Salesforce Brings Key Sales, Service, Marketing, Commerce & Data Cloud Capabilities Together With New Foundations Upgrade

Salesforce has announced Foundations, a free upgrade that brings key cross-department features to every Salesforce customer at no additional cost. Foundations includes Sales, Service, Marketing, Commerce, and Data Cloud features, all in a new, enhanced UI, making it easier for businesses to get a unified view of their customer and build connected, AI-powered experiences across every customer touchpoint.

Key features include opportunity management, case management, email campaigns with targeted segmentation, and secure payment links, all aimed at enhancing user experience and streamlining operations without additional costs or data integrations. Finally, Salesforce Foundations customers can enhance their systems with thousands of prebuilt third-party extensions and integrations available on the AppExchange, including extended free trials from over 25 leading partners like Docusign, RingCentral, and ZoomInfo.

More than three-quarters (79%) of customers expect consistent interactions across departments, but 55% say it generally feels like they’re communicating with separate departments, not one company. Salesforce Foundations connects departments by providing additional functionality to Sales and Service Cloud customers, bringing sales, service, marketing, and commerce data together on one unified platform so customers can have a consistent experience, no matter where they are in their journey.

Unlike other CRMs, which are typically limited to native capabilities focused on one or two lines of business, with Salesforce Foundations, Sales Cloud and Service Cloud now include built-in features for marketing and commerce to help businesses create connected customer experiences without added upfront cost or data integrations.

Every feature offered in Salesforce Foundations is built on the core Salesforce platform and grounded in enterprise-wide data from Salesforce Data Cloud. Data Cloud harmonises customer data from across the business, including data that may have been previously inaccessible or not centralised within one system, to ground AI and fuel insights and automation to provide enhanced relevance for customer experiences.

Drive more revenue with sales, service, and marketing teams working in one place: Sales users can now keep opportunities on track with insights into service cases. They 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 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. 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.

Personalise customer experiences with unified data: Data Cloud surfaces customer data created across applications within Salesforce or in disparate systems automatically, providing insights across the customer journey with a trusted data foundation for AI tools and solutions. This allows, for example, marketers 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 centralised within one system.

Work faster with an updated user interface: Users can spend less time finding the apps they need with new left-navigation and plan their day quickly with an updated homepage, now featuring customisable, out-of-the-box home cards that provide a snapshot into a user’s top priorities, like open cases, open opportunities, and recommended tasks.

At no additional cost, Foundations users get access to extended free trials from 25+ partner apps. With thousands of pre-built extensions and integrations on the AppExchange, users can increase productivity, adoption, and cost savings with key functionalities, including document generation, contract management, collaboration, surveys, sales tools, telephony, and video conferencing.

“With Salesforce Foundations, businesses of all sizes and industries can now automate sales, service, marketing, and commerce with unified customer data on a single platform, empowering them to integrate their entire front office and deliver real time, personalised customer experiences to drive revenue, answer service issues, create marketing campaigns, set up payments, and more,” David Schmaier, president and chief product officer

“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. Trying more Salesforce features, and getting more of our team into Salesforce, helps us create a better experience for the 30 million people and 70,000 teams using Grammarly to drive their business forward,” said Matt Rosenberg, chief revenue officer, Grammarly.

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