Salesforce has launched Salesforce Easy to attract more small businesses to its platform. This entry-level CRM solution is sold with onboarding simplicity. Salesforce claims it requires only three clicks to get started. More importantly, the solution guides users through the setup process. Unlike Salesforce Essentials which does not have this automation inbuilt.
While there is a free trial for 30 days, the price is £25 per user per month for an annual contract. This CRM solution is a unified business offering for marketing, sales, and service and was announced in a blog by Sarah Franklin, President and Chief Marketing Officer at Salesforce. Customers signing up for the free trial will realise that this is a beta edition, so there may still be some teething issues.
Kris Billmaier, SVP and GM Salesforce Easy, said: “We’ve heard overwhelming feedback from our customers that their organizations need to focus and simplify their operations to build resilience and deliver immediate value to their customers. That’s why we are announcing Salesforce Easy — with the swipe of a credit card, SMBs can start seeing results fast, while larger businesses can get up and running quickly with Salesforce and then rapidly scale with the tools they need along their growth journey.”
Salesforce Easy intends to create a launchpad for organisations on the Salesforce platform. Over the coming months, and presumably at Dreamforce, Salesforce will announce more application add-ons for the new application.
Easy onboarding and usage
What is different about this solution, is that the onboarding process does not need expensive Salesforce consultants. Salesforce has deliberately built wizards and guided walk-throughs to set up the solution. These include setting up integrations with Slack, Google, and Microsoft 365 identities to make sign-on faster than ever for users. Once access is granted, the onboarding process helps users upload contacts and set up email and calendar integrations.
The guidance for users continues through to usage of the platform. Users can create email marketing campaigns using emails. This includes the ability to create email lists and segment prospects by sector or by their point in the funnel. It ensures that communication with customers is timely and relevant.
This automation of outreach enables users to spend more time delivering a personalised relationship with customers rather than entering data. It complements the best practices baked into the solution that Salesforce has learned and developed over the years that have led Salesforce to become the leader in the CRM market. These processes help users close deals faster and deliver excellent customer service. The default dashboards provided with the solution give employees visibility around marketing, sales and service performance.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Salesforce Easy is the new entry-level solution the company hopes will attract smaller businesses to its platform. It may succeed if the onboarding process proves as simple as the promise. Those investing in this new solution will be aware that 72% of customers, using more than one Salesforce Customer 360 application, have reported faster time to ROI, and 95% report improved efficiency and productivity.
In the past, Salesforce has offered similar entry-level solutions. The challenge is that rival solutions are often less expensive. Also, it is not entirely clear what the functionality of Salesforce Easy is. The product page shares few details and nothing around any limitations or the upgrade path to full Salesforce. However, it seems as though Salesforce Easy is the new version of Salesforce Essentials, with the same price but more automation for onboarding and beyond. What will attract users is the focus on simplified onboarding, but they need to provide more collateral and videos to support the launch. It is unusual for Salesforce to have what appears such a half-baked launch for what is an important release, even if it is beta.
