While Salesforce's core functionality is, and has been, as a Sales CRM suite, it has expanded to other areas since it's inception in 1999. Today, it is able to handle a wide range of responsibilities for day-to-day operation of a business. It is widely expandable and customizable, and often acts as the centralized "source-of-truth" for business orgs.
Its current available offerings include:
- CRM (customer relationship management)
- Business approvals
- Business process automation (including declarative automation tools for point-and-click admins)
- Marketing automation
- Business enablement, including guided training prompts and optional LMS add-ons
- Suite of developer tools, via sfdx and related packages
- Multiple APIs for developers, including Tooling, Metadata, SOAP, and REST APIs
- Integration with 3rd-party tools (including data lakes such as Snowflake)
- AppExchange add-on marketplace
- Data encryption
- Profile, role, and user-level permissions
- Customer and Partner communities