It’s 3 PM on Thursday. Your VP of Sales just Slacked you: “Can you pull a list of customers who bought Product A in the last six months BUT haven’t opened our emails in 60 days AND have an open support case?”
You know this can easily take you at least three hours or more to do. Export from Sales Cloud. Export from Marketing Cloud. Export from Service Cloud. Open Excel. Pray your VLOOKUP formula works. Fix the duplicate emails. Format. Send.
Meanwhile, your to-do list has “explore AI strategy” sitting there, mocking you. Because you’re not a data strategist right now – you’re a data manager who is trying to keep the lights on while doing the tasks of five people in your organization.
Here’s the thing: You already own a powerful tool that can fix this. It’s sitting in your Salesforce Foundations package, completely free, waiting for you to activate it. It’s called Data 360 – Salesforce’s native data activation engine and the heartbeat that powers the Agentforce 360 platform.
But forget the buzzwords for a second. Here’s what it means for your Thursday afternoon:
That three-hour data request becomes a 10-minute task.
Data 360 makes all your business data ready for action, without moving it. Your CRM records, marketing engagement data, support tickets, knowledge articles, and even that Excel file your finance team guards with their life – Data 360 can virtually connect to any system of knowledge where all of your company’s structured and unstructured data lives and unify them to create a complete view of every customer you have.
No more exports. No more costly and complex data pipelines. No more “let me get back to you tomorrow”.
What Changes With Data 360
Before Data 360
Let’s say you have a customer named Lauren, who bought your product four months ago (that data lives in Sales Cloud). She opened three support tickets about setup issues (those tickets live in Service Cloud). She stopped opening your emails six weeks ago (that engagement data lives in Marketing Cloud). Your finance system shows her payment is 15 days late (that invoice data lives in QuickBooks).
When your sales rep calls Lauren, they see she’s a customer. That’s it.
When your service agent helps her, they see her tickets. That’s it.
When your marketing manager plans a campaign, they see her email engagement. That’s it.
With Data 360
But now that Data 360 has taken Lauren’s fragmented identities across different touchpoints and harmonized them into a unified customer profile of her, everyone in your organization sees Lauren’s complete story in one place:
- The sales rep sees she’s struggling, and her payment is late. They can offer onboarding help instead of an upsell.
- The service agent sees she’s a high-value customer having a rough experience. They prioritize her case.
- The marketing manager excludes her from promotional emails and puts her in a “help you succeed” nurture track.
- Your Agentforce Service Agent can answer Lauren’s questions with full context about her purchase, previous issues, and solutions that worked for her specifically.
That’s not just organized data. That’s a competitive advantage that comes from having a strong, unified data foundation that can help you deliver connected customer experiences to your customers in real-time, regardless of which channels they engage with your organization.
How Data 360 Can Reclaim Your Time
Data 360 not only empowers your teams to work together more efficiently to deliver the best experience to your customers, but it also buys back your time from the manual, time-intensive tasks that come up in your weekly routine:
- Building complex data pipelines between systems: Data 360 can virtually bring any data into Salesforce, regardless of where it lives. Through zero-copy integrations (your data stays where it lives – no migrations, no maintenance, no storage costs), Data 360 maximizes your existing technology investments while minimizing the cost and complexity of building another data pipeline.
- Cleaning up duplicate customer data: Data 360’s identity resolution automatically harmonizes fragmented customer identities into complete, unified profiles, which can save you days, weeks, or months of manually cleaning up the data yourself.
- Manually configuring data security and governance: Data 360 empowers you to easily tag sensitive data and metadata, then define access policies to ensure only the right teams and AI agents can access it at the right time – giving you granular control without the complexity of rebuilding security configurations from scratch.
- Spending hours building campaign segments in Excel: Data 360’s real-time segmentation engine lets you build complex audiences in minutes with a visual, point-and-click interface – no code, no exports, no VLOOKUP formulas. Create segments like “customers who purchased Product A in the last 90 days but haven’t opened emails in 60 days AND have no open support cases,” and they update automatically as customer behavior changes. What used to take hours, days, or months can now happen instantly.
One admin at a 75-person company told us they got back 8-10 hours per week. That’s 8-10 hours you can spend on the strategic projects that actually grow the business.
Reclaiming your time isn’t just about efficiency – it’s about making room for bigger moves. With the manual work off your plate, you’re free to focus on strategic priorities that actually drive growth. And in today’s world, that means preparing your business for AI.
How Data 360 Can Establish the Data Foundation to Power AI
AI Agents that can be built and deployed from the Agentforce platform can be incredibly effective – but only when they’re powered by complete, trusted data. And that’s exactly what Data 360 delivers.
Think of it this way: an Agentforce Service Agent without Data 360 is like hiring a brilliant employee and only giving them one folder from the filing cabinet. They can answer basic questions – but they’re making guesses about context, history, and what the customer really needs, which runs the risk of delivering a sub-par customer experience.
But an Agentforce Agent that is powered by unified data intelligence can now see everything – Data 360 pulls in data signals from across your organization, makes sense of them, and provides actionable intelligence that can be activated across your organization.
That means your agents (human and AI) understand:
- Complete customer history across every channel and touchpoint.
- Purchase patterns and product usage trends.
- Prior support interactions and what actually resolved them.
- Real-time behavior signals from marketing, service, sales, and more.
Here’s what that looks like in action: When Lauren messages your Agentforce Service Agent asking, “Can I change my activities in my corporate retreat?”, the agent already knows her reservation history, her length of stay, and her current itinerary. Instead of a generic response, it can proactively address the real issue: “We can change the activities for your reservation. Let me provide you with a list of all the activities available at the resort.”
Now your Agentforce agents aren’t just smart – they’re trusted, personalized, and proactive. They don’t just respond, they anticipate. They don’t guess, they know. That’s the difference between “we have AI” and “our AI drives growth”.
And here’s the strategic move: You’re the one who made it happen.
When leadership asks, “Are we AI-ready?”, you’re not starting from scratch. You’re already the expert who built the unified data foundation that powers your AI Agents with trusted business context and intelligence.
Try Data 360 in Salesforce Foundations for Free
Here’s the best part – you can activate Data 360 right now and experiment for free. Through Salesforce Foundations, you get 250,000 Data Services Credits at no cost – enough to connect multiple data sources, build unified customer profiles, create dozens of segments, and power your Agentforce agents.
Think of it as a sandbox for your data strategy. Test it. Build proof-of-concepts. Show leadership what’s possible. Then decide if you want to scale up. And because Data 360 uses consumption-based pricing, you only pay for what you actually use beyond those free credits – no surprise annual contracts.
Translation: Activate it today. If you don’t like it, turn it off. But based on what other SMB admins are seeing, you won’t want to.
How to Activate Your Free Data 360 in Salesforce Foundations:
- Log in to your Salesforce Foundations org.
- Go to Setup → Data 360 (or Data Cloud) Setup in your Salesforce org.
- Click “Get Started” – and follow the guided setup.
The system will provision your Data 360 instance (this takes about an hour). Once ready, you can connect your first data source and start building unified customer profiles.
Final Thoughts
While other SMBs are still drowning in spreadsheets and manual data processes, you have the opportunity to build the data foundation that scales with your company’s growth ambitions. You’re not just unlocking the value of your data – you’re activating from a strong foundation that will power your company’s next chapter of growth and establishing yourself as the strategic leader who made it happen.
While other admins are stuck being data managers, you can be the data and AI strategist your company needs.
Ready to seize the moment? Start exploring Data 360 through Salesforce Foundations today.
