After the exciting announcement of Agentforce last week, Salesforce has graced us with yet another unveiling in the run-up to Dreamforce.
Enter Salesforce Foundations: the one-stop-shop feature set that brings together new sales, service, marketing, commerce, and Data Cloud features, free for all Sales and Service Cloud users on enterprise licenses or above.
What is Salesforce Foundations?
Not to be confused with the Salesforce Foundation which is Salesforce’s charitable arm, Salesforce Foundations is a brand-new offering; a set of Sales, Service, Marketing, Commerce, and Data Cloud features that now are available for every Sales or Service customer to “use within their existing CRM.”
To avoid any further confusion, it’s important to mention that Salesforce Foundations is not a new product. You can think of it as an expansion pack of Sales, Service, Marketing, Commerce, and Data Cloud features and an updated UI, now included for Sales and/or Service Cloud users at no additional cost.
It’s built on the Agentforce platform, benefitting from a seamless interaction between agents and AI, and aims to make it easier for customers to “access baseline Salesforce features and build more connected, AI-powered customer experiences across every touchpoint.”
According to Salesforce, all CRM customers will now receive this foundational functionality, and can quickly begin to benefit from a faster and easier-to-use interface with streamlined navigation, a customizable home screen, and a guided set-up experience.
Customers with Enterprise Edition and higher will now get access to most features currently available to Pro Suite customers like marketing email campaigns, targeted segmentation (Data Cloud for Marketing), and Commerce Pay Now payment links.
Perhaps the best part of this announcement is that Salesforce Foundations is free. It’s built into Sales and Service Cloud, meaning that existing users of these clouds can enjoy the functionality right away, and new users will have this as another incentive to enjoy as part of their paid Sales or Service Cloud package.
How Does it Work?
As mentioned, Salesforce Foundations is built on Salesforce’s new Agentforce platform. This means that all the Salesforce Foundations tools are grounded in enterprise-wide data from Salesforce Data Cloud.
As we know, Data Cloud collects and “harmonizes” customer data from across the business and CRM, and this functionality working alongside the other tools and processes that Salesforce Foundations brings together allows customers to operate on a unified platform where a consistent, connected, and communicative experience is guaranteed.
Top Benefits
Organizations using Salesforce Foundations can expect to:
- Drive more revenue with sales, service, and marketing teams working in one place: Thanks to having insights into service cases, Sales users can add relevant customers to marketing-created nurture campaigns, which previously may have required access to separate service and marketing platforms.
- Turn quotes into cash faster: When a customer is ready to buy, sales users can now convert closed deals into payment quickly with secure payment links generated directly from a quote or opportunity record. Sales can then easily embed these payment links in an invoice pdf or email without needing an external payment system.
- Increase customer loyalty by empowering service teams: Service teams can add customers to marketing onboarding journeys to create higher-touch onboarding experiences, and, when appropriate, they can upsell customers thanks to access to sales quoting and secure commerce payment links, without needing access to separate marketing or sales platforms.
- Personalize customer experiences with unified data: Due to Data Cloud’s automatic data retrieval and presentation, users can benefit from insights across the customer journey and a trusted data foundation for AI tools and solutions. This allows marketers for example to create highly targeted segmentation lists based on service case data or sales pipeline stages with insights that may have been previously inaccessible or not centralized within one system.
- Work faster with an updated user interface: The goal of many organizations and teams is to work more efficiently, and Salesforce Foundations’ updated user interface can bring them closer to that goal. Users can spend less time finding the apps they need with new left-hand navigation and plan their day quickly with an updated homepage, now featuring customizable, out-of-the-box home cards that provide a snapshot into a user’s top priorities, like open cases, open opportunities, and recommended tasks.
- Extend with top partner apps: At no additional cost, every customer can now extend Salesforce with free trials of apps on the AppExchange. These Salesforce Foundations launch partner apps, including Webex by Cisco, DocuSign, and RingCentral, increase productivity, adoption, and cost savings with key functionalities, including document generation, contract management, collaboration, surveys, sales tools, telephony, and video conferencing.
Is Salesforce Foundations Starter and Pro Suite?
The short answer to this one is no.
The longer answer is that Starter and Pro Suite already give these foundational Sales, Service, Marketing, and Commerce capabilities to SMBs in a self-service, easy-to-get-started package. Now, Enterprise Edition customers and higher can benefit from these same cross-functional capabilities within a single UI at no added cost, with no integration required, allowing more teams to operate out of their existing CRM platform.
Salesforce Foundations will be available to Sales Cloud and/or Service Cloud Enterprise Edition or higher customers later this month.
The Customer Benefit
According to Salesforce’s latest State of the Connected Customer Report, 79% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments, but 55% say it generally feels like they’re communicating with separate departments, not one company.
This is why the main aim of Salesforce Foundations is to provide connectivity, utilizing a streamlined and unified platform that brings together teams, departments, and most importantly, the customer and the organization.
Grammarly, one of Salesforce’s largest customers, says that this new development allows them to get the most out of their investment.
“Salesforce Foundations will let us get more out of our existing Salesforce investment, and make it easier for our Sales teams to get crucial customer data from across service, marketing, and commerce experiences.” Matt Rosenberg, Chief Revenue Officer at Grammarly
Final Thoughts
At a time when customers have been hesitant to invest in Salesforce due to costs, Salesforce has found a way to give customers more opportunities for increased ROI.
We’ve yet to see the full scope of Agentforce’s capabilities, but Salesforce Foundations’ promises do seem to be a step forward in the effort to make the platform even more connected and less complicated for multi-team organizations.