4 Little Known Features of Salesforce Your SMB Will Love

When someone says Customer Relationship Management or CRM, most people immediately think of Salesforce, and with good reason. Salesforce is the giant in the CRM industry, with more than 150,000 customers and 20,000 employees.

Instead of being confidence-building, those numbers can be intimidating for a small to medium business. Many SMBs have the impression that Salesforce is an enterprise-only tool, but nothing could be further from the truth. Salesforce helps small businesses every day become more productive, grow, and increase their revenues.

Even better, Salesforce understands those small businesses have unique needs. Many of the features available on the platform are purpose build for SMBs, are tailored to the needs of small businesses, or are customizable to meet the needs of every company.

We've pulled together four compelling features of Salesforce that will help your SMB grow and your team will love.

Four Features of Salesforce Ideal for Your Small to Medium Business

Salesforce Essentials

Salesforce understands that many of the features available in its platform are not only excessive for some small businesses but can be overwhelming or confusing. That's why the CRM offers a parred-down, more simplified version of the platform for SMBs called Salesforce Essentials.

Essentials is a lower-priced option for SMBs with ten or fewer team members needing full access to the tool. Many of the customer management and sales tools are available in Salesforce Essentials, but not all. This lowers the barrier for entry for many small companies, who don't need all of the bells and whistles that a full-blown Salesforce instance provides. However, your SMB can still get access to reporting, customer engagement features, and sales tools to help you better understand and assist your customers.

By using Salesforce Essentials, you'll also be setting your business up for growth because Essentials is still part of the Salesforce platform. An upgrade to a full Salesforce license is simple with no data migration, giving you rapid access to the more feature-rich platform quickly.

Scalable Marketing Solutions

When you think of a CRM, you're probably focused on the tools and features that will help the sales team sell more. But Salesforce is about more than just sales - it's about creating, building, and nurturing relationships. That's why Salesforce offers Marketing Cloud - a set of tools that help marketing teams understand and communicate with customers better and work with sales teams and other groups more effectively.

One of the biggest strengths of Marketing Cloud for SMBs is its modularity. Businesses can choose the solutions that work best for them without adopting all of Salesforce's marketing tools. Which tools you decide to use and when you add them can be totally up to you and your business's needs.

Even at the most basic levels, the marketing tools at Salesforce offer integrations that allow you to create a right-fit solution for your business. In addition to native CRM integration, you can add support for webinars, chat, and event tools. As you move up in tiers, you add file hosting, multi-touch attribution models, and even API access with thousands of calls a day.

Customer data can effortlessly feed into your marketing plans, allowing your marketing teams to leverage customer sales cycle information and data to optimize campaigns. Plus, integration with emails and forms and routing features can quickly get inbounds leads into the sales team's hands without manual intervention.

Data Backups and Encryption

Small businesses today must be concerned with cyber and data security. According to a May 2021 article in Cybersecurity Magazine, 43% of cyber-attacks involve small or medium enterprises. With ransomware on the rise, SMBs need to consider data and business continuity as part of their operations. Losing customer data could be devastating to your business.

Salesforce provides both a secure environment for those that need it and data backups to protect company information. As a cloud-based SaaS solution, Salesforce manages both data encryption and backups for your information that is hosted within the platform. This removes the burden of managing the security for your data from your own IT group and adds a layer of protection for your data as part of your continuity, recovery, and disaster planning.

Automation

Growth in a small business frequently requires additional resources to support, but the balance between revenue and resources needs can be challenging. SMBs ideally want to get the most out of their high-value team without bogging them down in tedious, repetitive work or rely on busy team members for critical tasks that create bottlenecks.

Automation can help an SMB scale quickly and without adding headcount, and Salesforce is packed with automation opportunities. For instance, Six Consulting helped a manufacturing client automate its slow, manual trials process, making it possible for service representatives to initiate new trials through the Salesforce platform.

Even at a smaller scale, automation of lead assignments, task reminders, and approvals can help an SMB make the most of their existing team, well beyond just the sales group. The addition of digital process automation (DPA) can act as a force multiplier for customer service teams. At the same time, automated communication features can keep customers in the loop on service calls, allowing field teams to focus on jobs instead of customer notifications.

Within sales, of course, Salesforce automation features can keep teams in the loop and add clarity to where a prospect is in the sales process. Lead scoring and sales flows can be configured to convert leads to accounts at the right time automatically. Automation can also accelerate sales, facilitating actions like automated discount approvals. Because these features can grow with your business, there is no need to reinvent the wheel when your sales team grows. Instead, a well-designed and configured automation can continue to simplify and accelerate tasks as your business expands.

Conclusion

Salesforce is much more than a CRM, and it's also much more than a tool for large organizations. From small organizations who only need the features of Salesforce Essentials to SMBs looking to protect and automate tasks to reach their full potential, Salesforce can support a business at every single stage of its lifecycle.

Of course, getting the most out of Salesforce today and in the future means getting off on the right foot. With an expert partner like Six Consulting, your SMB can be confident that your Salesforce instance is set to grow with you. From configuration management to application development to integrations with your core systems, Six Consulting has the deep experience to help you continue building your business.