Almost a year ago, Salesforce announced that they would be releasing Salesforce Easy, a CRM package with the functionality for a small business to get started with simple sales, service, and marketing.
With onboarding tools built-in, it has been designed for customers to get up and running with the world’s most powerful CRM faster than ever. Since then, this edition has been renamed Salesforce Starter, still competitively priced for the small-medium business (SMB) market. Let’s take a look at this edition’s key features and pricing, as of this August 2023 release.
Salesforce Starter: Key Features
- Guided onboarding: From a revamped home page, select your focus from a dropdown menu (e.g. Sales, Service), access onboarding videos ‘selected for you’, and checklists to get to grips with Starter’s features.
Source: Salesforce Starter Demo
- Out-of-the-box defaults: Pre-configured settings reflect the most common requirements from businesses, reducing time to value.
- Email integration: Email outreach templates can be sent from record with a click of a button, with 2000 outbound emails per month included. Plus, it comes with Einstein Activity Capture, enabling you to capture the right data from Gmail and Outlook and add it to Salesforce.
- Sales functionality: Lead and opportunity management.
- Customer service functionality: With case management, knowledge management (knowledge base), and email-to-case capabilities.
- Marketing functionality: Capabilities include campaign templates, audience creation, an email builder, content personalization, and campaign analytics.
- Reporting templates and pre-built dashboards: Measure and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) which reflect the most common requirements from businesses.
- Built-in AI: Capabilities here include AI-powered email send optimization (Einstein Send Time Optimization) and activity capture, as mentioned above.
Salesforce Starter Pricing
Starter is generally available today. The marketing capabilities will be generally available in August 2023.
The list price for Salesforce Starter is $25/user/month, which includes 2000 outbound emails per month. Plus there is an option to ‘try before you buy’ with a free 30-day trial.
Salesforce Starter: What’s Our Verdict?
The small-medium business sector represents half of the $370 billion in tech spending in the US. Salesforce clearly recognize that they need to remain competitively priced among the SMB market, which is jammed packed with competitors.
Salesforce Starter does seem to be a solid package, treating small-medium businesses to technology from the most innovative CRM provider on the market.
The suite pricing means that one user license incorporates more functionality, as opposed to needing to purchase multiple licenses as add-ons. We also see this pattern with Sales Suite, which launched earlier in 2023.
It is a competitive offering, and Salesforce believes that the ease of use and rapid, guided setup will be key differentiators. Including AI-powered features is another plus for the price point.
There’s no denying that Salesforce are on to something when it comes to meeting customers of all sizes where they’re at in terms of size and budget. As we know, Salesforce is a highly-customizable platform, which gives organizations the flexibility to mold CRM to their needs. How fast will companies outgrow Salesforce Starter? That remains to be seen, and the extent of customization capabilities have not been explored.
However, if an organization did need to upgrade for more capabilities, their data is already on the Salesforce platform, therefore, eliminating the need for costly data migration.
This is the first time in recent memory that Salesforce has pushed customers to self-implement. Again, this eliminates the overhead of implementation services, which have traditionally cost a significant proportion – if not equal to – the cost of the licenses. In turn, this will free up Salesforce’s service partner (consultancy) network to work on more complex implementations.
However, as seasoned Salesforce professionals will know, trying to implement Salesforce without experience can often end in customers not easily seeing value from the tool. Without having a professional tailor your org to the way your business works, will this impact user adoption with users finding the tool too restrictive?
Summary
Salesforce has released Salesforce Starter, a competitively priced CRM package designed for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). It offers guided onboarding, pre-configured settings, email integration, sales, customer service, and marketing functionalities.
With a list price at $25/user/month, and with a 30-day free trial, Salesforce aims to cater to SMBs’ needs with more functionality under a single license.
Companies may eventually outgrow this edition, however, with their data already on the Salesforce platform, data migration costs are avoided. Overall, Salesforce Starter appears to be a solid CRM option for SMBs.
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