We do business smarter through People, Process, Products, P&L with priorities
Salesforce for Small Business
Salesforce is one of the most popular customer relationship management (CRM) platforms available. Many businesses use it to help track customer data, create actionable sales and marketing insights, and connect ross-department teams.
Although it’s powerful, is Salesforce worth it for small business owners?
At 5P Consulting, we think it’s a good fit for small businesses.
As a boutique business transformation consulting firm, the 5P mission is to optimize organizations for increased productivity. We use process and technology to help drive these changes. We focus on identifying the problems and needs of a business. Then, we develop a plan that includes a quick win to jumpstart success while also driving long-term improvements.
Our past experience includes work with some of the top SaaS technology and productivity processes. Over the years we’ve seen a lot of different business trends, including adopting Salesforce for managing customers.
Let’s take a look at using Salesforce in small businesses.
Salesforce Drives Efficiency…. 
Is Salesforce Worth it for Small Business?
Salesforce is known for driving efficiency, but it’s no secret that most enterprise-level technology solutions are costly. This leaves many small business owners wondering whether it’s worth the price to invest in the platform. Luckily, there are lots of ways to customize a Salesforce solution to fit the unique needs of your business. Salesforce has built a platform that is affordable and maximizes business automation for small businesses up to fortune 50. Many small businesses don’t know you can get Sales and Service functionality in one platform for $25 per user. You can’t afford not to invest.
We work with businesses of all types and sizes at 5P. One of the things we love about the Salesforce platform is that it doesn’t use a ‘one size fits all’ approach. There are endless ways to configure the platform using one of three base products:
- Non-Profit Cloud: This solution is for non-profit organizations. It provides contact management, donor nurturing, and fundraising support. Depending on the organization, this solution costs little to nothing for users in the non-profit space.
- Salesforce Essentials for Small Businesses: Essentials is the Salesforce small business edition. The Essentials solution makes it easy for small businesses to manage contacts, leads, sales opportunities, and customer service. It allows you to create data-driven reports and dashboards. Salesforce Essentials is a great CRM for small business applications due to integrations with popular small business tools like G-Suite, DocuSign, TaskRay, Drop Box etc.
- Professional and Enterprise: Once a business reaches a certain size, it can often benefit from Professional and Enterprise Salesforce solutions. These platforms are ideal for medium to large scale businesses to enhance the sales nurturing and customer service process. There is an ecosystem of pre-built solutions and the flexibility of custom integration. The third-party ecosystem includes tools for accounting, forecasting, quoting, and cross-selling. This reduces the need for multiple systems and manual data crunching.
Salesforce Pricing for Small Business
The Salesforce small business edition is an affordable solution for many small businesses. Annual plans cost $25/month per user, with a slightly higher rate for month-to-month solutions. When the Essential edition was introduced it was a game-changer for small businesses. It lets smaller businesses run like larger organizations without the cost of an enterprise-level solution.
Larger businesses might also find that the Essentials version actually fits their needs better than a more expensive edition. The key is comparing options and configurations that optimize the CRM for your unique business.
Even though the Essential edition is affordable for many businesses, it may not be the perfect fit for your business. You may find updating your current tools or using a different platform works better for your organization.
Other Options for Small Business Customer Relationship Management
At 5P, we know that Salesforce is only one option for customer management. We opt to stay away from partnering with specific SaaS systems or products so we can continue to focus on our clients’ needs. Unlike certified partners of SaaS products, 5P can take an objective look at your current solutions.
We start by analyzing your existing processes and tools. Based on what we see from your existing processes, we can customize and optimize your current tools or implement new solutions. Our goal is always to provide our clients with the best solution for their budget, needs, and goals – regardless of products or brands.
Our Salesforce Story
As a business transformation firm, 5P Consulting helps other organizations make improvements to efficiency through processes and technology. However, as a small business, the enterprise-level Salesforce solutions were out of our budget. We couldn’t invest in Salesforce knowing we could be putting those funds to better use by investing in our internal operations, investing in our current clients, and helping non-profits in our local community.
We were ecstatic when Salesforce Essentials was released. We signed up for a free trial to test the new solution for small businesses like ours. This is what we found:
- Our trial version included the use of all the platform features at no cost for 30 days for Sales and Service functionality.
- We purchased the full version of Salesforce Essentials for our entire team at $25/user per month – two full days before our trial was supposed to end.
- We were able to keep all our data from the trial version.
- The program made it easy to convert all of our contacts, accounts, and leads internally from our old system.
- We used Salesforce ‘Opportunities’ and ‘Tasks’ to define leads and accounts while communicating with the whole team.
- We didn’t have to develop any reports because all the best practices were built into the platform to help us manage where we’re at with a contact, the next action, who owns what, what meetings are coming up, and what contracts need additional work or can be closed.
- We get proactive news about our contacts in Salesforce so we can stay on top of their business not just ours.
- We easily customized dashboards, reports, and screen layouts.
- We have the mobile app for everything on the go.
- We added in a free Google Chrome plugin so everything can be done in our email and populated automatically into Salesforce. This has saved so much time and is one of our favorite features.
- We integrated digital signatures for contracts with DocuSign.
- We developed customer marketing campaigns so we could target value-added communications to our prospects and clients and keep track of the results.
Salesforce Essentials gives us access to sales and service abilities with one purchase. We can now also automate the way we track ongoing operational activities – like incidents, problems, and project tickets – with our clients.
The platform allowed our entire 5P team the ability to drive business growth without being salespeople. It put in a cadence for us to nurture contacts, leads, and opportunities no matter what role you play at 5P.
In a small business, people fill multiple roles. Our entire operational and delivery team is now focused on growing our business the same way. There is a sense of ownership and transparency across the entire team resulting in growing together instead of spending hours looking in our email where we left off with prospecting clients.
Learn More About Salesforce for Small Business
Many small businesses need Essentials so they can work quickly and effortlessly. Find out if Salesforce is the right fit for your business by contacting 5P today.
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