What it means
Salesforce is the dominant CRM in the enterprise space. It started as Sales Cloud (sales pipeline management) and has grown into a sprawling platform covering sales, service, marketing, e-commerce, and analytics. Most large companies' sales teams run on Salesforce.
Salesforce's strength is depth: virtually every workflow can be customised, every field can be added, every integration is supported. Its weakness is the same: complexity, implementation cost, and a steep learning curve.
Why it matters
If your client already runs on Salesforce, you build around it. Migrating a 500-seat sales team off Salesforce is rarely worth it. The right play is to layer specialist tools (like respond.io for messaging) on top, with Salesforce as the system of record.
If your business does not yet have a CRM, Salesforce is usually the wrong starting point for SMEs. The complexity outweighs the benefit at small scale.
Example
A regional logistics company runs Salesforce for its 80-person sales team. They want to add WhatsApp without disrupting the pipeline. The fix: respond.io handles messaging, every conversation pushes data into Salesforce via webhook, and Salesforce remains the source of truth. Sales reps see WhatsApp activity inside Salesforce; ops sees Salesforce activity inside respond.io.