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Why We Chose Salesforce as the Best CRM for Small Businesses

Salesforce is among the industry leaders in cloud-based CRM solutions and has the widest variety of plans and features we’ve reviewed. Unlike the other industry giants, Salesforce gears many of its product offerings and its pricing toward small businesses that want to start with a simple and effective all-in-one sales and customer service tool. Salesforce learns and grows with your business, thanks to intelligent tools that Strengthen with each customer interaction. As a centralized source of data, Salesforce makes it easier to understand how to allocate marketing efforts and tailor messages for different customer segments with helpful AI-powered recommendations from Einstein and complete AI-generated content with Einstein GPT. With easy-to-use automations, timesaving macros, AI-powered insights and detailed customer information, business owners and small sales teams can eliminate repetitive manual tasks. Instead, they can focus their energy on delivering personalized service and deals at the perfect times in their customers’ journeys.

Salesforce keeps records of every customer interaction and communication, which any registered user in your company can access from any device. Source: Salesforce

Usability

Despite its potential complexity and advanced feature set, Salesforce is far from a difficult product to set up and use in a small business setting, even for first-time CRM account owners. However, if usability is your top priority, you may want to consider another CRM, such as Keap or monday.com Sales CRM, two of the top choices for ease of use (learn more in our Keap review and monday.com Sales CRM review). Once you’ve gone through the brief setup process to import your contacts and build your sales workflows, you can begin collecting new leads and making more sales with live in-product help to assist with any minor issues.

Even with Salesforce Starter (formerly Essentials), the company’s entry-level edition, automated tools will log sales activities like emails and calendar entries with the AI-powered tool named Einstein. With all of your customer data stored in one location, it’s easy to develop effective sales strategies and keep track of every step of your customers’ journeys. On the support side, you can help your customers resolve common issues by publishing a searchable knowledge center from a readymade template.

As your small business grows, you can easily add features from the AppExchange or upgrade to a better-featured plan to suit the evolving needs of your customers and employees. All of your CRM features are available through the mobile CRM apps, letting you and your team work effectively from anywhere. [Read related article: 12 Features to Look for in a CRM Solution]

You can see and manage your entire sales process, from new leads to close, through any internet-connected device. Source: Salesforce

Salesforce CRM Features

You would be hard-pressed to find a popular CRM feature that’s not available with Salesforce in a standard edition or as an existing add-on. Even with the entry-level Starter plan, you’ll have access to AI-powered features and automations with Einstein Activity Capture. 

You can select a sellable item from your Salesforce catalog, set your segmented contacts and let Einstein dive into the data to make the best offers to the right prospects at the perfect time for a sale. Source: Salesforce

These sorts of tools are typically reserved for more expensive, higher-tier plans with other service providers. All Salesforce plans include features for data syncing, sales tracking, customer service, mobile access, custom reporting, integrations and everything else you need to manage customer sales and support. We’ve highlighted a few of the features that are most effective for small business owners.

Sales Forecasting

Salesforce provides an accurate and up-to-date view of your entire business pipeline. You can motivate your sales reps to exceed their targets with up-to-the-minute leaderboards to encourage friendly competition. You can easily identify areas where your business is struggling through an objective, data-driven point of view to make necessary adjustments and stay on track with your revenue goals. The software builds forecasts with a set of weighted variables that can include the owner, time, forecast categories, product family and territory. According to Salesforce, sales leaders can usually expect to see accuracy within 10 percent of their forecasted data.

As a sales manager, you can see your team’s progress with quarterly and monthly goals, and dive into any piece of data for great insight. Source: Salesforce

Lead Management

You can use landing pages and email to automatically add new leads and route them to the appropriate sales representative. Your reps will automatically have all the information they need to follow up with one click to email from a personalized template or make a call with the built-in dialer. You can customize your lead’s information pages to highlight the details that matter to your business and guide your reps on what they should focus on and accomplish next. You can automate many manual tasks and set up complex macros to handle multiple time-consuming actions quickly in a single click. With key information and helpful automations, your reps can spend more time selling and less time learning about their customers.

You can manually filter leads to determine the strongest opportunities. Source: Salesforce

Social Intelligence

Available as an add-on for $25 per month, the unique Social Intelligence feature helps business owners and managers harness engagement across social media networks to make better sales decisions. This social listening tool uses natural language processing to gain an understanding of trending news and business events for your accounts, competitors and industry. You can use this tool to identify new leads, set reminders to reach out to a contact, search for account names, and use keywords to surface business events and key conversations to reach your customers where they congregate online.

Einstein GPT

New for 2023, Einstein GPT is the next generation of Salesforce’s “Einstein” AI technology that’s delivered more than 200 billion daily AI-powered predictions across the company’s Customer 360 platform. As the name implies, Einstein GPT combines Salesforce’s proprietary AI models with ChatGPT to trigger time-saving automations and create personalized AI-generated content. Sales teams can use this tool to compose emails and schedule meetings. Service teams can use it to generate personalized chat replies and collect relevant information from existing case notes. Marketing teams can use it to engage customers and prospects through multiple communication channels. With Slack integration, anyone at your company can benefit from AI-powered conversation summaries and writing assistance to quickly draft coherent messages and texts. 

Save valuable time directing your CRM to create lead-generation pages, add sign-up forms, get insights on new accounts and send customers detailed answers to complex questions. Source: Salesforce

Salesforce CRM Pricing

The Salesforce Small Business CRM has four plans with three distinct tiers. The entry-level Starter edition, which has a limit of 10 user accounts, includes everything you’ll need from a CRM to run your business efficiently from one cloud-based platform. For the middle-tier Professional option, you can choose between the Sales Professional and the Service Professional, based on how you interact with your customers. Rather than a per-seat price, the upper-tier Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is priced by the number of contacts you manage and includes support for 10,000 contacts.

You can purchase add-ons for new features or extended capabilities for sales, service, marketing, commerce, analytics and more. Most plans require an annual payment plan.

Setup

The difficulty of setting up Salesforce is largely dependent on the product you select, size of your team, number of contacts and complexity of your CRM workflows. However, for a small business setting up a Starter plan, Salesforce is considered fast and easy. The self-help resources include more than 350 YouTube videos, more than 120 webinars and a large collection of on-demand expert coaching videos to help you with everything from importing your contacts to building out automated sales processes. During the setup process, Salesforce provides to-do lists and recommended steps to help you connect to your email, set up your sales processes, customize fields, import data, and start collecting and nurturing leads.

Customer Service

Salesforce’s customer service is available 24/7 by phone, email and chat, but finding the help you need may take some time. Salesforce prefers customers to request a support call via online form to initiate a technical support case. (This is similar to what we saw in our review of Oracle NetSuite CRM.) While this practice helps ensure the correct person is available to resolve your issue, the waiting period may be frustrating if your sales or support activities are affected and you need an immediate resolution.

When we called for technical support outside of normal business hours, we were informed that Salesforce was experiencing high call volume and were encouraged to seek a solution on our own at help.salesforce.com.

Drawbacks

Integrations on the Starter plan are limited to DocuSign, Dropbox, HelloSign, CodeScience, ActiveCampaign and Zapier. While Zapier alone can cover many of the must-have CRM integrations, you’ll have to pay extra for a plan that offers more than 100 automated tasks per month.

The majority of Salesforce’s products require an annual subscription. Most CRM providers offer annual and monthly payment options for most of their plans. (See examples in our Zoho CRM review.)

Methodology

Our editorial team and contributing writers considered all of the major CRM software providers in 2024 for review. After performing our initial research into each platform, we selected 13 of the leading CRM solutions available today for small businesses, including Salesforce, monday.com Sales CRM, Freshsales, Zoho, Oracle NetSuite, HubSpot, Pipedrive and Zendesk. After spending many hours participating in live product demos and testing each platform, we identified the best use case for each of the 13 providers to help small businesses owners and managers choose the best CRM for their needs. We’ve also taken a deeper dive with nine of our top performers, providing greater insight into the features and tools that separate these CRM solutions from the rest of the competition. Salesforce meets the needs of small businesses and teams with easy-to-use features to manage leads, stay on top of sales goals and automatically identify insights into the social trends that are relevant to your company. The platform’s features are expansive, ensuring you’ll always have access to the CRM tools you need as your business evolves.

Overall Value

We recommend Salesforce CRM for …

• New businesses looking for their first CRM platform.
• Small businesses shopping for a basic all-in-one sales and support platform.
• Scaling businesses expecting steady growth and looking for a flexible CRM to meet their evolving needs.

We don’t recommend Salesforce CRM for …

• Businesses in niche industries that don’t segment their audience.
• Businesses seeking an equal mix of sales and customer service from their CRM.
• Enterprise-level businesses that want a lot of customizable features and tools.

Why you should consider Salesforce alternatives

The customer relationship management (CRM) space is full of large and midsize companies vying for the attention of businesses like yours. While only a few CRMs out there are real competition for Salesforce and its global scale, small business clients have a wide variety of vendors to consider.

Salesforce is the most prominent name on the market, with a vast array of features and integrations at reasonable pricing, but those positives may become negatives when viewed from a small business point of view. For example, too many choices can create analysis paralysis; with a plethora of features to choose from when choosing their Salesforce package, small business owners may become overwhelmed or distracted from their core business needs. Plus, many of the company’s integrations and features can be irrelevant and costly bells and whistles for some smaller businesses that can get by with basic functionality. You should also keep in mind that bigger doesn’t always mean better when it comes to customer service. Salesforce, despite being the global CRM leader, has gained a reputation for limited customer support within small business circles.

Fortunately, all it takes is a little research to discover which Salesforce alternatives may be more ideal for your business. We’ve gotten the process started for you by rounding up some of Salesforce’s top competitors below.

Top Salesforce competitors

Could one of Salesforce’s top competitors be a better solution for your small business? We recommend considering these vendors.

Keap

One of the things we love most about Keap is its ease of use. This CRM platform is super customizable to your business’s unique needs and makes automation simple to set up. You can add over 2,500 software integrations and sales and CRM marketing tools to expand its functionality. However, Keap’s contact-based pricing model means costs will increase for businesses with more than 10,000 contact names (contacts could include all of your current and past customers, as well as customer leads). This may not be a significant drawback, however, for very small businesses with limited client lists:

• Why it stands out: Keap’s CRM platform stores all customer activity in a centralized space. Your business’s customer interactions are added automatically. The user dashboard makes it easy for you and your team to text, email, book appointments, process purchases and add invoices from the same screen. 
• Pricing: The Pro plan starts at $139 per month for two users. The Max plan starts at $199 per month for three users. The company also offers a 14-day free trial.

Find out more in our detailed Keap review.

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is designed to increase leads, accelerate sales and accurately measure performance with ease and efficiency. Zia, the system’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered assistant, predicts leads and deals, identifies potential customers for conversion and helps sales teams focus their efforts with user-friendly guidance. Note that only Enterprise subscribers have access to these AI-powered tools:

• Why it stands out: This vendor particularly excels at serving remote and hybrid teams. Real-time notifications of customer interactions can reach your sales team in any location, easy-to-use automation saves time on repetitive tasks and the flexible dashboard makes it convenient to stay in touch with your entire sales team from anywhere.
• Pricing: Zoho offers four plans — Standard, Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate. Pricing starts at $14 per user, per month, for the Standard package and tops out at $52 per user, per month, for the Ultimate option. We particularly like that the Enterprise tier gets you a customer journey command center, a Canvas visual CRM view, a mobile software development kit and multiuser portals. 

See our in-depth Zoho CRM review for a breakdown of each pricing tier.

Zendesk

Zendesk works incredibly well for businesses with complex customer profiles and industries with long-term customer relationships. It is especially well-suited for managing post-sale business activities, renewals and other customer service tasks. However, the home dashboard isn’t super user-friendly compared to other CRM options on the market. 

• Why it stands out: You can enjoy a suite of collaboration tools that keep team members engaged and make it easier to work together from various locations. Customer data is aggregated from multiple customer touchpoints into a central database, preventing different departments from duplicating communications or missing context. 
• Pricing: The monthly subscription price ranges from $19 to $99 per user, with a 30-day free trial option.

Oracle NetSuite CRM

While Oracle is one of the biggest CRM companies in the world — competing alongside leaders like Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft and Adobe for market share — it can also be a powerful tool for small e-commerce businesses. Its Oracle NetSuite product is a truly unified, all-in-one commerce solution for sales, marketing and operations. Just be aware that access to all features and tools requires purchasing Oracle’s enterprise resource planning platform.

• Why it stands out: The Oracle CRM includes custom integrations with the full suite of Oracle products. It also provides a robust CRM analytics system, highly rated mobile applications and full browser and cloud support.
• Pricing: Costs are not available online because quotes are generated based on each business’s specific needs.

While pricing isn’t readily available, our full review of the Oracle NetSuite CRM is jam-packed with other must-know information on other aspects of this Salesforce rival.

monday Sales CRM

For businesses with never-ending task lists and complex ventures, the monday Sales CRM from monday.com can help streamline project management processes as they relate to sales activities. The vendor’s core work management platform, which is included with the CRM, is designed to run and scale to any workflow. The software’s interfaces are easy to navigate, and the program comes equipped with unlimited boards to organize projects, from dashboards to customer data visualization tools: 

• Why it stands out: Premade templates make building and implementing time-saving automation super simple. We like that all plans include 24/7 customer support.
• Pricing: There are four plans available — Free, Basic, Standard and Enterprise (for large-scale operations). The free plan is limited to two users, 5GB of storage and 200+ templates. Basic and Standard are priced from $10 to $14 per user per month when billed annually, while companies interested in the Enterprise option need to get a custom quote. Students and nonprofits may qualify for discounted or free access.

Our review of the monday Sales CRM explains how the free version of the software differs from the tiers you have to pay for.

Other CRM competitors

The vendors we highlighted above are only some of the many other CRM providers small businesses can choose from. Companies like Less Annoying CRM, HubSpot, Insightly and SugarCRM can’t compete with Salesforce in terms of sheer size, but they understand the small and medium-sized business market. Like the other CRM vendors profiled in this article, these companies have built CRM solutions designed to serve small businesses with a more modern sales process that makes buying a software-as-a-solution product more transparent. 

The future of Salesforce and its competition

Salesforce is unique in that it acquired a dominant market share by targeting businesses of all sizes at the same time. The company continues to face stiff competition from big dogs like Oracle NetSuite CRM and Microsoft Dynamics as they move out of the enterprise-only market to nab contracts with large and midsize companies. That’s on top of the increasing competition Salesforce faces from CRM companies that focus exclusively on the small business set. 

The strength of the competitive landscape combined with the economic changes hitting the technology sector in 2024 promise to make it an interesting year for Salesforce. The alternatives that focus on serving the unique and evolving needs of small businesses, instead of on company growth and global market dominance, could chip away at Salesforce’s clientele. After all, a global presence and unmatched power don’t automatically make the Salesforce CRM the best option for your business.

Mona Bushnell and Jordan Beier contributed to this article.