Salesforce Targets SMB Market With Essentials Offering

Salesforce is looking to dispel the perception that its cloud-based CRM tools are the reserve of large organisations only.

To this end the firm has officially launched Salesforce Essentials, which it says is aimed at small businesses and builds upon its popular CRM platform.

Salesforce is touting Essentials as an easy to use and much less expensive CRM offering, and that the sales and service apps are “backed by the power of Salesforce Trailhead, Einstein AI, Lightning and AppExchange.

SMB offering

Salesforce said that the first Essentials apps (namely Sales Cloud Essentials and Service Cloud Essentials) are available as of now.

A video demonstration of Salesforce Essentials can be found here.

“There are more than 125 million small businesses around the world all working toward one common goal – growth,” said Mike Rosenbaum, EVP, CRM Applications at Salesforce. “With Essentials, we’ve taken the full power of Salesforce and tailored it for the unique needs of small businesses. Essentials is easy to set up and use – and it’s future-proof, so small businesses can add new capabilities quickly and easily as they grow.”

Salesforce cited the fact that small business teams typically spend 23 percent of their workdays on average manually inputting data.

The CRM giant argues this time would be better spent “finding, winning and keeping more customers,” and that Essentials can help as its sales and service apps are easy to set up, learn, use, maintain and can be expanded with new capabilities as the business grows.

“Essentials takes advantage of all the Salesforce innovation that is delivered in three major releases per year,” the firm said. “It’s the same trusted CRM platform used by 83 percent of Fortune 500 companies, now optimized for small businesses.”

Essentials will provide small businesses with free access to Trailhead, Salesforce’s interactive, online learning environment.

Essentials also includes Einstein Activity Capture, which automates manual data entry to make sales and service reps more productive.

Platform scaling

The Lightning and the Salesforce Mobile App (which contains a complete view of a customer’s history) will also allow for work to be carried out faster, as relevant information is provided in one unified console, which can be easily customised.

And Essentials can be scaled so it grows as the business grows.

The Salesforce Essentials apps (Sales Cloud Essentials and Service Cloud Essentials) are available now and priced at $25 (£17.91) per user per month.

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