Mediaboss Marketing

Summary: The CRM giant has launched Salesforce for Startups, a program designed to familiarize young companies with its software and platform offerings.

Salesforce has made its first foray into serving the needs of startups. The enterprise-focused CRM giant on Tuesday launched Salesforce for Startups, a resource program designed to familiarize young companies with Salesforce's software and platform offerings.

The startup program has four core components: mentoring from Salesforce experts; free access to the Salesforce1 Platform; finding customers via the Salesforce AppExchange; and a years worth of free customer tracking and service desk software.

Ludovic Ulrich, the director of startup relations at Salesforce, explained in a blog post that most startups fail because they cannot connect to customers and who better to help them do that the darling of the customer relationship management?

"Through the years, we've learned that turning a startup into a great company requires many ingredients, but the most important one is customers," Ulrich wrote. "At salesforce.com, we realize how much we can support the early stage success of many startups."

The startup initiative complements Salesforce Ventures, which recently launched the $100 million Salesforce1 Fund to support entrepreneurs who utilize the Salesforce1 Platform to build mobile apps and connected products.

Other enterprise-tailored companies, such as Amazon and Google, have also begun to launch services tailored to startups. Last month, Google announced the launch of Google Cloud Platform for Startups, a program that offers early-stage startups with $100,000 in cloud platform credits, access to the company's technical solutions team and 24/7 support.

Original post:
Salesforce targets startups with free access to Salesforce1