Why Salesforce Essentials is the Best CRM for Small Businesses?

Salesforce Essentials was introduced in 2017, which is one of the best solutions from Salesforce for small businesses. Even though this Saa...

Salesforce Essentials was introduced in 2017, which is one of the best solutions from Salesforce for small businesses. Even though this SaaS giant is offering a wide range of products focusing on the SMB sector, the majority of these solutions were suiting at best to the medium-size enterprises or those bigger than that. However, Salesforce Essentials, which is also called the Lightning Essentials, is meant for real small businesses as it supports only 10 users and is built with real small businesses in mind.

Reasons Why Salesforce Essentials is the Best CRM for Businesses

Let's further discuss show this Essentials plan is different from other existing packages by Salesforce.

Implementation of Essentials is easier and faster

As per the latest report by Small to Medium Business Trends, nearly about 26% of the small businesses only have one ore a few in-house staff for IT. The major reason is that many of the small businesses who were availing budget-friendly SaaS solutions tend to eschew as they get only limited support for implementation and maintenance. Those enterprises which have only a limited crew, it is not possible to spend many weeks to negotiate with the reps, watch demos, and go through all white papers to implement a CRM system.

However, with the new Salesforce Essentials, the provider has now simplified the process of implementation by providing a comprehensive Trailhead to the users. This is a much simplified, gamified, and free to use learning platform online, which anyone can access anytime. This will guide even the non-tech savvy users to accomplish a quick setup by learning a few basics. As there are only very few features out there in the streamlined version of this CRM, there is also very little to do in terms of getting it up and running. With a little effort and learning, you can do all these in-house without any in-depth technical skills.

Pricing made affordably

Unlike many other Salesforce products, Essentials is priced by keeping the small business owners in mind, who are operating at a limited budget. Salesforce ecosystem is made a border to entire these small businesses, too, with the hope that the small businesses signing up for Essentials will later upgrade themselves to more sophisticated services as they grow. One reason why Essentials is made so easy to upgrade is that it's a lower-tier option in the Lightning line with a ladder out there for anyone to climb up.

The pricing is just $25 per month for a single user, with which any small-scale user can get access to the cloud services and essentials to up to 10 users. Coming at the next tier is the solution that costs $75 per month for a single user. So if you find your business grows rapidly and in need of more than 10-user packages, then you can plan it accordingly to move on to a higher package instantly.

In fact, as Flosum consultants point out, Salesforce Essentials may not offer all features and functionality as of Lightning, but it could surely offer many advanced features on considering the price point. Further, we will discuss a few of the best features which Salesforce Essential offers to small businesses.

Top best features of Salesforce Essentials

• Account management
• Contact management
• Task management
• Activity feeds
• Sales opportunity management
• The easily customizable sales process
• Activity Capture with Einstein engine
• Custom configurable dashboard and reports
• Case management
• Collaboration tools
• App exchange and app builder Lightning platform

Even though there are many such features coming packed with the Essentials, there are many limitations too for this budget platform like limited forecasting and analytics capabilities, lack of permissions and roles, lack of any workflows to build approvals, and also the lack of features like price quoting, built-in billing, etc.

Service Cloud Essentials

Service Cloud Essentials is another great solution for small businesses, for whom the customer service could be troublesome. From the basic package, you need to upgrade in order to get these additional features like reporting and order management, etc. Even though it is pricier than the base version, the features coming packed with it are fully worth the price paid. Some advanced features on Service Cloud Essentials are:

• Mobile Salesforce app
• Various collaboration tools
• Auto-assignment of cases
• Email optimization with auto-response and case capture features etc.
• Setting up queues and case escalation rules
• Management of lead-contact accounts
• Activity tracking and task management
• Lightning app builder
• Page layouts and custom profiles

The small businesses and teams are targeted primarily by Salesforce Essentials, so the setup is also made much simplified. You can avail the setup assistant, which his loaded with many in-built tutorials to guide the users through the setup process along with access to Trailheads, which givers interactive guidance free of cost. You can find each and every step discussed in detail at the Trailhead under various categories as Beginners, Admins, Business Users, etc.

With Essentials, The salespeople could also get a customized view of sales figures and can also follow the leads to identify key contacts and speed up the closures. You can find that the sales activities get automated with the innovative feature of Einstein Activity Capture. There is no need for complicated spreadsheets anymore to track calls, leads, meetings, and emails, etc., which all will be done automatically. Einstein can also capture the customer records and keep all these up-to-date with AI features and connect these with the email and user’s calendar. Essentials could also be availed through the Salesforce mobile app, which makes it further easier to access data and updates wherever it's needed.

Another major area where small businesses are weak at is customer support. With Salesforce Essentials, this part is also taken good care of by automatically connecting and centralizing multiple cases. On this platform, it became easier for the agents to resolve the issues much quicker and easier by getting access to it on any device like their smartphones or tables other than desktop and laptops. By getting instant access to this administration platform from where they are, the repetitive tasks like assigning tickets or checking the queue in an automated manner become much easier.

With all these, Salesforce Essentials could offer affordable features to small businesses. If you keep a close eye on the processes-based costs as the organization grows and stay close with the data and usage limits, then trying out the lighter edition of Salesforce is a worthy try.