Learn the Basics of Salesforce Essentials

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Outline the essentials of Salesforce Essentials.
  
• Explain why and how Salesforce Essentials was created.
  

What Is Salesforce Essentials?

Salesforce Essentials is an out-of-the-box CRM designed for small businesses. 

[That is so important it’s worth repeating…]

Salesforce Essentials is an out-of-the-box CRM designed for small businesses!

And by “designed for small businesses” we mean that it helps them:

• Start instantly with easy setup.
  
• Sell smarter and faster with built-in intelligence.
  
• Provide outstanding service for every customer.
  
• Scale as they grow on a complete platform.
  
• Get started on CRM for just $25/user/month.
  

In a nutshell, it’s the world’s #1 CRM, reimagined for small business, for just $25 per user per month. Pretty awesome, right? We think small businesses should be as jazzed about Essentials as we are. And a growing number of them share our excitement.

Why Did We Build Essentials?

Excellent question. First and foremost, we built Essentials because we care about small businesses and want to help them succeed. To that end, we wanted to make Salesforce easy and affordable for businesses of every size. 

Essentials lets small businesses move away from tracking customer information on spreadsheets and sticky notes, so they can create OMG WOW! experiences for their customers and scale up for handling the staggering amount of information that comes with long-term growth.

Fortunately, small businesses tend to be early adopters that help drive innovation. They also need easy-to-use products that scale. Essentials delivers exactly what they’re asking for—simplicity that’s married to a scalable platform. 

Designed for Small Businesses

Designing and building products for small businesses is very deliberate. Every feature matters. Small businesses expect an intuitive product that just works. And that’s why building Salesforce Essentials has been such a rewarding experience for us.

Our platform is used by some of the largest enterprises in the world and we’ve now reimagined it specifically for what a small business needs. Now they can get started with CRM quickly, so they can grow and extend and innovate without constraint. It's easy to set up, easy to use, and easy to scale for business growth. It’s future-proof.

Now it’s easier and more affordable than ever for any business to get access to the very best of Salesforce, including Trailhead, Einstein, Lightning, and AppExchange.

Trailhead, our online, gamified learning platform, makes learning Salesforce—including Essentials—fun and easy. 

Salesforce Lightning supercharges productivity—giving every employee a modern, intuitive interface that can be easily customized to any business. 

AppExchange lets users easily add the apps they love—like Dropbox, MailChimp, Slack, and GetFeedback—with just a few clicks.

Einstein helps every employee work smarter and faster by automatically adding emails and calendar invites for a complete customer view.

Now small businesses don’t have to worry about outgrowing their CRM, because Salesforce Essentials is built to grow with them. It’s the same CRM platform that powers 83% of Fortune 500 companies, optimized for small businesses.

Making CRM Easy

As we highlighted in the last unit, small businesses face an avalanche of challenges—from too little time to super-sized customer expectations. The last thing small businesses need is a complicated, expensive IT mess. With Salesforce Essentials, we make CRM as easy as possible for them. 

Easy to try. All it takes to start a free trial is an email address. And Essentials includes walkthroughs and setup assistants to help every user get the most from the world’s #1 CRM. 

Easy to buy. Say goodbye to complex purchasing processes. Essentials can be purchased with a credit card and renewed in-app.

Easy to use. Automated sales and service setup makes it easy to personalize Essentials to specific business needs. Now you can pull all your data together for a complete view that helps you anticipate customer needs.

Easy to grow. Essentials is designed to scale for growth. And small businesses can add the apps they need through AppExchange and quickly integrate them with Essentials. 

Helping Small Businesses Change the World

There are about a kajillion examples of small businesses upending long-established industries and changing the way we lead our day-to-day lives.

• A startup develops a new way to share rides and reinvents how we get where we’re going.
  
• A growing business brings streaming music to any device and changes how we’re entertained.
  
• A visionary small company finds a new way to connect communities and transforms the way we talk with our neighbors.
  

Small businesses are true disruptors that drive the spirit of innovation. And it has often been small companies like Lyft, Spotify, and Nextdoor that radically improve the way we live. With Salesforce Essentials, small businesses have the tools they need to continue changing the world for the better.