Connect teams and data with Salesforce Foundations

Connect Teams and Data with Salesforce Foundations

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Editor’s Note: This post was updated on April 3, 2025, with the latest information and resources.

As Salesforce Admins, you’re well-versed in delivering Salesforce features to your users and stakeholders. Salesforce Foundations makes it even easier for you to get the most out of Salesforce by adding cross-department features built into your existing CRM.

Salesforce Foundations helps you get more from your Salesforce investment. Foundations is an add-on that grants you access to Agentforce and key features from multiple clouds, all without any additional cost. This offering was announced at Dreamforce ’24 and is designed to enhance your Salesforce experience. This gives every organization with Enterprise, Unlimited, or Einstein 1 Edition Editions with Sales Cloud and/or Service Cloud access to:

  • Agentforce Sales Agent and the ability to provide personalized coaching to reps or handle outreach to leads 24/7; or Service Agent with the ability to resolve customer inquiries across channels 24/7 in natural language
  • Foundational features from Sales, Service, Marketing, and Commerce Cloud, including deal management, case management, marketing email campaigns with targeted segmentation, and secure payment links
  • Improved user experience with updated left-navigation and customizable Home page
  • Data Cloud auto-configured to centralize and harmonize customer data into unified profile
  • New, extended free trials and functionality from 25+ top partners on AppExchange

With Foundations, admins have the opportunity to get even more value out of their Salesforce investment by driving efficiency with Agentforce or moving to a multi-cloud setup for free! In this blog post, we’ll dive into which features are available to your organization and how you can start taking advantage of them to bring more teams into Salesforce and set them up for success.

What is Salesforce Foundations?

Salesforce Foundations gives you access to Agentforce and key Sales, Service, Marketing, Commerce, and Data Cloud features, as well as an enhanced user interface (UI).

Admins now have access to Agentforce and can easily build and deploy autonomous agents with pre-built skills to support your customers, prospects, and sales reps:

  • Create a Customer Service agent that can resolve customer inquiries across channels 24/7 in natural language.
  • Develop a Sales Development Representative to maximize pipeline by engaging prospects 24/7.
  • Launch a Sales Coach to help reps practice pitching, objection handling, and negotiation with realistic role-plays.

Service Cloud Admins now have access to foundational Sales features, such as:

  • Leads, Opportunities, Sales Quotes, and Forecasting: Service agents now have visibility into in-flight deals and access to quoting tools to process upsells and add-ons, when appropriate. Sales users can work out of Service Cloud with lead management, quoting, and forecasting.

Sales Cloud Admins now have access to foundational Service features, such as:

  • Case Management, Knowledge, and Macros: Sales users can now keep opportunities on track with insights into service cases. Service teams can resolve cases faster in Sales Cloud with case resolution tools like Knowledge and Macros.

Sales and Service Admins now have access to foundational Marketing, Commerce, and Data features, such as:

  • Email templates and email campaigns: Marketing teams now have email tools directly in Sales or Service Cloud. With 2,000 sends per month included at no cost, Sales or Service reps can now add customers to marketing-created nurture campaigns to increase customer loyalty directly in your CRM.
  • Targeted segmentation, powered by Data Cloud: Marketers can launch personalized campaigns using highly-targeted segmentation lists created with Data Cloud.
  • Commerce Pay Now secure payment links: Sellers can quickly collect payment on closed deals with secure, direct payment links, now easily generated on opportunity records.
  • Data Cloud: Once enabled, Data Cloud runs automatically, centralizing your data into unified profiles, including data that may have been previously inaccessible or not centralized within one system.

Sales and Service Admins can also choose to turn on an improved UI, including:

  • Streamlined left-hand navigation that makes it easy for users to find the apps they need
  • New Home page with 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

New customizable Home page with spotlight cards, out-of-the-box home cards, and left-hand navigation.

What does this mean for admins?

If you want to move your company to a multi-cloud setup, you might feel like you’re facing an uphill battle. This has historically required a large investment of time, budget, resources, and integrations. Salesforce Foundations alleviates those concerns by making it easier (and free!) to get started with multiple clouds. These new features are built directly on core, so there are no integrations or technical implementations needed—a real time-saver for busy admins!

Access to Salesforce Foundations means you can use your existing knowledge of Salesforce to help teams be successful across your organization.

  • Help sellers prospect faster with email campaigns and secure payment links.
  • Help service teams get insight into open deals and purchase history.
  • Help marketing teams set up automated email journeys with email templates and workflows.
  • Help IT teams innovate faster and extend Salesforce with new free trials of top partner apps.

Salesforce Foundations helps lay the groundwork to get started with the Agentforce platform. Admins are being tasked at a growing rate to implement artificial intelligence (AI) solutions while integrating with more sources of data to tie back to their Salesforce integrations. With Data Cloud now running in the background as part of Salesforce Foundations, you’re able to take action on your data and enable trusted AI solutions grounded in contextualized data.

No matter how you plan to use the products in Salesforce Foundations, you’ll be helping your teams work faster and ready to integrate AI into various workflows.

What does it mean to use Salesforce Foundations?

Salesforce Foundations gives you access to a complete, all-in-one CRM suite, including Marketing and Commerce. This is the perfect entry point for orgs that don’t yet have solutions for Sales, Service, Marketing, or Commerce. Salesforce Foundations will be available to Sales Cloud and/or Service Cloud Enterprise Edition or higher customers later this fall.

You can now also extend Salesforce with free trials of 25+ apps on AppExchange. These Salesforce Foundations launch partner apps—including Docusign, Highspot, and RingCentral—increase productivity, adoption, and cost savings with key functionality including document generation, contract management, collaboration, surveys, sales tools, telephony, and video conferencing.

Opportunity view in Service Cloud or Sales Cloud with updated navigation and record for payment links.

Case Management in Sales Cloud with new Service features turned on, including Knowledge.

Explore Salesforce Foundations today

Can’t wait to try out these solutions? Click Activate Now to enable Foundations for your account or view this quick Foundations setup tutorial. Reach out to your Account Executive today to learn more about Agentforce and Foundations. Check out the below resources to get hands-on with these great features.

Resources

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