Salesforce CRM Review

Why We Chose Salesforce as the Best CRM for Small Businesses

Salesforce is among the industry leaders in cloud-based CRM solutions and has the widest variety of plans and features we’ve reviewed. It offers countless integrations, including a native Slack app for enhanced team and customer communication, and now offers some of the most powerful and comprehensive AI tools on the CRM market. Salesforce also has a secure AI assistant, Einstein, which can help summarize and visualize CRM data, enhance customer communication, build workflows, craft emails and train sales reps.  

Unlike other industry giants, Salesforce gears many of its product offerings and its pricing toward small businesses that want to start with a simple and effective all-in-one sales, marketing and customer service tool. Salesforce was designed to learn and grow with your business, thanks to its AI-powered tools that improve with each customer interaction. 

As a centralized source of data, Salesforce makes it easier to spot the most promising sales opportunities, generate and optimize email marketing campaigns, enhance cross-team collaboration, visualize real-time insights, and build better customer relationships. With easy-to-use automations, time-saving macros, AI-powered insights and smart workflows, business owners and small sales teams can eliminate repetitive manual tasks. Instead, they can focus on delivering personalized service at the perfect times in their customers’ journeys.

Salesforce’s customizable Home dashboard offers a top-level overview of the most important metrics, including recently added leads and opportunities. 

Usability

Despite its potential complexity and advanced feature set, Salesforce is not difficult to set up for a small business, even for novice CRM users. It comes with a variety of pre-built reports, dashboards and templates that can help you hit the ground running. 

Once you’ve gone through the brief, guided setup process to import your contacts, personalize your pipeline, and build your sales workflows, you can begin collecting new leads and making more sales with live in-product help to assist with any minor issues. The system also displays pinned recommendations to ensure a comprehensive setup.

Salesforce can support your customer service team by handling case management and providing a searchable knowledge base. Source: Salesforce

Even with Salesforce Starter Suite (formerly Essentials), the company’s entry-level edition, automated tools will log sales activities like emails and calendar entries with the AI-powered tool named Einstein. With all of your customer data stored in one location, it’s easy to develop effective sales strategies and keep track of every step of your customers’ journeys. 

Your marketing team can use the CRM to send segmented, personalized email campaigns at exactly the right time, identified by Einstein. On the support side, you can manage the entire case lifecycle from within Salesforce, from automatically logging cases from online inquiries to sending auto-responses to routing the case to a relevant agent. You can also help your customers resolve common issues by publishing a searchable knowledge center from a ready-made template. 

We also liked that, even on its Starter plan, Salesforce offers essential e-commerce tools, including an option to create a branded online storefront and custom payment links. This can be particularly helpful for budget-conscious small businesses that don’t want to pay for a separate website.    

As your small business grows, you can easily add features from the AppExchange or upgrade to a better-featured plan to suit the evolving needs of your customers and employees. All of your CRM features are available through the mobile CRM apps, letting you and your team work effectively from anywhere. [Read related article: 12 Features to Look for in a CRM Solution]

Salesforce CRM Features

You would be hard-pressed to find a popular CRM feature that’s not available with Salesforce or as an existing add-on. Even with the entry-level Starter plan, you’ll have access to AI-powered features and automations with Einstein Activity Capture. The benefit of using Salesforce is that the company is constantly re-evaluating consumer needs, gathering feedback, and launching new CRM features.

You can select a sellable item from your Salesforce catalog, set your segmented contacts, and let Einstein dive into the data to make the best offers to the right prospects at the perfect time for a sale. Source: Salesforce

These sorts of tools are typically reserved for more expensive, higher-tier plans with other service providers. All Salesforce plans include features for data syncing, task management, sales tracking, lead assignment and auto-routing, customer service, mobile access, custom reporting, e-commerce, email marketing, built-in meetings and everything else you need to manage sales, marketing and customer support. We’ve highlighted a few of the features that are most helpful for small business owners.

Sales Forecasting

Salesforce provides an accurate and up-to-date view of your entire business pipeline. We liked that you can view your deals in a highly visual Kanban view and advance them through the pipeline with a simple drag-and-drop — Salesforce will automatically update the estimated revenue. You can easily identify areas where your business is struggling by reviewing the identified trends and gaps, so you can make necessary adjustments and stay on track with your revenue goals. 

The software builds forecasts with a set of weighted variables that can include the owner, time, forecast categories, product family and territory. According to Salesforce, sales leaders can usually expect to see accuracy within 10 percent of their forecasted data. 

You can drag and drop deals on the Kanban pipeline, and Salesforce will automatically update the expected revenue forecast. Source: Salesforce

Lead Management

Salesforce helps bring all customer and prospect information into one single data hub. Thanks to its email integration, the system will automatically capture your email leads and route them to the most appropriate sales rep or agent. You can also generate leads from your e-commerce landing pages, chatbots and web forms. 

Your reps will be automatically notified about any updates and will have all the information they need to follow up, be it by using a personalized email template or a built-in meeting app. You can also launch segmented email campaigns, using AI to determine the optimal sending time.   

Like most elements in Salesforce, you can customize your contacts’ information pages to highlight the details that matter to your business. The system’s AI helps identify and score the most promising leads, so you can focus your sales efforts. With Salesforce, you can also automate many manual tasks and set up complex macros and cadences to handle multiple time-consuming actions in a single click. With key information and helpful automations, your reps can spend more time selling.

Salesforce allows you to set up complex automated cadences across multiple channels. Source: Salesforce

Einstein Generative AI

Salesforce has some of the most powerful AI-driven features on the market. However, many of them are locked behind top-tier plans that are often inaccessible for smaller businesses. Luckily, the generative capabilities of Einstein, Salesforce’s AI assistant, are available to most users. 

Sales teams can use this tool to compose emails enriched with customer data, summarize conversations, and schedule meetings. Service teams can use it to generate personalized chat replies and collect relevant information from existing case notes. Marketing teams can use it to engage customers and prospects through multiple communication channels. 

On higher plans, Einstein can also analyze conversation sentiment, identify customer pain points, propose close plans and more. With the native Slack integration, anyone at your company can benefit from AI-powered conversation summaries, visualized data snippets and writing assistance to quickly draft tailored messages and texts. 

Salesforce’s AI, Einstein, can help draft personalized emails following simple prompts. Source: Salesforce

Generative Canvas

We were impressed by Salesforce’s new AI-powered visualization feature — Generative Canvas. You can use plain language prompts to ask AI to generate custom views of your data that will be presented as interactive tables, charts and graphs. It will even scout the web for the latest company data, like recent acquisitions, that can provide valuable context and serve as conversation starters. 

Sales reps can use it to prepare for upcoming meetings, support agents can pull up relevant case data while on a call, and marketing teams can quickly analyze and visualize the latest campaign performance. You can also share your canvases with other team members in real-time, so you can ensure you’re on the same page while closing a deal.   

Note that the feature is not available during the trial period but is accessible on both paid Starter and Pro Suite subscriptions.  

Salesforce’s Generative Canvas feature allows you to quickly visualize key contact and account data using conversational AI prompts. Source: Salesforce  

Salesforce CRM Pricing

The Salesforce Small Business CRM comes in two plans: Starter Suite and Pro Suite. Both tiers include sales, marketing, service and commerce tools essential for running a growing business. 

Starter Suite can be sufficient for many companies, but if you’re looking for AI-powered forecasting, quote management and advanced customization, you might consider the upper tier. It also offers access to the AppExchange marketplace with 7,000 integrations, providing further platform customization options.  

For companies ready to scale up and prioritize sales efforts, Salesforce also offers higher-tier Sales Cloud-specific plans: 

• Enterprise: $165 per user per month
• Unlimited: $330 per user per month
• Einstein 1 Sales: $500 per user per month

These plans give you access to AI-powered lead scoring, advanced pipeline management, conversation analysis, sales engagement, and more. Small businesses that want to expand their marketing reach can consider investing in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, but the pricing starts at $1,500 per organization per month. Most plans require an annual subscription.

Setup

How difficult it is to set up your Salesforce account depends on the chosen product mix, size of your team, number of contacts and the complexity of your CRM workflows. However, for a small business on a Starter Suite plan, the setup is relatively fast and easy. 

We appreciated the in-app tutorials and step-by-step feature walkthroughs that can help new users get up and running. However, we were surprised that, unlike most of the reviewed competitors, Salesforce’s demo accounts don’t come with pre-populated dummy data, which can be helpful for business owners who want to import their existing CRM contacts straight away but can be a hindrance for users looking to play around with the system first.   

The self-help resources include more than 350 YouTube videos, more than 120 webinars and a large collection of on-demand expert coaching videos and guides to help you with everything from importing your contacts to building automated sales processes. We also appreciated Salesforce’s Trailhead platform that provides product courses, official certifications and access to a wider learning community. During the setup process, Salesforce provides to-do lists and recommended steps to help you connect to your email, set up your sales processes, customize fields, import data, and start collecting and nurturing leads.

Customer Service

Salesforce offers three customer success tiers: Standard, Premier and Signature. Standard plan is available on all licences and includes access to self-help materials and the Trailblazer community. Premier service plan comes at a cost of 30% of the license fees and includes onboarding support, health checks and 24/7 support by phone, email and chat for business-stopping issues. The custom-priced Signature plan includes a dedicated support agent, 24/7 support for all issues, personalized onboarding and smart account monitoring. 

If an issue can’t be resolved by Agentforce, Salesforce’s AI bot, the company prefers customers to log a support case or request a call via an online form. (This is similar to what we saw in our review of Oracle NetSuite CRM.) While this practice helps ensure the correct person is available to resolve your issue, the waiting period may be frustrating if you need an immediate resolution. 

When we called for technical support outside of normal business hours, we were informed that Salesforce was experiencing high call volume and were encouraged to seek a solution on our own at help.salesforce.com. 

Drawbacks

Both Starter and Pro Suites come with a limit of 2,000 emails per month, with an option to purchase further bundles of 1,000 email sends. Small businesses with large marketing lists can find themselves paying significant extra fees. 

The majority of Salesforce’s products require an annual subscription. Most CRM providers offer annual and monthly payment options for most of their plans. See our Zoho CRM review for an example.

Methodology

Our editorial team selected the best CRM software in 2025 after spending many hours participating in live product demos and testing each platform. We identified the best use case for each of our chosen providers to help small business owners and managers choose the best CRM for their needs. Salesforce meets the needs of small businesses and teams with easy-to-use features to manage leads, stay on top of emerging opportunities, and analyze and visualize key insights to support sales reps in real-time. The platform’s features are expansive, ensuring you’ll always have access to the CRM tools you need as your business evolves.

Overall Value

We recommend Salesforce CRM for …

• E-commerce businesses looking for a simple CRM to handle sales, marketing and client communication. 
• Small businesses shopping for a basic all-in-one sales, marketing and support platform.
• Scaling businesses expecting steady growth and looking for a flexible CRM to meet their evolving needs.

We don’t recommend Salesforce CRM for …

• Businesses in niche industries that don’t segment their audience.
• Businesses that operate outside of standard business hours and require prompt customer support.
• Enterprise-level businesses that want extensive and granular customization options.