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This week, Salesforce released another version of its platform aimed at small businesses. I say “yet another version” because the company has been trying to penetrate this market for years. This time the product is called Salesforce Easy and it is a “new” and “simplified” version of its product. The price is $25 per user, and it comes with additional functionality, including one-step sign-up to Slack, Google, and Microsoft 365, new data import tools, and pre-set sales processes.
“Salesforce Easy is designed to help more and more companies move their businesses forward, leveraging Salesforce’s technology expertise and best practices accumulated over more than two decades,” a publishing representative told Vernon Keenan. SalesforceDevops. “Salesforce Easy is a new simplified experience for businesses of all sizes.”
Keenan himself seems a bit dubious about this product. I don’t blame him.
“It will not, ahemSalesforce Easy should be able to succeed easily,” he writes. “Salesforce Easy can break some of the traditional Salesforce channel models and will require the company to improve its technical customer service and direct account services. For Salesforce Easy to succeed, Salesforce customer service will have to be a little more like Intuit or Microsoft.”
Even the name “Easy” seems somewhat offensive. Like it’s muted specifically for small businesses. Or maybe I’m too sensitive. Keenan’s perspective is correct. Let me also give you a few reasons why Salesforce might not be your best CRM option, especially if you’re a small business.
The first reason is that Salesforce is not a small business focused company. It is a company that has many products, including a small business product. If you are a small business you should be wary of this. It’s like buying a salad at a McDonalds – they offer it, but you know it’s not the main focus of the restaurant chain.
The CRM platforms that best serve the small business market are focused on serving the small business market only. You already know a few. They contain Zoho, Insightful, Sugar, Rapid, Buyer and others. For Salesforce, the company’s bread and butter comes from its largest corporate clients. And the business market is completely different from the small business market.
As Keenan points out, the company’s support infrastructure isn’t set up to handle the types of support requests from small businesses. For example, small business owners are less knowledgeable about technology, are often ignorant and impatient when technical problems arise, and can be more demanding than larger employees who have less interest in solving a problem in a timely manner. I say this with peace and love as a small business owner who behaves just like that. To really serve this market, Salesforce would need to overhaul its support infrastructure, change the way it delivers its services, come up with a more affordable service model, and probably hire a thousand psychiatrists to deal with the crazy personalities of small business owners like myself. I don’t see that happening.
The second reason: Salesforce lacks a channel that can serve small businesses.
Software vendors in Silicon Valley like to say how “easy” and “simplified” their products are to set up and use. Oh sure. Tell that to the person who runs a distribution company in Oklahoma City. People have different skills and what is easy and simple for some may not be for others.
That means most smaller businesses need help setting up, training, customizing, integrating, and data migration. Some – to save money – will do this alone and that will cause headaches for Salesforce support, who may spend tens of hours with a $25 customer. Many others can contact a partner. But Salesforce partners have been brought in to serve enterprise customers. Their channel consists of large companies such as Deloitte, Accenture and IBM and a large number of specialists who charge between $250 and $750 per hour for their services. A small business owner is unlikely to spend this kind of money and these partners are not interested in just 10 or 20 hours of service. They are used to projects of more than a hundred hours.
Finally, Salesforce doesn’t really want $25 per user customers. The rep Keenan spoke to pretty much conceded that, saying that “larger companies can try it too, understand what functionalities they want or need, and then quickly scale with the tools they need across our entire portfolio.”
Salesforce Easy is positioned as a small business product, but to me it seems more like a lead generation tool that allows the company to generate a new revenue stream for a demo product that the sales team can then use to target business prospects. The company’s stock price will not grow at $25 per user per customer.
Even if a small business signs up, they will be strongly encouraged to buy add-ons to really “get the full value of the application”. Those companies will find that many of those extra apps are already included in small business CRMs like the ones mentioned above. The reality is that when a small business pays $25 per user, not only will they complain about the price, but the vast majority will never make it any higher up that food chain.
An employee is not fired for buying Salesforce. It’s the BMW of CRMs. But small businesses don’t need BMWs. We need F-150s. Something that packs a lot of features at an affordable price and is built to serve our market. Salesforce is a really great product. But I don’t think the company is in the best position to serve small businesses.
