Salesforce Unleashes Essentials for Small Businesses

Available today, Salesforce says the apps enable every small business to grow and innovate faster.

March 13, 2018

5 Min Read
Small Business Owner

PRESS RELEASE — SAN FRANCISCO—March 13, 2018— Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the global leader in CRM, today announced Salesforce Essentials—easy-to-use, intelligent apps for small business teams, built on the world’s #1 CRM platform. The first Essentials apps—Sales Cloud Essentials and Service Cloud Essentials—are available today, enabling every small business to grow and innovate faster with the power of Salesforce.

“There are more than 125 million small businesses around the world all working toward one common goal—growth,” said Mike Rosenbaum, EVP, CRM Applications, 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.”

Small business teams spend 23 percent of their workdays on average manually inputting data—time that should be spent finding, winning and keeping more customers. Essentials helps small businesses save time with sales and service apps that are easy to set up, learn, use, maintain and add new capabilities as their businesses grow.

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

With Essentials, small businesses can:

  • Get started fast and learn easily with Trailhead: 62 percent of small businesses say training would help them improve their operations, but they’re constrained by costs and time. Trailhead, Salesforce’s interactive, online learning environment, is free and guides Essentials customers through a fast, fun and easy setup. In addition, Trailhead gives anyone, regardless of their education level or background, the opportunity to develop skills that span Salesforce products, app development and even business skills such as public speaking.

  • Work smarter with Einstein artificial intelligence built in: Essentials includes Einstein Activity Capture, which automates manual data entry to make sales and service reps more productive. When reps receive emails and calendar events, Einstein automatically adds messages to the appropriate record in Salesforce, freeing up the rep’s time to focus on engaging with customers. All of the captured messages provide a rich history of engagement with each customer, giving all team members the context they need to make the next customer interaction more personalized and productive.

  • Work faster with Lightning and the Salesforce Mobile App: Built on the Salesforce Lightning framework, Essentials has a consumer-like experience optimized for any device so customers can work the way they want, increasing productivity. Relevant information is surfaced in one unified console, modernizing processes and making workflows more intuitive. In addition, users can easily customize their consoles by simply dragging and dropping components most relevant to them.

  • Scale as they grow with a complete platform: Small businesses often make technology buying decisions based on what they need now rather than what they will need in the future, costing them more time and money on upgrades and integrations in the long run. Because Essentials is built on the world’s #1 CRM platform, small businesses don’t have to worry about outgrowing their CRM—they can add more advanced capabilities quickly and easily. In addition, customers can use the Small Business Hub on the AppExchange, the world’s leading enterprise cloud marketplace for business apps and solutions, to access apps that integrate with Essentials, extending the power of the Salesforce Platform.

Sales Cloud Essentials

Sales Cloud Essentials enables small sales teams to get up-and-running fast, work smarter and sell more. With Lightning Sales Console, sales reps have …

… a complete view of their customers—including activity history, key contacts, customer communications and internal account discussions—in one place and accessible from any device using the Salesforce Mobile App.

In addition, reports and dashboards make it easy to keep track of company performance. By increasing efficiencies in the sales process, reps will have more time to spend building customer relationships.

“Sales Cloud Essentials is a great place to start if you’re new to CRM,” said Kenny Hodge, director of business development at Handstand Innovations. “The setup assistant was incredibly helpful, making the product feel intuitive, easy to customize and powerful for sales right out of the box. Now we can turn our data into action and easily add new functionality as we grow.”

Service Cloud Essentials

Service Cloud Essentials makes it easy for small service teams to set up their helpdesks instantly and provide customers with faster, more personalized customer service. With the Lightning Service Console, service agents have a 360-degree view of every customer interaction in one unified desktop view, ensuring they’re equipped with the context needed to resolve issues faster, with greater accuracy and from a single location—whether customers reach out via phone, email, Twitter or Facebook. In addition, the Service Cloud Mobile app will empower agents to provide personalized customer service from anywhere.

“As a small business, our support team often needs to answer sales-related questions in addition to typical customer support questions,” said Justin Mauldin, customer support advocate at TrackVia, Inc. “I really like that Salesforce Essentials provides a comprehensive view of customers, with sales and service data in one place, so that support reps can easily access the information they need to deliver fast and personalized service.”

Additional Comments on the News

“The adoption of new technology can contribute to bottom line growth, but for smaller companies, setting up a CRM can seem overwhelming,” said Rebecca Wettemann, VP Research, Nucleus Research. “Salesforce Essentials will help small businesses accelerate time to value with an out-of-the-box sales and service CRM that makes it easy for them to get started fast and acquire, manage and service more customers.”

“Small businesses are the cornerstone of innovation and economic growth,” said Marie Rosecrans, SVP of small business marketing at Salesforce. “That’s why we’re so excited about Salesforce Essentials and the opportunity to help every small businesses tackle the unique needs and challenges they will face as they grow.”

Pricing and Availability

  • The Salesforce Essentials apps—Sales Cloud Essentials and Service Cloud Essentials—are available today and priced at $25 per user per month.

Additional Information

About Salesforce
Salesforce, the global CRM leader, empowers companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way. For more information about Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), visit: http://www.salesforce.com.

Source: Salesforce

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