes more embedded in business operations, DevOps has shifted from being a developer-focused practice to a foundation that underpins the success of the entire business. Teams are waking up to the fact that DevOps goes far beyond adopting source control. By investing in observability to track and understand changes, CI/CD to ship faster, and security and compliance to meet growing audit demands, teams are able to build a complete and robust DevOps Lifecycle. Salesforce DevOps is no longer a nice-to-have — it’s how organizations scale confidently, with visibility and control at every step.
Ready to get more from Salesforce?
As Salesforce continues to evolve, with smarter AI, deeper data integrations, and a growing ecosystem of clouds and tools, the opportunity to deliver real business impact has never been greater. But unlocking that potential takes more than just buying into the platform. It takes the right strategy, the right processes, and the right tooling to support change at scale.
Whether you’re scaling development, improving collaboration, or laying the groundwork for innovation, Gearset’s DevOps platform is built to support every Salesforce team — from developers to admins to architects. With powerful tools for automated deployments, testing, backups, and monitoring, Gearset gives you the visibility and control to move fast, stay compliant, and keep your org stable as you grow. To read more about Salesforce DevOps, take a look at our The State of Salesforce DevOps Report.
