Salesforce.com Launches Essentials for SMBs

Salesforce.com today released Salesforce Essentials, which the company describes as easy-to-use sales and service apps built onto the Salesforce platform. Divided into Sales Cloud Essentials and Service Cloud Essentials, they are designed to empower small businesses to work smarter and faster while simultaneously maintaining customer-centricity.

“Salesforce Essentials is really for…small companies, emerging businesses that are looking to…find a better way to manage their customer relationships. We are really looking for a simple way of delivering Sales Cloud and Service Cloud capabilities to that growing, emerging business,” says Marie Rosecrans, senior vice president of small-business marketing at Salesforce. “We’ve really optimized Sales Cloud and Service Cloud capabilities for the small-business segment.”

Essentials has a number of key features. It incorporates Trailhead, Salesforce’s interactive, online learning environment, which is free and guides users through Essentials. Additionally, it has built-in Einstein artificial intelligence in the form of Einstein Activity Capture, which automates manual data entry for sales and service reps. Furthermore, it is built on the Lightning framework, which offers a user experience that is optimized for any device and surfaces information in a single, unified console.

Rosecrans emphasizes that Trailhead makes it easy for CRM first-timers to get started with Essentials. “We understand that these folks are new to CRM and so what we’ve done is we’ve incorporated and embedded Trailhead directly into Salesforce Essentials, really coaching them through that setup experience but also in their ongoing use of Salesforce Essentials.”

She also highlights the unified user experience that Lightning provides. “Tying all of this together is the ability for that sales user and that service user to have access to that unified console—the ability to see all of their work in one place and to be able to customize the way that that looks because this is built on Lightning so you can drag-and-drop components with no code, really allowing the user to work the way that they want to work.”

As for a quick breakdown of the two units, Sales Cloud Essentials aims to empower small sales teams to quickly get up and running and sell more; Service Cloud Essentials looks to simplify the help-desk setup process for small sales teams. Sales Cloud Essentials features Lightning Sales Console, which provides reps with a complete view of their customers, including activity history, key contacts, customer communications, and internal account discussions in a single place accessible from any device. Service Cloud Essentials features Lightning Service Console, which provides services agents with a complete view of every customer interaction in a single desktop view.

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