Salesforce CRM
Salesforce has the largest selection of targeted CRM products and customizable solutions to fit any business in any industry.
The modern sales features let you leverage the power of social media engagement to gain leads and drive sales. Most Salesforce CRM plans require an annual commitment.
When it comes to CRM providers, Salesforce is known as an industry leader and offers a popular essentials-level platform that’s ideal for small and growing businesses. For those ready to level up and delve more deeply into CRM capabilities, Salesforce offers a vast set of tailor-made solutions for sales, marketing and customer service teams.
Editor’s score: 95/100
Navigating the dashboard is easy with its intuitive and customizable organization, making it effortless to stay on task while working through a specific project or nurturing a new lead. More advanced tools like forecasting and AI-powered assistants can be added to business packages as your company and customer requirements evolve over time. Guided learning tools offer a long list of tips for smooth operation for even the newest users.
With one of the industry’s largest third-party app marketplaces, Salesforce has integration capabilities for an impressive amount of platforms. Whether it’s Mailchimp, QuickBooks, Dropbox or Google Workspace, Salesforce can help you integrate and streamline whatever you need to accomplish your sales and service goals. Small businesses will benefit from the workflow builder, helping to easily automate every task your team performs repeatedly. The Salesforce mobile app is also designed for ease of use, mirroring the Salesforce desktop experience with room to be customized for employees with different roles.
The Essentials plan, which is optimal for many small businesses, is $25 per user per month and has a maximum of 10 users. With this plan, small teams will enjoy big-team features like lead management, web-to-lead capture, mass email, campaign management, email templates, case management and five lightning flow automation processes. The Professional plan is $75 per user per month and features custom applications and collaborative forecasting. The Enterprise plan is $150 per user per month, and the Unlimited plan is $300 per user per month. Each plan level offers additional key features that can expand your businesses CRM capabilities as your contact lists and revenue grow.
Why We Chose Salesforce for Small Businesses
Salesforce is among the industry leaders in cloud-based CRM solutions and has the widest variety of plans and features we’ve reviewed. Unlike the other industry giants, Salesforce gears many of its product offerings and its pricing toward small businesses that want to start with a simple and effective all-in-one sales and customer service tool. Salesforce learns and grows with your business, thanks to intelligent tools that improve with each customer interaction. As a centralized source of data, Salesforce makes it easier to understand how to allocate marketing efforts and tailor messages for different customer segments with helpful AI-powered recommendations from Einstein. With easy-to-use automations, timesaving macros, AI-powered insights and detailed customer information, business owners and small sales teams can eliminate repetitive manual tasks and focus their energy on delivering personalized service and deals at the perfect times in their customers’ journeys.
Pros
An expansive range of available CRM products means that Salesforce can grow with your company.
Salesforce acts as a single source of customer data for everyone in your company to improve customer experiences and outcomes.
Salesforce has a targeted set of CRM products engineered for small businesses.
Cons
Larger businesses may have to pay additional fees to use Salesforce integrations effectively.
Most Salesforce plans require an annual commitment.
It could be difficult to get immediate technical assistance during nonbusiness hours.
Usability
Despite its potential complexity and advanced set of features, Salesforce is far from a difficult product to set up and use in a small business setting, even for first-time CRM account owners. However, if usability is your top priority, you may want to consider another CRM, such as Keap or monday.com Sales CRM, two of the top choices for ease of use (learn more in our Keap review and monday.com Sales CRM review). Once you’ve gone through the brief setup process to import your contacts and build your sales workflows, you can begin collecting new leads and making more sales with live in-product help to assist with any minor issues.
Even with Salesforce Essentials, the company’s entry-level edition, automated tools will log sales activities like emails and calendar entries with the AI-powered tool named Einstein. With all of your customer data stored in one location, it’s easy to develop effective sales strategies and keep track of every step of your customers’ journeys. On the support side, you can help your customers resolve common issues by publishing a searchable knowledge center from a readymade template.
As your small business grows, you can easily add features from the AppExchange or upgrade to a better-featured plan to suit the evolving needs of your customers and employees. All of your CRM features are available through the mobile CRM apps, letting you and your team work effectively from anywhere. [Related article: 12 Features to Look for in a CRM Solution]
You can see and manage your entire sales process, from new leads to close,