Salesforce Essentials: 3 Reasons To Try It

Small business owners are used to wearing lots of hats. Plenty of articles offer tips for how to stay organized, covering everything from color coding spreadsheets to making physical lists. However, what if we told you there is a solution to organize every aspect of your business at a glance? Salesforce Essentials, a customer relationship management (CRM) app from Salesforce, helps sales and service come together.

Let’s take a look at how Salesforce Essentials works and the benefits it provides entrepreneurs.

1. It has never been easier to manage customer relationships.

Keeping up with your customer base is harder than it looks, especially if you do it on your own. Salesforce Essentials helps simplify the process. Everything related to your customers is kept in one space. This includes the following:

All customer data, organized in Essentials. (We’ll detail more about how this works in a moment!)
Easy methods to connect and engage with your customers. Salesforce Essentials allows you to engage and provide customer support through phone, web chat, social media, and email.
A visible increase in customer lead generation. This may be up to 3X higher for businesses, according to the Salesforce Essentials ROI case study!

2. Say goodbye to spreadsheets.

Typically, entrepreneurs are advised to create spreadsheets in order to stay organized with their business. There’s nothing wrong with this advice, per say. It’s usually a bit more effective than relying on a pile of sticky notes or our memory banks.

However, creating and updating manual spreadsheets tends to be a time-consuming task. Entrepreneurs must remember to keep updating these documents. They must give the document a name and fill in the most accurate information on file possible. Sometimes they stay up late to complete a spreadsheet for the day. Small businesses that hire employees must also train them in creating and maintaining spreadsheets.

What if you decide to color code a spreadsheet? You will need to clearly indicate within the spreadsheet what each color means. Then, you must keep up with completing the spreadsheets and filling in their proper color codes.

There is a way to simplify all of this, right?

Absolutely! One of the biggest features from Salesforce Essentials is that they “organize all your data, not just some of it.”

Essentials helps clean up business information for you. Duplicate entries? Salesforce Essentials will clear ‘em out. Will you need to type anything into a spreadsheet? Nope. The app automatically syncs with, and captures, customer data from your email for you. All you have to do when setting up is follow the setup assistant and use the in-app tutorials to pull in your data. Goodbye spreadsheets, hello Essentials!

3. Salesforce Essentials makes it possible to run your business from your phone.

Yes, really! Once you’ve signed up for Salesforce Essentials and pulled in your data, you’re granted access to a suite of business management tools.

Build real-time reports and dashboards. Customize as needed and track (with a click or tap) to visual key metrics. Take a look at which areas of customer feedback to prioritize and find out how much revenue your deals are worth.
Track each sales stage. From initial calls to closing the deal, business owners get a clear view of what is in their pipeline.
Respond to customers. Salesforce Essentials provides a queue that helps you manage customer feedback quickly and through a variety of contact methods.
Integrate your existing business tools. Do you use DocuSign or Dropbox? Essentials works with these apps, so you can easily integrate them in this CRM solution.

Try Salesforce Essentials today!

We’ve partnered with Salesforce Essentials so entrepreneurs can see how easy it is for sales and service to come together. Try out the FREE 14-day trial now! This gives small business owners the valuable opportunity to see how Salesforce Essentials keeps track of their customer information. See how your business is doing at a glance with the help of Salesforce Essentials.

No need to wait for email validation — sign up here to immediately get started with Essentials!

Deborah Sweeney

Deborah Sweeney is an advocate for protecting personal and business assets for business owners and entrepreneurs. With extensive experience in the field of corporate and intellectual property law, Deborah provides insightful commentary on the benefits of incorporation and trademark registration.

Education: Deborah received her Juris Doctor and Master of Business Administration degrees from Pepperdine University, and has served as an adjunct professor at the University of West Los Angeles and San Fernando School of Law in corporate and intellectual property law.

Experience: After becoming a partner at LA-based law firm, Michel & Robinson, she became an in-house attorney for MyCorporation, formerly a division in Intuit. She took the company private in 2009 and after 10 years of entrepreneurship sold the company to Deluxe Corporation. Deborah is also well-recognized for her written work online as a contributing writer with some of the top business and entrepreneurial blogging sites including Forbes, Business Insider, SCORE, and Fox Business, among others.

Fun facts/Other pursuits: Originally from Southern California, Deborah enjoys spending time with her husband and two sons, Benjamin and Christopher, and practicing Pilates. Deborah believes in the importance of family and credits the entrepreneurial business model for giving her the flexibility to enjoy both a career and motherhood. Deborah, and MyCorporation, have previously been honored by the San Fernando Valley Business Journal’s List of the Valley’s Largest Women-Owned Businesses in 2012. MyCorporation received the Stevie Award for Best Women-Owned Business in 2011.