Staying connected with your customers and prospects is an essential business practice. However, it can also be hard to stay organized with all of your customer communications and sales outreach efforts. That is why many businesses invest in a solution like Salesforce to centralize their customer data, messages, and notes.
Jump to:
- What is Salesforce?
- What features does Salesforce offer?
- Salesforce pricing
- Should you choose Salesforce?
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is a leading customer relationship management (CRM) software solution. Salesforce’s cloud-based platform offers companies a way to centralize and automate many of their sales and customer service functions.
Users can track deals or sales from the initial contact to closing and perform any necessary follow-up tasks. Salesforce has largely been able to maintain its status as a top CRM platform due to its expansive feature and product offerings.
Read more: Best CRM Software for Small Business
What features does Salesforce offer?
Salesforce has a lot of features, but you get what you pay for. They have numerous packages and add-ons available, so business owners can get the services that they need. However, all these separate options can add up. Their primary offerings are in the areas of sales, service, and marketing.
Sales features
Salesforce provides the basic CRM features along with some other useful tools to help streamline your team’s sales efforts. Their primary sales features are:
- Contact management: This is your basic CRM database where you can store all of the contact information and data related to current and prospective customers.
- Opportunity management: Salesforce can help sales professionals identify the biggest customer opportunities and track where prospects are in the buying process.
- Sales forecasting: Forecast expected sales earnings and gain insight into your revenue.
- Process automation: Users can automate repetitive tasks like sales alerts, workflows, and more.
- Mobile CRM: Salesforce does have a mobile app that lets you access your CRM database from a smartphone. Most major CRMs, including HubSpot and Zoho, also offer mobile apps.
Service features
Salesforce offers plenty of customer service support features in their Service Cloud including:
- Agent workspace: Customer service agents have dashboards to get a comprehensive view of all their cases and customer information.
- Workflow automation: These features allow you to automate some of your common processes like prioritizing tickets and creating follow-up reminders.
- Agent routing: Customers can be routed to the correct customer service staff member across a variety of channels including messaging, phone, and email.
- Video chat: Service representatives can connect with customers over video calls.
- Incident management: Incident management allows service staff to identify and track issues in their workflows and proactively support customers.
- Reporting and analytics: Manage service quality with prebuilt dashboards that monitor agent performance, KPIs, and channel usage.
In addition to their standard service features, they also have an add-on for field service management. Salesforce Field Service Lightning can be used to create and track service orders for field technicians.
Marketing features
Salesforce offers marketing features that allow companies to send out email campaigns, manage paid advertising, create content, and build customer journeys across different platforms. This is a great option for those using Salesforce as a CRM for sales and service processes.
Salesforce’s marketing products can be a bit more complex and expensive than other email marketing or content tools, so they may not be the best choice for small businesses that are not already experienced with Salesforce.
Integrations
Because Salesforce is one of the biggest players in the CRM market—and even in the SaaS space overall—they are well-connected when it comes to integrations. You can easily integrate many of the major messaging, productivity, email marketing, and document management tools into Salesforce. Some of the most popular integrations are Slack, Mailchimp, DocuSign, Jira, and Google Workspace.
Salesforce pricing
Salesforce offers a wide variety of packages and services to choose from.
There are four packages in their small business solutions category:
| Essentials | $25 per user per month |
| Sales Professional | $75 per user per month |
| Service Professional | $75 per user per month |
| Pardot Growth | $1,250 per month |
The Sales Cloud and Service Cloud packages each have four tiers as well:
| Essentials | $25 per user per month |
| Professional | $75 per user per month |
| Enterprise | $150 per user per month |
| Unlimited | $300 per user per month |
Should you choose Salesforce?
Salesforce has a wide target audience with solutions that fit organizations of various sizes. This is part of what sets them apart from many of their competitors in the CRM space.
However, it’s important to think about what services or tools you actually need. Salesforce’s expansive features are impressive, but you should try to be objective and consider which ones your team will actually use. Otherwise, you’ll end up spending extra on features that aren’t delivering meaningful results for your company.
Very small businesses that are looking for a basic CRM to organize customer data and automate email may find that a cheaper option such as the free version of HubSpot will meet their needs. Starting out with a simpler CRM system is also helpful if you have less tech-savvy employees who may struggle with the learning curve that many report when starting out with Salesforce.
On the other hand, if you are planning to fully utilize Saleforce’s extensive feature offerings and integrations to streamline your sales, customer service, and marketing, the service can be a great investment. If you’re still not sure if Salesforce is right for you, they do offer free trials so that you can test out the service for yourself.
Read next: Salesforce Competitors & Alternatives
