Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM platform that helps businesses manage sales, marketing, and customer service. Here's a simplified summary of what Salesforce does and its benefits:

Imagine you have a retail business with physical stores and an online presence. With Salesforce, you can:

1. Centralize Customer Data: Store all customer information in one place, including contact details, purchase history, and preferences.
2. Track Sales Opportunities: Monitor leads, prospects, and deals throughout the sales pipeline, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
3. Automate Sales Processes: Streamline repetitive tasks, like assigning leads to the right salesperson, saving time and ensuring prompt follow-ups.
4. Enable Collaboration: Foster teamwork by allowing team members to share customer information, communicate internally, and work together efficiently.
5. Generate Reports and Insights: Create custom reports and dashboards to gain insights into sales metrics, and team activities, and identify areas for improvement.

In addition, Salesforce offers Custom development and API capabilities for integrating with external systems and building custom applications. Automation features automate routine tasks and AI-powered automation provides intelligent insights and recommendations.

By using Salesforce, you can streamline sales operations, improve customer engagement, and make data-driven decisions to drive sales growth.

Please note that this is a simplified summary, and Salesforce offers a wide range of features and capabilities beyond what's mentioned here.

The Salesforce company was founded by former Oracle executive “Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez” in 1999, and was one of the world’s first cloud computing companies. Because of Salesforce simplicity and speed, they quickly grew and become so popular.

On the other hand, the other software companies requiring the servers to host, Salesforce led the charge with off-premise, or in other words, ‘cloud computing’.

The Salesforce launches many products over the last 18 years. Here are some popular products:

Sales:

• Sales Cloud: It manages contacts and track opportunities form any desktop or device with the world’s #1 CRM solution.
• Salesforce CPQ: It is used to deliver accurate contracts, proposals, and quotes. And it also automates the revenue, subscription and billing recognitions.

Service:

• Service Cloud: It gives our customers the faster and smarter support they deserve and now expects.
• Field Service Lightning: It connects our entire workforce to deliver intelligent and productive onsite service, and transform the customer experience in the field.

Marketing:

• Marketing Cloud: It builds 1 to 1 customer journeys with the world’s most powerful digital marketing platform.
• Salesforce DMP: It captures, unifies, and activate our data to build valuable customer experiences.
• Pardot: It will accelerate the pipeline and drive sales with B-2-B marketing automation.

Commerce:

• Commerce Cloud Digital: It engages shoppers across all digital channels with our personalized, innovative, and AI-powered commerce solution for marketing, merchandising, promotions, fulfillment, and more.
• Commerce Cloud Order Management: It is the shopping journey which doesn’t end once an order is placed. It gives our customers the “buy, service, and fulfill anywhere” experience through real-time inventory visibility, allocation logic, and order lifecycle management across all channels.
• Commerce Cloud Store: It personalizes customer experiences with a comprehensive, mobile-first solution for point of sale and store operations- and revolutionize your business.

Productivity:

• Quip: It prepares checklists, spreadsheets, and documents that your whole team can easily edit and share with Quip-embed live Salesforce data that automatically updates so you never have to worry that it’s out of date.

Platform:

• Platform Cloud: This will find all the tools and services that we need to Build, Run, Manage, and Optimize apps and also extend the power of the CRM on the world’s #1 enterprise cloud platform.

Analytics:

• Einstein Analytics: After coming to Einstein there no more waiting’s for analysts or IT. Now anybody can ask questions, drill into data, and find new opportunities with our self-service platform.
• Sales Analytics: It delivers customizable sales insights to any device at the right time with our new app which brings the power of Einstein Analytics to our CRM products.
• Service Analytics: It gains a deeper understanding of our services team’s performance-turn insights into actions that drive better customer experiences with the first analytics app built for Service Cloud.

Community:

• Community Cloud: It empowers customers, partners, and employees to tackle anything, anywhere, with an online collaboration platform.
• Chatter: It turns social into a powerful business tool, and connect employees with the files, data, and expertise they need.