Salesforce Expands Its Financial Services Platform

Salesforce has announced an expansion to its Financial Services Cloud to help financial advisors build deeper relationships with clients and become more productive by automating relevant client information from disparate IT systems.

Two years in development, the Financial Services Cloud platform offers advisors profiles of clients, their households and extended networks. Modules include Client Life Goals which allow advisors to create collaborative financial plans for the client based on life goals such as budgeting for college or buying a vacation home and Wealth Home Page which automates administrative tasks so advisors can quickly scan their daily agendas, prioritize client tasks and track client opportunities.

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com during the grand opening ceremonies for the... [+] Salesforce Tower in San Francisco. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Salesforce seems to believe that CRM (customer relationship management software) and artificial intelligence (AI) using APIs can overcome the silos that have bedeviled retail financial services firms for decades.

In its announcement, Salesforce said that “decades of mergers and acquisitions, evolving products that grew up in silos, multiple core systems across different lines of business and an explosion of data have created redundancy and a fractured view of the customer and their needs.”

To access the customer information in those silos, Salesforce is relying on a recent acquisition, MuleSoft, which uses APIs to extract customer information from disparate older systems and provide it to bank employees in an easily understood dashboard. Salesforce's commercial banking app provides relationship managers with a complete view of every customer's business and commercial accounts, and empowers them to identify and grow the most profitable relationships and streamline the onboarding of new clients. It also lets the commercial bankers make referrals to other parts of the bank, including wealth management and retail banking.

“For the first two years we focused on B2C now we are extending to B2B,” said said Rohit Mahna, senior vice president and general manager of Financial Services at Salesforce. "Customers wanted more repeatable action plans like passing a lead from the retail bank to the commercial bank.”

Since it started, Salesforce has done well with the financial services industry. It was being used by big players like Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Deutsch Bank, companies focused on ultra high net worth investors, like Bessemer, and four- and five-person shops across the country.

But, discovered Simon Mulcahy, it was getting the wealth management industry wrong.

Mulcahy, now the chief innovation officer, was running the company’s financial services groupwhen a conversation with one wealth manager made him realize that, as does occasionally happen with software companies, there was a huge gap between what Salesforce delivered and what wealth managers needed.

“I went back to Marc (Benioff) and the leadership team and they said to go deep. I ended up on the road." He visited more than 100 wealth management offices to learn more about what they needed.

“The industry is turning on its head,” Mulcahy said. “We had been helping them sell and they have a desperate need to do service-based selling. We have to help them change their operating and business model."

Millennials and female investors are being underserved by the current wealth management model, he added.

In the old model a client would bring a stack of paper to the financial advisor who would send it off to headquarters to get a financial plan in the form of a long paper-based document.

“The millennials are now 35 at the top end, entering the high earning time in their life and they need advice. The people who are getting advice are not getting it how they want. In other industries everyone is being retrained, and then you look at the staid experience of wealth management and it is like something out of Jeeves.”

“The industry model is a butler service,” Mulcahy said. “I am the advisor, tell me what you want and I will take care of everything. The relationship is binary — either give everything to the advisor and she does it all or do it yourself. You have all these people who aren’t being advised. The attitude is that it is too complicated for the client.”

The process is also product-centric. The advisor is going to sell the client some products and then have quarterly face-to-face reviews where the client faces more documentation than the average person can consume. But that’s probably not a big loss since the documents are out of date by then anyway.

Decades of complexity are slowing transformation, said Mahna.

“Complexity internally has created fragmented a view of the customer, they don’t have a holistic view of the customer.”

MuleSoft has built flows specific to financial services, which allows the Salesforce financial services platform to unlock all of a firm’s back office data sitting in core or policy administration servers, Mahna added.

Alyson Clarke, principal analyst for digital business strategy at Forrester Research, said Salesforce has been building this broad solution over several years. They started with the financial services cloud for financial planners, then did banking, then lending and small business.

“Now they have brought it all together,” she said, “with this great interface and they leveraged connectivity to services firms us like digital account opening. The new solution brings it all together across the organization —retail banking, lending, wealth management, commercial banking, SMB banking —  to help you better serve customers in a customer-centric way.”

The problem for banks is not just that these are different businesses, they also use different technology for servicing the customer.

“If you have a customer who cuts across multiple lines  of business, then the poor customer gets a very disjointed experience and the employees don’t know what is going on elsewhere. They can’t see that a wealth customer was talking to the firm about an SME loan. It brings the ability to integrate with a lot of existing systems and be able to connect the dots.”

“The financial services cloud is trying to make that employee’s job easier," Clarke added. “It will drive productivity and enable deeper and better conversations. If I can spend 10 minutes on administration and and 90 minutes on the conversation, and I can see other conversations you have had with other parts of the bank, it feels like I know you when I am talking to you. One benefit for the cloud is usability, the customer experience and how it makes the employee’s job a lot easier. It can pull together all the customer information in one spot.”

Next year, she added, Einstein will add artificial intelligence (AI) which will start to make the relationship management more deeply engaged and be able to suggest the next best action to an employee.

“I like its great usability. Salesforce is trying to understand the employee’s needs and it created an interface that allows you to customize and create a great experience for that person.”

The industry needs that help for employees, said Mulcahy, the innovation leader.

The advisors are in the mid to late 50s, they have a book of business and they really don’t want to sell any more.

“You are dealing with a business that starts with retirees and they end up dying. You have a high attrition rate which is not being addressed.” The advisor tends to have a  relationship with the patriarch of a family, and when he dies, an average of 70 percent of client-heirs take their business somewhere else.

Wealth management firms face a challenge of how to stem the outflow of assets and retain the business.

Mulcahy’s research revealed that most investors — well over 50 percent — are dissatisfied. That’s something to worry about because the nation faces an enormous wealth transfer in the next five years — more than $2 trillion.

“The transfer is going on and the industry is not set up for it. It is still selling, not servicing.”

“You have to transform the experience of the advisor,” Mulcahy said. “Now it is so onerous. The  advisor spends half a day preparing for a client meeting using 20-30 apps they have to swivel between. How do you make that easier?”

State Farm, for example, uses Salesforce to support agents in handling claims. When a claim is submitted, Salesforce provides a complete view of the customer and automatically creates an intelligent action plan that helps them prioritize their tasks. It also updates the customer by email or text message of the status and progress of their claim.

Among the partners supporting the launch are Athene Group and Envestnet | Yodlee for account aggregation, DocuSign and OneSpan for document management and electronic signatures, Informatica and MuleSoft to extract and integrate data from multiple systems, Orion for new billing capabilities and Advisor Software for portfolio rebalancing.

Salesforce to Fund Startups Writing Apps for its Platform

— -- Salesforce.com Inc. has launched a US$25 million investment fund to encourage the development of new applications using its Force.com hosted development platform.

The fund, created with investment companies Bay Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners, will make investments of $500,000 or more in start-up companies using Force.com, the companies announced Monday.

Salesforce.com refers to Force.com as its "platform as a service." It allows companies to build add-ons to Salesforce.com's hosted CRM (customer relationship management) software, or entirely new hosted applications, using pre-built database, logic and workflow services from Salesfore.com.

The goal is make it easier to build hosted applications by letting Salesforce.com provide the underlying infrastructure services.

Last month, Salesforce.com released a new part of Force.com called Visualforce, a tool for creating user interfaces in HTML, AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) or Adobe Systems Inc.'s Flash.

The tool is valuable because it lets companies build applications that don't have to have the same look and feel as Salesforce.com's own applications, which wasn't possible before, commented analyst company Ovum Ltd.

Salesforce.com didn't say how much each company is contributing to the investment fund, only that they will invest about $25 million over three years. Salesforce.com will act in an advisory capacity, it said.

Bay Partners has already invested in companies that list their applications in Salesforce.com's AppExchange marketplace, including Eloqua Corp., which makes demand generation software, and Xactly Corp., which develops sales management software.

Salesforce Pricing: How Much Does Salesforce Cost in 2023?

Salesforce pricing starts at $25 per user, per month for its Sales Cloud and Service Cloud platforms, with more expensive plans getting as high as $330 per user, per month. These monthly fees will vary depending on the needs and scale of your business. The difference between the above two figures is startling, so the smartest move you can make is to get a direct price quote from Salesforce for how much Salesforce will cost for your exact business needs.

You can also use our CRM quote comparison tool to receive quotes from a range of CRM providers, in addition to Salesforce. It's worth noting that, in August 2023, Salesforce changed its pricing across most of its prominent plans, increasing most plans by an average of 9% each. Luckily, the $25 per user, per month plan was unchanged, but more expensive plans did see an increase.

The most popular Salesforce platform is the Sales Cloud, which is why we've outlined this in the table below. Scroll down for all of Salesforce's plans and pricing information, including Sales and Marketing solutions.

File storage: 1GBData storage: 10GB + 20MB per license

File storage: 10GB + 2GB per licenseData storage: 10GB + 20MB per license

File storage: 10GB + 2GB per licenseData storage: 10GB + 20MB per license

File storage: 10GB + 2GB per licenseData storage: 10GB + 20MB per license

$15/user/month

Salesforce's most expensive solutions are its robust marketing automation platforms. Prices for this come in at between $1,250 per month and $15,000 per month, so you can see the price tag can vary wildly depending on exactly what you're looking for.

Worried about how much Salesforce will cost your business? Compare price plans in a few simple steps with our custom quote tool.

When it comes to determining the best price your business can get for Salesforce, or any software, the most important thing is to understand which pricing plan is sufficient for your exact business needs so you're not overpaying for features you won't use.

That’s why we’ve created our unique quote matching tool – it takes seconds to fill out but can save your business time and money. Last year, we helped thousands of businesses like yourself find the right services and products. Fill in a few quick questions about your business and we'll match you to the best solution.

Keep scrolling to work out for yourself which Salesforce price plan might best meet your needs. We'll look at Salesforce's costs for each tier and product. Plus, help you decide if this Salesforce is the right CRM system for your company, or if an alternative might offer you better value.

What's the reason for the increase? According to the official Salesforce press release, it's because the company has substantially increased its generative AI offerings, including AI Cloud, Einstein GPT, and Sales GPT and Service GPT. As a result, the platform has increased prices to make up for the increased functionality of Salesforce as a whole.

Salesforce divides its various services into what it calls “clouds.” Unsure about what service your business might need? Tired of the ambiguous pricing models of business software? We get it – comparing the different pricing plans is confusing and it can be extremely costly should you get it wrong. If you want to save time, you can join the dozens of other businesses who have used our quote-finding form and get matched to a pricing plan much quicker this way.

Sales, Marketing, and Service are the primary clouds Salesforce offers. Beyond that, the company has a variety of other services, including a development platform for building Salesforce-powered apps, online forums connected to CRM data, and more.

For those just starting out, however, Sales Cloud is the place to start.

For pricing, Salesforce offers a wide variety of pricing levels. Essentials is for teams of five or less and applies only to the Sales and Service clouds. As you go up in pricing tiers, Salesforce becomes more customizable and adds higher levels of support.

There's also Lightning Professional, Lightning Enterprise, and Lightning Unlimited. The Lightning suite of services all use a different user interface than the classic versions of these plan tiers but offer the basically same features (albeit with a few new productivity tools).

You can read more about the Lightning services here. Ultimately, while the “Lightning” name can be a little confusing, the services it offers are just a mildly revamped version of the services we discuss here and come with the same benefits and price tags.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Formerly Pardot)

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Formerly Pardot)

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Formerly Pardot)

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Formerly Pardot)

The Sales Cloud is the standard Salesforce software. The main features will allow every employee in a company to easily manage their accounts, contacts, leads, and opportunities, all from a single interface. It's also one of the few CRM options that allows for sales forecasting functionality across all its pricing plans. AI-powered tools and customizable templates can further streamline and automate daily chores, cutting down on costs and helping agents focus on what matters.

Each of the four tiers offers more features and functionality than the last. Sales Essentials costs $25 per user, per month; Lightning Professional is $80 per user, per month; Lightning Enterprise is $165 per user, per month; and Lightning Unlimited is $330 per user, per month.

It's worth noting that the Unlimited plan is where you can unlock the built-in AI features, which provide in-depth lead and opportunity scoring, as well as insights into customer interactions and deal health at your business.

As is often the case, the closest competitor to Salesforce Sales Cloud is the HubSpot Sales Hub, which offers many of the same features at a slightly lower price (starting at $23 per user per month). You are required to have at least two users though, so starting price is actually a minimum of $45 per month.

Salesforce is a good option, but it isn't the best CRM for sales, according to our research. That honor goes to Zoho CRM, which offers lots of features but at a reasonable price point that won't scare off smaller businesses. Salesforce does, however, offer some of the most robust sales dashboards on the market.

File storage: 1GBData storage: 10GB + 20MB per license

File storage: 10GB + 2GB per licenseData storage: 10GB + 20MB per license

File storage: 10GB + 2GB per licenseData storage: 10GB + 20MB per license

File storage: 10GB + 2GB per licenseData storage: 10GB + 20MB per license

$15/user/month

Service Cloud is a key part of Salesforce's products. It's a fully functional customer service platform that integrates seamlessly with Salesforce, putting your customer data at the fingertips of all those in your company that need it.

The Community 360 feature, for example, allows customer service agents to see if your clients have looked for help already on your website or filed any support tickets. This helps the agents get a better picture of what's going on with any given client.

With Service Cloud, Salesforce says you can reach any customer on any device to meet their needs as they arise.

The costs for Service Cloud are the same as for the Sales Cloud. Essentials is $25 per user, per month, Lightning Professional starts at $80 per user, per month, Lightning Enterprise costs $165 per user, per month, and Lightning Unlimited starts at $330 per user, per month.

The availability of Einstein AI features is relegated to the Enterprise plan and Unlimited plan only. Additionally, the functionality will cost extra, running businesses an additional $50 per month for advanced analytics and smart service features.

While Salesforce Service Cloud is a respectable option when it comes to customer support platforms, our research showed that Zendesk is actually the better option, depending on your needs. It's more affordable, easier to use, and allows support across virtually every channel you can imagine, whereas Salesforce is missing some, like phone support.

Read our full Salesforce vs Zendesk comparison here.

Requires Telephony Integration

Requires Telephony integration

Requires Telephony Integration or Service Cloud Voice Add-on

Yes – but limited to 1 license

Additional cost

Yes (Maximum of 2).

Yes (maximum of 2)

Yes (maxium of 2)

Yes (maximum of 2)

Salesforce also offers a Marketing Cloud, which is made up of a wide range of different platforms, each with their own set of pricing plans. For the average business, there are two platforms that our research shows are the best fit for you: the Marketing Cloud Engagement platform and the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement platform.

As for the difference between the two platforms, Marketing Cloud Engagement is intended for B2C businesses whereas Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is intended for B2B businesses. The difference in the max number of contacts per plan is the key indicator here because Marketing Cloud Account Engagement has a lot less contacts allocated to customers as B2B businesses have less need for a huge library of customer details.

Read on for the pricing information about each of these two Marketing Cloud platforms.

The Marketing Cloud Engagement platform is Salesforce's one-to-one marketing platform, which integrates with other Salesforce “clouds” for a more complete understanding of your customers' history.

The idea with Marketing Cloud Engagement is to meet your customers wherever they are. You can use Salesforce's platform to send out marketing emails, advertise to them online, send them mobile alerts, and encourage them to land on your e-commerce pages.

Salesforce says this can all happen at scale, giving your customers a more personalized experience without handcrafting every single message that goes out the proverbial door.

Marketing Cloud Engagement's pricing is a little more expensive than the Sales and Service Clouds. It offers three distinct plans: Pro, Corporate, and Enterprise. The Pro plan costs $1,250 per month, and the Corporate plan rounds it out at $3,750 per month. The Enterprise plan requires you to contact Salesforce to get a quote.

For the best AI-powered results, you'll need to subscribe to the Corporate or Enterprise plans, as the Pro plan does not have AI functionality built in. With these features, you can supercharge your marketing campaign with smart insights to reach and convert customers.

In our research, we found that Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement platform isn't the best CRM for marketing, particularly if you're worried about price. It's very expensive and outside of extensive data visualizations, doesn't offer as much as our top pick, HubSpot Marketing Hub. With this robust option, you'll be able to take care of all your marketing needs from a single hub, including email, social, content, and paid. It's also quite expensive, but at least you're getting a lot of bang for your buck.

30 days

30 days

30 days

Salesforce acquired the marketing automation service Pardot in 2012, and now offers it as an add-on for Salesforce users. Formerly known as Salesforce Pardot and now referred to as the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement platform, the service streamlines a marketing team's daily and long-term tasks, from automating all the simple chores to sending custom alerts that can jog agents' memories to ensure they follow up on all of their clients' needs.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement offers an impressive range of features in four main marketing categories: lead generation, thanks to tools covering lead tracking, email, social media, landing pages, and A/B testing; lead management, due to custom-designed engagement and nurturing programs; sales alignment, with tools including customer activity tracking, campaigns, and CRM integration; and, finally, ROI reporting, with metrics tracking tools that cover the whole sales funnel.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement comes in four plans — Growth, starting at $1,250 per month; Plus, starting at $2,500 per month; Advanced, starting at $4,000 per month; and Premium, starting at $15,000 per month. All four plans cover up to 10,000 contacts at this base price — except for Premium which allows for 75,000 and are differentiated mainly by the features each offers.

You'll need to grab the Advanced or Premium plans if you're interested in using artificial intelligence to improve your business. These plans come with Einstein AI built in, so you can reach out to your leads at the perfect moment to ensure a sale is as likely as possible.

If Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement sounds right for you, or you just want to check out whether it will work for your specific business needs, then you can join the thousands other businesses we helped to get set up with the platform. Save time and money by taking a minute to fill out our free, no-commitment form right now.

You can check out the pricing table below to see a few main differences, though you'll need to head over to our dedicated Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement pricing and benefits page to get the full breakdown.

If your team has gone remote during the pandemic, you might be in need of some kind of collaboration platform. With Salesforce Quip, you can connect with your team in a meaningful way alongside your Sales, Marketing and Customer Service tasks, while keeping within the Salesforce suite.

Salesforce Quip costs $100 per user, per month on top of other Salesforce plans, and allows for activities including document and spreadsheet sharing, real time updates on team progress, mobile optimization for business on the go, and team messaging to stay in touch easily and effectively.

No, Salesforce does not offer a free plan. The cheapest basic plan is the Sales or Service cloud, either one of which starts at $25/user/month.

A few big names in CRM – Apptivo, HubSpot, and Zoho CRM – do offer free plans, although all of them come with one big caveat: a limited feature set. Apptivo's free plan only supports a maximum of three users, for instance, compared to Salesforce's minimum of five.

Cost is not the only issue to consider, of course: You also have to decide whether the CRM platform you pick has the right features, integrations, and storage capacity for your needs. Not all CRM systems are the same, and any free option is unlikely to have all the features you'll need, particularly if you plan to expand your operation in the future.

What you'll notice from the pricing table above is that Salesforce – like pretty much all CRM platforms – charges on a per user, per month basis. Salesforce Essentials for Sales Cloud, for example, charges $25 per user, per month. There's a set minimum of five users, but no maximum.

If, however, you need help with marketing, we'd recommend the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement platform. This option is just a simply monthly fee, but prices can up from there depending on your needs — it starts at $1,250 per month and goes all the way to $15,000 per month.

Annoyed by complicated pricing models? Compare the cost of Salesforce plans in a minute or two with our free quotes tool.

Per-user pricing schemes are typical for business software. It ensures the pricing structure is scalable, so it won't break the bank for the smallest companies that only need Sales Cloud for a few users, while still charging a fair price for larger companies.

If you need a CRM system for a full five users, you'll be paying around $1,500 per year for Salesforce. If you're a small company of 10 users moving up to the Lightning Professional tier, then you'll be paying about $9,000 per year.

When you're considering which clouds to pay for, keep in mind the number of current employees as well as how quickly you plan to expand. Keeping the per-user pricing in mind means you'll always know how much you'll be paying for Salesforce at any given time, which you can evaluate with our price comparison form.

Salesforce recently announced in August 2023 that the platform would be undergoing a price increase across the majority of its Clouds and pricing plans. The move is a rare one from Salesforce, as the company hasn't seen a price increase to its popular CRM platform in more than seven years. Still, it can be a bit jarring for those familiar with Salesforce, which is why we wanted to explain it as effectively as possible.

For starters, it's not a massive increase, which is always good to hear. Pricing plans are getting on average a 9% increase, which certainly won't break the bank. The Professional plan has gone from $75 to $80 per user, per month, the Enterprise plan has gone from $150 to $165 per user, per month, and the Unlimited plan has gone from $300 to $330 per user, per month.

As for the reason behind the price increase, the development and rollout of generative AI technology to the platform is the main driver – at least according to the company itself.

“Salesforce is leading the way on delivering trusted generative AI for the enterprise and helping customers in all industries adopt and deploy AI.” – Salesforce

Salesforce has been hard to work to bring generative AI functionality to its wide variety of platforms. More specifically, Salesforce recently launched an Einstein GPT tool that can improve sales, service, and marketing efforts at your business. On top of that, it has rolled out AI Cloud and Sales GPT and Service GPT, so it's safe to say that the slight price increase is more than worth it.

While Salesforce is an undeniably popular choice when it comes to CRM, it's not ideal for everyone. In fact, given the higher price and the robust nature of the platform, Salesforce can be a bit intimidating for certain businesses. Fortunately, the CRM market is riddled with amazing platforms that can get the job done.

Here are some of our top picks for CRM alternatives to Salesforce that can handle marketing, sales, customer service, and small businesses:

Salesforce Marketing Hub is a competitive, albeit very expensive option when it comes to CRM, but our research found that HubSpot is your best bet in that regard. Both are quite expensive, with the HubSpot Marketing Hub starting at $45 per month, but HubSpot offers a great free plan, whereas Salesforce merely has a 30-day free trial. Simply put, HubSpot is just more accessible to users than Salesforce, particularly when it comes to marketing.

For customer service, we highly recommend Zendesk for your business as a low-cost alternative to Salesforce. This platform offers a whole bunch of pricing plans and options — starting at $19 per user per month — so you can cater the cost to your particular needs. Zendesk offers the most built-in communication channels on the market, as well as some great perks like offline customer service options and ticketing functionality.

Obviously, Salesforce is known for its sales platform, and if you can afford the cost and have a bigger team, we definitely recommend going with Salesforce. Still, Zoho CRM provides a great sales platform that can handle your needs at a lower price, starting at $14 per user per month and offering free plan to try, too. In fact, we found that Zoho CRM is the best option for small businesses, thanks to low prices and still plenty of features.

As you can imagine, smaller teams won't need to pay that much for a comprehensive platform that can get work done. Small businesses should stick to the lower priced Sales Cloud and Service Cloud options, as costs are low and competitive with other platforms. For marketing, Salesforce gets pretty complicated and expensive, and there are better options out there, like HubSpot.

Still unsure about Salesforce pricing? For a quick price comparison, use our free CRM price comparison tool and receive exact prices matched to your business requirements. It only takes a minute but can save you a lot!

As far as value for money is concerned though, Salesforce does offer a robust features package as well as impressive support options, so you're definitely getting some serious bang for your buck.

However, it's always important to consider exactly what you need CRM software for at your business before making a decision, and Salesforce may not always match those needs, which is why a little bit of research on other CRM providers can go a long way.

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