I worked for a roughly ~80 person B2B SaaS startup whose primary product was a Salesforce managed package tailored to a specific industry. We had around 8000 customers at the time I left the company.

Salesforce as an internal sales-team-management tool is a very different beast than Salesforce as a product delivery platform, so I'll try to address both.

As an internal tool to manage a sales team, Salesforce shines. It provides a simple, extensible UI for sales reps of all skill levels to coordinate their activities, and provides lots of hooks for integrations of various other products. For example, our marketing team generated leads using other software, and could easily pipe their lead data into Salesforce, where it was easily acted upon by sales reps. Salesforce quickly became _the_ source of truth for the reporting activities of the sales department as a result of the ease of getting data into it. Additionally, Salesforce's customizability was a huge asset - when the sales team wanted to add fields to their core CRM data tables (Leads, Opportunities, Contacts, etc.) - they could do it themselves without involving the engineering team at all, because Salesforce's configuration-first interface enabled them to do so. Eventually it got complex enough that a full-time Salesforce admin was hired, but for smaller teams that might not ever be necessary. Salesforce can do a lot more advanced things if you add custom code to it, too.

As a platform for delivering products, it has a whole litany of problems that make it difficult to work with, so I wouldn't recommend using it for that purpose unless you have someone around who has adequate experience to avoid the pitfalls. Salesforce "orgs" are essentially primitive containers - they're instances of the Salesforce core product that are isolated from one another on a multitenant cluster infrastructure. A managed package is essentially a custom configuration for the Salesforce core product - including database schemas, permission assignments, custom code, and more. When you sell a managed package, it is installed in your customers' orgs and all custom code is obfuscated from their view. This is a neat solution for preserving IP, but it can cause huge headaches when your customer base grows. Without adequate preventive measures, customers (used to the customizability of Salesforce) might build their own org-specific customizations that rely on functionality in a specific version of your managed package, and then downstream changes to your managed package can break their custom functionality, leading to angry phone calls and support nightmares. Because of this, we had to be extremely judicious with our update pushing, which slowed down development progress substantially. Until very recently with the advent of Salesforce DX, local development was extremely difficult as well - we essentially had to provision many sandbox orgs for our developers, and the always-running nature of those orgs, combined with the limited number of allowed sandbox refreshes, led to lots of problems with unwanted data artifacts hanging around. This made bugs quite hard to reproduce in some cases.

Since Salesforce has evolved as a platform for roughly 20 years, there's a lot to learn. Salesforce's whole ecosystem at this point probably has a similar complexity to AWS (as a whole). As such, if you ever want to do really advanced stuff with Salesforce, I cannot understate how important it is to bring someone on board that has lots of tribal knowledge of the platform before trying to implement it. You're probably fine without such a person if your need is for a simple internal sales CRM, but if you're trying to go beyond that niche, a good Salesforce admin, developer, or architect is worth their weight in gold. There's a reason the big consulting companies make tons of money selling Salesforce implementations - it's hard to do it right the first time, and an improperly managed implementation can spiral out of control really quickly. Fortunately, Salesforce's docs have gotten way better in recent years with the advent of Trailhead, and they've made strides to improve the developer experience as well.