Salesforce launches SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud and for Small Business

Salesforce today announced new products based on the technology it picked up through last year’s RelateIQ acquisition: SalesforceIQ for Small Business, a smart “relationship intelligence” application aimed at small and medium-sized businesses, and SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud, an integration with Salesforce’s longstanding customer relationship management (CRM) software.

The new products automate the process of getting data to the right places, so sales reps can focus on doing more important work. SalesforceIQ for Small Business passively pushes information from calendars, emails, calls, and marketing automation software (HubSpot, MailChimp, and Salesforce’s Pardot are being supported initially) into the CRM. SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud, with its Chrome extension for Gmail and its iOS and Android apps, can not only update CRM records from your inbox but also brings information from the CRM into your inbox after analyzing emails. That way, salespeople don’t have to jump back and forth so much.

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SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud provide users with read receipt notifications to alert them when clients open their emails, as well as follow-up email scheduling, a send-later function, pre-crafted text snippets for emails, and the ability to attach files from many cloud storage services. There’s even a “dynamic” calendar widget for emails that lets salespeople offer potential meeting times but only shows the ones that are currently available when recipients actually open emails.

“From a sales rep standpoint, it’s a game changer,” Adam Evans, cofounder and chief technology officer of RelateIQ, told VentureBeat in an interview. “I don’t have to worry about anything. The system just takes care of it for me.”

Features like automated logging and reminders made RelateIQ stand out even before it was acquired by Salesforce. Now Salesforce is going beyond serving up RelateIQ as a standalone product. It’s now targeting smaller companies with an emphasis on automation capabilities, and it has brought enhancements to the core Sales Cloud, both under the new SalesforceIQ branding.

“The thesis of our company is to use data to make basic activity — all logging, all these things, automatic and easier,” Evans said. Now that Salesforce has that capability, things should become even more challenging for its competitors, which include Microsoft with its Dynamics CRM.

SalesforceIQ for Small Business is available today in the U.S., Canada, and Australia, for $25 per user per month, according to a statement. The SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud beta is free for everyone who uses Sales Cloud in English; information on pricing and support for other languages is not yet available.