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Comment by KerrAvon | Hacker News Reader

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KerrAvon

> I still don't know what Salesforce is

“Salesforce is the most popular CRM in the industry.” It’s like the second paragraph of TFA.

I know people who work at Salesforce, and I learned some things from this article.

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Ah yes, "Customer relationship management", everyone knows exactly what that is.

people don’t explain exactly what a database is, why would a common business software need explanation?

If you're familiar with CRMs you wouldn't be asking what Salesforce is, in the same way that if you were familiar with databases you wouldn't be asking what SQL is.

"Customer relationship management" - which is basically "manage sales and marketing".

Which is a huge problem in organisations of all sizes.

I might be biased here (having worked on a CRM before), but it does sound like the old joke about "What's an Internet Service Provider?" to me.

...It's a provider for your internet service. The explanation isn't going to get any easier than that.

A CRM is where you manage the relation to your customers - whatever that means depends on the vendor and customizations. Run analytics who to upsell to, send marketing material to, get reminded that a customer's subscription is running out, ....

Right. It isn’t clear to me why a CRM needs an entire application builder inside.

I work with Salesforce. Application builder in Salesforce means adding standard and custom objects ( db tables) and additional components ( widgets) to a single 'app'. All these components come with tons of standard features ( e.g. suggestion engine tied to sales process) and more can be built on top of it. For instance, I was sick and tired of the sales team manually updating lead records, so I've created a component that would query an address database based on the postcode entered and would update the records automatically.

Customization. Every company has their own processes, procedures, etc. that are just a little bit different. Often they track data elements specific to their industry.

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