Salesforce for Startups now comes with a 30% discount on Pardot service

Enterprise software vendor Salesforce is enhancing its Salesforce for Startups program to target early-stage technology companies. Going forward, participants will be able to use Salesforce’s Pardot business-to-business marketing automation service for 30 percent off the usual price for a year.

The program, which was first launched in October 2014, also includes free access to Salesforce services like the Heroku platform as a service, the Desk.com service-desk software, and the core Sales Cloud customer-relationship management software.

So why would Salesforce want to add marketing automation to the mix? Because once startups have built their software, they might very well want to grow.

“It’s easier to upsell existing customers than to try to generate new ones,” Ludo Ulrich, the head of startup relations for Salesforce, told VentureBeat in an interview. And Pardot, with its support for email marketing, landing pages, and forms, could come in handy if startups want to inspire their customers to spend more money.

Not that the existing portfolio of services available for participating tech startups wasn’t good enough. The program now includes 3,650 members in 85 countries, with 20 startups accelerators on board as partners.

But Salesforce wants to have 10,000 startups in the program by the end of 2016, Ulrich said.

The program won’t help Salesforce immediately shed its reputation for catering only to enterprises, with lots of handholding from salespeople, but it does ensure the company has a funnel for young companies. Big cloud providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all shower free credits on startups, and now there is a self-serve smorgasbord of tools available from Salesforce.

And even if companies take credits from, say, Amazon Web Services to host their web applications, they might very well need a CRM. Ulrich wants such startups to know that Salesforce welcomes them. “We want you to come,” he said.