The Ultimate Guide to Salesforce Foundations

Making the most out of your Salesforce implementation in your organization is a widely discussed topic now, perhaps now more than ever. With many different products and editions available, as well as an increase in consumption-based products, Salesforce is looking to empower customers to do more at no additional cost with the introduction of Salesforce Foundations.

In this post, we’ll explore what Salesforce Foundations can offer to Salesforce customers on Enterprise Editions or above, how you can get started, and a few considerations to keep in mind. 

What Is Salesforce Foundations? 

Foundations is a $0 SKU that allows customers to get more out of their Salesforce investment without complicating their tech stack or being resource-intensive. This offering is all about enhancing the existing Salesforce experience, without having to purchase anything.

It is free to make use of the following:  

• Agentforce: 1,000 conversations, Agent and Prompt Builders, Sales and Service Agents.
• Sales: Sales Console, deal management, quoting, meetings. 
• Service: Service Console, Case management, Knowledge, Macros. 
• Marketing: 2,000 monthly email sends, drag-and-drop email builder, built-in analytics.
• Commerce: 1 D2C Digital Storefront (for U.S. only), managed checkout, merchandising tools, Pay Now secure payment link, Commerce Cloud analytics.
• Data Cloud: Unified profiles, data services, and storage credits, 10,000 annual segmentation credits.
• Salesforce Platform: Salesforce Platform login license, 600 annual logins with 30,000 credits, Agentforce extended to occasional users. 

Depending on the products you already have, you can turn on one or more of the above features. For example, if you’re already a Sales Cloud customer, you can enhance your customer support and agent experience with a free version of Service Cloud.

Additionally, while Foundations was announced shortly before Dreamforce 2024 – where Agentforce was unveiled – access to Agentforce is now a key feature that also comes with the offering. 

If your sales team is already using Salesforce for their daily tasks, why not provide them with a personal assistant that can quickly generate detailed summaries and respond contextually to natural language input?

All in all, Foundations is all about democratizing access to more Salesforce functionality, which you otherwise may not have the opportunity to try out, given the additional cost of each product.

Get Started From Your Account

Before going into the benefits, I want to highlight how easy it is to get your hands on Foundations, since you can provision it yourself! 

This free offering is readily available and can be accessed in minutes. Simply watch the video below and follow the steps in the Your Account app to get started.

Note that this step has to be completed in the production environment. Once done, you can simply match the production licenses in the sandbox you’ll be exploring the functionality in. 

What’s In It For You

Many Salesforce customers are still skeptical of AI and unsure of its impact on business, but Foundations can serve as a risk-free and no-commitment option that allows them access to Agentforce and other key cloud features.

You can also experience the Customer 360 by accessing multiple features with your structured and unstructured data unified in one place. Additionally, both users and Salesforce Admins can leverage UI enhancements to navigate exactly where they need, faster. 

Agentforce

As Salesforce’s latest innovation, Agentforce’s inclusion in Salesforce Foundations is the easiest gateway for Salesforce customers on Enterprise edition and above to take autonomous agents for a spin in their own instance. 

With configurable Sales and Service Agents, and an agent builder at your disposal, getting started with Agentforce is now just a few clicks away. With 79% of UK retailers agreeing that agents will be essential to compete in today’s market, it’s clear that sales is embracing an agentic future.

To help you get started, Salesforce Foundations includes 1,000 conversations at no additional cost. Since it’s a consumption-based model, exceeding this amount will incur an extra cost, but it is enough to get a feel of what the new wave of agentic automations could do for your business, whether internally or externally. 

Access to Prompt Builder

Speaking of Agentforce, it’s worth mentioning that Salesforce Foundations now includes access to Prompt Builder. The question was raised by the Salesforce community at Trailblazer DX back in March, and Salesforce acted swiftly to resolve and enable access to all Salesforce customers using Foundations. 

To access Prompt Builder in Setup, assign yourself the Einstein Prompt Templates Permission Set License and the Prompt Template Manager Permission Set. There’s no need to enable Sales Emails anymore, but Einstein Generative AI has to be enabled beforehand. 

Salesforce customers who have access to Prompt Builder and use Foundations can now leverage Prompt Templates as Agent actions. This streamlines Salesforce Flows and automates repetitive tasks directly on the Record Page with Field Generation templates for quick and efficient field completion.

The Foundations package provides your organization with 200,000 Einstein Requests to establish a strong base and enough resources for initial use cases. It also includes 100,000 Permission Set Licenses for both Einstein Prompt Templates and Einstein for Sales Innovations. 

With Einstein for Sales Innovations, you gain access to the Einstein Summary component, which can be embedded on Account, Contact, or Case Record Pages to display Record Summary, Flex, or Field Generation template types. Additionally, you have full control over the header, summary button, and disclaimer visible to your users.

Sales

If you already are a Service Cloud customer, Salesforce Foundations gives your organization access to the most well-known and widely used tools to transform the way your Sales team works. Account Executives will have an out-of-the-box mechanism to track deal progression from creation to closure seamlessly.

The preconfigured Sales Console includes Leads, Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities to begin with, setting your team up for success for everything in between as well, including creating Quotes or scheduling meetings.

Service

If you’re already a Sales Cloud customer, you can make use of the Foundations Service Cloud functionalities to drive customer value fast and optimize your support process. Give your team access to the Service Console to easily track Cases related to Accounts or Opportunities, take action, and prioritize accordingly. 

On top of the basic Case Management features, Foundations also includes Knowledge to easily create and maintain articles, as well as Macros to quickly automate repetitive tasks for your team, without the use of generative AI. 

Remember the Einstein Summary component above? Generating the Case Summary directly on the record page can equip your service agents with all the information they need, all in one place. In a matter of minutes, it will have it up and running. Make sure to fine-tune and properly test your prompt beforehand!

Marketing

Building targeted Campaigns and tailored emails doesn’t have to be cumbersome, so when it comes to supporting marketing efforts, Salesforce Foundations equips you with the native drag-and-drop email builder, 2000 monthly email sends, as well as built-in analytics to track the performance of your emails. 

Even more so, you could enable the option to create personalized landing pages directly within Digital Experiences, to conduct both lead capture and event promotion. 

Commerce

You can take your business to the next level and drive more revenue by creating a fully branded Digital Storefront for customers to seamlessly purchase your products and services, easily check out, and securely have their payment processed. 

With Salesforce Foundations, you can gain access to native Commerce Cloud features, including managed checkout functionality, merchandising tools, and secure payment links. Even more so, readily available Commerce Cloud Analytics will be ready to use to measure success and further streamline direct-to-customer sales right from the get-go.

Note that Commerce for availability as part of this offering varies by location, so make sure to check with your Account Manager in case of any limitations and considerations in provisioning. As of today, the pay now functionality is not available for customers in India, Brazil, and Japan.

Data Cloud

Aggregating data from the various systems within your org sounds quite tedious, doesn’t it? It doesn’t have to be, although proper planning will always be needed in order to get the most out of Data Cloud, too. 

As the backbone of a true Customer 360 experience, you can create customer segments to more accurately target campaigns, easily manage consent data, and have full flexibility to create custom rulesets for your specific business needs to unify data within Data Cloud. You can use data from Salesforce, other first-party data, and even information from third-party systems, in one single place. 

When it comes to leveraging this data, it’s as easy as retrieving a Salesforce record. For example, you could enhance an already existing Screen Flow with information that was ingested in Data Cloud by simply retrieving the Data Model Object records needed. This allows you to bring a wealth of information directly to your users’ fingertips and within their workflow! 

With Salesforce Foundations, you gain access to unified profiles, data services, and storage credits and up to 10,000 annual segmentation credits for free.

User Interface Enhancements

On top of the features and functionalities mentioned above, Foundations also offers Salesforce Admins a few options to explore when it comes to the user interface, both for them and their users.

From a user experience perspective, the vertical navigation bar can be enabled to replace the App Launcher. Users will have the option to star the different Apps so that they appear on this side panel. Additionally, three simplified Apps are also available to assign for Home, Accounts, and Contacts. 

From an admin’s perspective, within User Interface Settings, there is also the option to enable Quick Settings, which will replace the options available when clicking the Settings cog in the global header with a list of the most common, while retaining the option to open the Advanced Setup as needed.  

Considerations

• During the implementation, make sure to take a look at the readily available Permission Sets and Permission Set Groups, which are shipped with Foundations as well. While you could create your own, these will be automatically updated by Salesforce as new features become available, so choose the approach that works best for your org. 
• Even if you provision Salesforce Foundations within your org, you have the flexibility to choose which features to enable. Note that after you turn on certain features, such as the ones related to Marketing Cloud, they cannot be turned off. Remember to plan accordingly and only turn on what you need and will use.  
• Einstein Requests and Data Cloud Credit consumption apply to both production and sandbox environments, so planning from the very beginning is a must to make the most out of the allotted resources. As you start, remember to keep an eye on the Consumption Cards within your Digital Wallet.  
• Make sure to review all considerations directly from the Salesforce documentation before you start. 

Final Thoughts

The Salesforce Foundations offering comes at a time when both Agentforce and Data Cloud are prevalent in most conversations, taking into consideration their customers’ needs for core functionality. The products included in this SKU strike a good balance between out-of-the-box features, experience enhancements, and brand-new products that customers can use and explore.

Have you already enabled Salesforce Foundations in your org? Let us know about your experience in the comments below!