Salesforce.com Inc. is targeting smaller businesses as it looks to dispel the notion that its cloud-hosted customer relationship management tools are only for large enterprises.

The company today unveiled Salesforce Essentials, which is a collection of smaller applications that are cheaper and easier to use than its main CRM platform. For starters, there are just two applications available – Sales Cloud Essentials and Service Cloud Essentials – which the company said are backed by the power of its larger products, Salesforce Trailhead, Einstein AI, Lightning and AppExchange.

Mike Rosenbaum, Salesforce’s executive vice president of CRM applications, said the new offering is all about helping smaller businesses grow. “Essentials is easy to set up and use – and it’s future-proof, so small businesses can add new capabilities quickly and easily as they grow,” he said.

One immediate benefit of using Essentials is that smaller businesses’ employees should become much more productive, the company said. In its release, Salesforce noted that small business teams spend up to 23 percent of their working hours manually inputting data into computer systems.

Salesforce reckons that teams could do much more with this time, “finding, winning and keeping more customers.” It said Essentials apps can help with this because they’re easy to set up and learn how to use and can be expanded with new capabilities as required.

“Essentials takes advantage of all the Salesforce innovation that is delivered in three major releases per year,” the company said. “It’s the same trusted CRM platform used by 83 percent of Fortune 500 companies, now optimized for small businesses.”

Some of the specific capabilities of the Essentials apps include free access to Salesforce Trailhead, which is the company’s interactive online learning environment. Essentials also comes with Einstein Activity Capture, which helps to make sales and service representatives more productive by automating manual data entry tasks.

Perhaps the biggest appeal of Essentials is that it offers smaller businesses an easier way to scale up their information technology infrastructure as they grow, Salesforce said. The company pointed out that upgrade paths and future-proofing are key concerns for many small and midsized businesses. Smaller companies often lack IT resources and need options that are easy to deploy and manage. And although there are many software providers catering to the needs of small businesses, these offerings are usually unable to scale, Salesforce said.

“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, vice president of research at 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.”

Salesforce said Sales Cloud Essentials and Service Cloud Essentials are available now, priced at $25 per user per month.

Images: Salesforce