Ask any small business what’s important for growth, and they’re likely to tell you it’s connecting with customers. That’s why, at last fall’s Dreamforce, we launched Sales Cloud Essentials, an easy-to-use, intelligent sales app for small business teams, built on the world’s #1 CRM platform. Salesforce Essentials makes it possible for every small business to tap into the power of Salesforce to build stronger customer relationships with apps that are easy to use, setup, and maintain.

Businesses everywhere are already adopting Sales Cloud Essentials to manage their sales and grow faster. Today, we’re introducing Service Cloud Essentials, a powerful support app for small business support teams.

Service Cloud Essentials powers support for small business teams 

The new Service Cloud Essentials lets small service teams offer customers faster, more personalized customer service. They can:

• Get started fast and learn easily with Trailhead: 62% of small businesses¹ say training would help them improve their operations, but they’re constrained by the cost and time it requires. Trailhead, Salesforce’s interactive, online learning environment, is free and guides Essentials customers through a fast, fun, and easy setup. Learn more about Service Cloud Essentials with Trailhead.

• Help more customers in less time: With powerful productivity tools, small businesses can increase the number of customers being supported by their lean service teams. When agents receive simple questions over and over again they can use macros, which automate many actions into one or two clicks, to respond to frequently asked questions with little to no effort. This means less work for agents and faster responses for customers.

• Work faster with Lightning: Built on the Salesforce Lightning framework, Essentials has a consumer-like experience that helps agents be more productive. Service agents have a single view of the customer so they have the context needed to resolve issues — from phone, email, Twitter or Facebook — faster, with greater accuracy and from a single location.

• Scale as they grow with a complete platform: Small businesses often make technology buying decisions based on what they need now rather than what they will need in the future, costing them more time and money in the long run on upgrades and integrations. With Essentials they can easily add more advanced capabilities so they never outgrow their CRM.

Service Cloud Essentials scales with best-in-class partners

To provide an amazing customer experience, businesses need to bring together all of their customer data in one place. That’s why we make it easy for Essentials customers to connect amazing apps from the AppExchange, Salesforce’s app marketplace, to their agent console. Service Cloud Essentials launch partners include GetFeedback, an easy-to-use survey solution designed to improve response rates and give companies more actionable data; and Nicereply which helps companies measure and improve the quality of their service by making it easy to collect customer feedback.

Increasing agent productivity is also critical, which is why we’ve also partnered with best-in-class productivity apps such as Dropbox and Slack, making collaboration for small business teams easier than ever. Learn more about our partner solutions at the Small Business Hub.

Salesforce Essentials fuels small business growth

“The adoption of new technology can contribute to bottom line growth but for smaller companies, setting up a CRM can seem overwhelming,” said Rebecca Wettemann, VP Research, Nucleus Research. “Salesforce Essentials will help small businesses accelerate time to value with an out-of-the-box sales and service CRM that makes it easy for them to get started fast and acquire, manage and service more customers.”

Small businesses are the cornerstone of innovation and economic growth. That’s why we’re so excited about Salesforce Essentials and the opportunity to help every small businesses tackle the unique needs and challenges they will face as they grow. Essentials allows small teams to get up and running on the Salesforce Platform quickly, and easily add new functionality as they grow. We believe Essentials is the way forward for small business growth, and we are excited about the future of the product and committed to the success of all small businesses growing with Salesforce.

Want to learn more about Service Cloud Essentials? Check out our demo, or try Service Cloud Essentials now.

Sales Cloud Essentials and Service Cloud Essentials are generally available today and priced at $25 per user per month. Learn more about Salesforce Essentials at salesforce.com/essentials

Salesforce can help you find customers, win their businesses, and keep them happy so you can grow your business faster than ever. Learn more about our small business CRM solutions or follow us on Twitter @SalesforceSMB and join the conversation with #SalesforceEssentials.

Data from this post comes from Salesforce’s second annual “Small & Medium Business Trends Report,” commissioned Harris Poll.

¹Salesforce Research, “2017 Small and Medium Business Trends Report,” October 2017.

UPDATED: August 28, 2018 to reflect new product nomenclature.