Salesforce Launches Starter Suite, Simplifying CRM for Small Businesses

Starter brings sales, service, and marketing capabilities together in a simple, out-of-the-box experience to help SMBs find, win, and keep customers

Salesforce announced general availability of Starter, a simple all-in-one CRM app bringing sales, service, and marketing capabilities together to help small and growing businesses manage customer relationships, centralize key data, and grow more efficiently.

Starter distills more than 20 years of Salesforce innovation into an easy-to-use app with guided onboarding, reporting templates, pre-built dashboards, unified customer data, and built-in AI, to help small businesses get the most from their CRM from day one.

Starter helps small businesses:

• Generate more leads with marketing campaign templates, segmentation, analytics, email builder, and AI-powered email send optimization features.
• Win more customers with email integration, AI-powered activity capture, unified customer data powered by Data Cloud, lead and deal management, and sales paths.
• Keep customers happy with faster case resolution, knowledge management, and more personalized experiences across marketing, sales, and service.

Here, Kris Billmaier, GM of Salesforce Starter, discusses how SMBs can get started with CRM quickly to drive efficiency, accelerate growth, and scale their business.

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Q. What major challenges do small businesses face today? How does Starter address these?

Small businesses commonly find CRM systems overly complex and difficult to set up, customize, and use effectively. They often struggle integrating their CRM with existing sales, service, and marketing tools, especially if they use multiple tools or have outdated software that’s hard to connect to the rest of their tech stack. And as businesses scale, they easily outgrow lightweight CRM systems, requiring costly migrations to a different CRM platform.

With Starter, we reimagined the entire user experience to help companies avoid complex setup and expensive, time-intensive implementations. Customers get up and running fast with a complete view of their business across sales, service, and marketing.

Unlike other lightweight CRM platforms, Starter is built for growth. It allows you to find, win and keep customers — for life. It scales as you scale and grows as you do. You never outgrow Salesforce.

Q. Who is the average Starter customer?

Starter is designed to grow with our customers’ business. The SMB market is unique – it is highly competitive and customer experiences are often fragmented. Making the right technology investments can be a key differentiator for these businesses.

But, Starter isn’t just reserved for SMBs. It is a better way to try, buy, and use Salesforce. Teams can use Starter to build a solid foundation, because we’ve built-in the best of our sales, service, and marketing features to drive efficient growth. As they scale, they can add more customization, automation, and integration solutions to fit their growing needs.

Q. Why is Salesforce uniquely positioned to meet small and medium-sized business needs?

For the past 10 years, IDC ranked Salesforce the #1 CRM provider. We bring 24 years of trusted expertise to designing a solution that helps new customers take advantage of CRM while avoiding unnecessary expense or complexity. Starter benefits from the same innovation we bring to Fortune 500 companies and large enterprises at a fraction of the cost, while delivering the ease of use, flexibility, and security all companies need to help scale their business faster.

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Q. How is Starter different from other Salesforce SMB offerings in the past?

Salesforce has always offered solutions for businesses of different sizes with different needs, but we had more work to do to build a CRM for SMBs’ unique needs.

With Starter, we rethought everything – from how people use the product to how they buy and get started. We improved the user experience to help companies move fast, adding in-app guidance and ready-to-use, pre-built tools and templates. We simplified signup with self-service checkout, a 30-day f*********, and a three-click sign-up process. Starter’s simplicity helps customers get started fast.

We built-in AI with Einstein Activity Capture to sync your email and calendar automatically to Salesforce. AI also helps marketing messages have more impact – Einstein Send Time Optimization helps identify the best time to send marketing emails when people are most likely to engage.

Q. How do customers use Starter?

Different sized companies across industries can use Starter to resolve service issues, market to the right people at the right time, increase sales, and deliver high-quality customer experiences.

Starter’s easy-to-use educational tools helped MedLogiq, a medical device logistics provider, quickly unify their customer data across sales, service, and marketing and build trusted relationships with their customers while scheduling, procuring, and tracking surgical instruments and equipment.

Snapology of Lehi provides STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) programs for children in Lehi, Utah. Starter helps Snapology centralize their customer data, keep education partners, contacts, and details organized in one one place, and see which programs work best at each facility.

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