Customer relationship management (CRM) is often pigeonholed as a technology that is applicable to larger companies only. While this may have been true in CRM’s earliest days, it’s no longer the case. After all, even small companies need to keep their sales contacts fresh, generate and share leads and keep their customers happy with faster case resolution, knowledge management and more personalized experiences across marketing, sales and service.
To address the smaller business market, CRM giant Salesforce recently announced the launch of Starter, a simple all-in-one CRM app designed to bring sales, service, and marketing capabilities together to help small and growing businesses manage customer relationships, centralize key data, and grow more efficiently. The goal is to overcome the difficulties small businesses experience in adopting effective CRM, which includes finding CRM systems overly complex and difficult to set up, customize, and use effectively. Additionally, SMBs often struggle integrating their CRM with existing sales, service, and marketing tools, especially if they use multiple tools or have outdated software that’s hard to connect to the rest of their tech stack.
Salesforce notes that Starter distills more than 20 years of Salesforce innovation into an easy-to-use app with guided onboarding, reporting templates, pre-built dashboards, unified customer data, and built-in AI, to help small businesses get the most from their CRM, which will grow accordingly with them as they expand the business.
“Starter isn’t just reserved for SMBs,” noted Kris Billmaier, GM of Salesforce Starter. “It is a better way to try, buy, and use Salesforce. Teams can use Starter to build a solid foundation, because we’ve built-in the best of our sales, service, and marketing features to drive efficient growth. As they scale, they can add more customization, automation, and integration solutions to fit their growing needs.”
Billmaier stated that Salesforce has always offered solutions for businesses of different sizes with different needs, but we had more work to do to build a CRM for SMBs’ unique needs.
“With Starter, we rethought everything – from how people use the product to how they buy and get started,” said Billmaier. “We improved the user experience to help companies move fast, adding in-app guidance and ready-to-use, pre-built tools and templates. We simplified signup with self-service checkout, a 30-day free trial, and a three-click sign-up process. Starter’s simplicity helps customers get started fast.”
Edited by
Greg Tavarez
