Salesforce Helps Small Businesses with Ready to Use Solution

Salesforce has announced the general availability of Pro Suite, a flexible, scalable, all-in-one offering to help small businesses get started and scale on the #1 AI CRM.

Powered by Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Platform and Data Cloud, Pro Suite helps customers grow their operations with one ready-to-use and easy-to-implement solution.

Pro Suite expands on the capabilities of Salesforce’s Starter Suite, which includes guided onboarding, reporting templates, pre-built dashboards, and built-in AI to help small businesses get the most out of their CRM from day one.

Starter allows employees to handle key tasks quickly, like tracking sales leads, managing customer service cases, sending customer emails, collecting direct payments, and more.

Pro Suite offers a seamless growth path from Starter Suite for growing businesses with the tools they need to support more complex business processes.

In addition to the functionality of Starter Suite, Pro Suite provides advanced features and more customization, such as workflow and process automation, sales forecasting and quoting, and live chat for customer service.

Pro Suite helps businesses:

• Increase lead generation with campaign templates, content personalization, and performance analytics to reach the right prospects with the right message, at the right time.
• Drive faster sales with forecasting, quoting, and direct online payments to streamline revenue collection.
• Answer customer questions fast with chat and messaging capabilities available on customer websites and apps.
• Extend the power of AI CRM through AppExchange, Salesforce’s trusted enterprise cloud marketplace, with an ecosystem of apps and experts to drive results across any industry, department, or product.

Kris Billmaier, SVP and GM of Salesforce Self-Service and Growth Products, discusses how businesses of all sizes can get more out of Salesforce and grow faster using Pro Suite.

Q. Why Did Salesforce Build Pro Suite?

A recent survey from Slack found that 40% of small businesses believe 2024 is a ‘make or break’ year for their business — and that technology is a key focus for them.

They’re worried about updating their technology without the budget to do so, and feeling like the tech they use for their business is outdated.

To help, we wanted to bundle the best of our products for small business owners in a way that is both affordable and easy to use.

And, we wanted to make it quick to implement and scale with an intuitive UI so these business owners can find success quickly.

Q. How is Pro Suite Different than Starter Suite?

Starter Suite was built to help small businesses who needed a simple, out-of-the-box CRM that could quickly provide value across their business, and the feedback that we’ve received has been overwhelmingly positive.

They love the simple-to-set-up, easy-to-use capabilities that span the marketing, sales, service, and now, commerce needs of their businesses.

What we also found was that many customers want a seamless growth path to unlock additional functionality as their business grows more complex.

That drove us to build Pro Suite, which has stronger customization, automation, and integration capabilities, along with more advanced sales and service functionality to support businesses that are ready for the next stage of growth.

Pro Suite offers all of the goodness of Starter Suite with more advanced features from our enterprise platform like Forecast Management, Direct Payment Links, In-App and Web messaging, Custom Apps and Objects, Flow Automation, and access to AppExchange for enhanced functionality.

Q. Who is Pro Suite Built For?

We built Pro Suite for growing businesses that needed more tools and customization than Starter Suite could provide them as they scaled.

So, for example, if you’re a small consulting business that’s running multiple tech systems to manage customer emails, phone calls, and meetings, it’s likely that those systems need to be integrated.

Or if you’re part of an installation team within a larger manufacturing business that needs to manage contractors and subcontractors alongside forecasted revenue and expenses, Pro Suite gives companies the tools to consolidate their sales, service, marketing, and commerce systems into a single view of their operations on one platform.

Q. How Does Consolidating Their Systems into a Single Platform Set Growing Businesses Up for Success in the Future?

In today’s digital-first world, businesses are faced with ever-increasing customer expectations. To meet these demands, they are looking to AI and automation to drive efficiency and grow their business. However, they need a strong data foundation to deliver the trusted experiences customers expect.

This starts with getting all of their customer data together in one place. Pro Suite brings together business data that is usually spread across multiple tech systems and departments, and creates a unified view with Data Cloud.

Data Cloud connects, federates, and harmonizes any data type from any product and system, and connects it back to the Salesforce applications that business users need to use every day, to deliver a comprehensive, 360-degree view of customers and power CRM, AI, automation, and analytics across any business process.

Q. What Separates Pro Suite From its Competitors?

Pro Suite is backed by the full power of Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Platform. Unlike its competitors, Salesforce has been a long-time leader in CRM and we’ve built Pro Suite on that same, extensible platform that has been the foundation of our customers’ success for 25 years.

Pro Suite empowers customers to quickly and easily get started on the world’s #1 AI CRM and scale seamlessly. Unlike other point solutions, customers will never outgrow Salesforce.

We have a variety of solutions — big and small — for every unique business need or industry. Salesforce customers will never have to rip and replace existing implementations to get the right-sized solution for their needs.

We offer a variety of fully customizable upgrade paths from Starter and Pro Suite all the way up to our top Einstein 1 Sales Edition.

Q. How Are Customers Finding Success with Pro Suite?

Many customers are already seeing success with Pro Suite. One example is Nucliq, a preventive healthcare company with 10 employees, which develops at-home gut health tests.

As they were looking to expand into the B2B market, Nucliq needed a CRM that could organize data from their different systems and spreadsheets, and a solution that was easy to learn and could scale up with them as they grow. After evaluating other options like HubSpot and Monday.com, they decided on Pro Suite.

Now, Pro Suite provides them with a single source of truth for all of their deals so they can track deal flows.

They also have visibility into planning timelines, so they can manage their manufacturing forecast and can track kits that get delivered to clinics, allowing them to resolve customer inquiries easily.

Author: Robyn Coppell