Salesforce launches Starter to ward off competition in the SMB segment

“With Starter, we rethought everything — from how people use the product to how they buy and get started. We improved the user experience to help enterprises move fast, adding in-app guidance and ready-to-use, pre-built tools and templates,” Kris Billmaier, general manager of Salesforce Starter, said in a statement.

Sales capabilities added to Starter include features such as homepage, easy email integration, out-of-the-box sales, and default dashboards for reporting. While the homepage feature provides a digest of contacts, leads, and opportunities in one place, the easy email integration feature can be used to connect an inbox to Starter with the help of Einstein Activity Capture, the company said.

Salesforce has also added service capabilities, such as case management, knowledge management, automating repetitive tasks, and connecting email support to Starter.

Starter also comes with marketing capabilities such as building campaign templates, audience creation, e-mail builder, content personalization, and campaign analytics capabilities.  

Stiff competition in the SMB market

Salesforce’s move to launch Starter can be attributed to the stiff competition the company faces in the SMB market from rival CRM software providers who rapidly gained customers and market share while Salesforce focused on larger enterprises, according to Miller.

“All-in-one business operations platforms like Zoho offer packages that fit the ‘solo-preneur’ all the way up to tools for enterprises,” Miller said. Other CRM packages such as Keap also offer easy-to-use sales and marketing growth tools attracting, Miller added.