Salesforce Essentials Brings CRM to Small Businesses
Customer relationship management (CRM) software has long been used by large organizations to help improve customer satisfaction and boost sales, but it has often been out of the reach of small business.
Salesforce is now aiming to bring its CRM capabilities to the smallest of businesses with the general availability of its Salesforce Essentials platform.
The Salesforce Essentials platform is delivered in two different flavors: Sales Cloud Essentials and Service Cloud Essentials. Sales Cloud is a CRM system optimized for sales activities, while Service Cloud is about help desk and customer management.
Both Sales and Service Cloud Essentials will be provided with Salesforce's Einstein artificial intelligence capabilities to help organizations gain better insights from their operations.
The Essentials platform is set to be updated with three major releases every year, providing incremental feature updates. Additionally, Salesforce is making its Small Business Hub on the AppExchange available, providing third-party apps and services that integrate with Essentials.
“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,” Mike Rosenbaum, executive vice president of CRM Applications at Salesforce, stated.
The Salesforce Essentials apps — Sales Cloud Essentials and Service Cloud Essentials — are priced at $25 per user per month.
Salesforce Essentials is not the first time the CRM vendor has attempted to attract small business users. Saleforce's desk.com software and SalesforceIQ were two prior attempt at delivering small business-focused technology, though neither effort was particularly successful.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseAppsToday and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.
