by Sarah Kelleher 
Salesforce are giving the new Marketing and Commerce capability to every Enterprise Sales and Service customer for free. No, really! This isn’t just clickbait. Building on the Free Data Cloud initiative, announced at Dreamforce 2023, Salesforce customers can now access more of the new features on the core platform at no additional cost. Let’s take a look at what’s included with Salesforce Foundations and why this is important for the future of the platform.
What is Salesforce Foundations?
Salesforce Foundations is a free upgrade for all Sales and/or Service Cloud customers on Enterprise Edition or higher. It includes features for Marketing, Commerce and Data Cloud, all wrapped up in the new AI.
Key features
- Marketing automation – the latest version of the Campaign object allows marketers to build nurture programs and marketing initiatives right on the core platform, using Flow and Data Cloud. This is a version of Salesforce’s latest marketing product, Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, which was announced earlier this year.
- Integrated communications – Sales and Service users will be able to add leads and contacts to marketing journeys and view engagement in a single platform.
- Faster payments – secure Payment Links can be generated from within quote and opportunity records to speed up payments and reduce the need for integrations with external systems.
What are the limitations?
There’s no such thing as a free lunch, right? Salesforce is indeed giving away this capability for free. However, the extent of the free offering will likely only cover basic use cases or a proof-of-concept for most organisations.
- Email campaigns are limited to 2,000 sends per month.
- 10,000 Data Cloud Segmentation and Activation credits are included – this is huge, as these credits were previously excluded from Free Data Cloud.
- The same Free Data Cloud credits limits apply, as this upgrade is built on top of that product.
- Commerce Pay Now transaction fees apply for the payment links used.
Why is this such an important announcement?
With Dreamforce 2024 taking place this week, this gives us huge clues as to what Salesforce is expected to announce at the flagship conference.
One Platform
Over the last couple of years, Salesforce has been shifting its strategy from having multiple, integrated platforms to having one core platform with all business functions built on the same foundation. Data Cloud has quickly become fundamental to this strategy with almost all new product announcements requiring this technology.
Marketing and Commerce functionality has been starting to appear on the core platform for a while now. We can expect plenty of announcements at Dreamforce that accelerate this journey.
AI
This is a bit of an obvious one as it’s impossible to avoid the AI conversation when discussing anything Salesforce these days! But Salesforce knows that companies will not be able to see the true potential of their AI capability without first adopting the underlying functionality. This is a huge challenge for Salesforce. Marketers won’t see the power of AI-driven lead scoring if they’re using an external marketing automation platform. By providing the basics for free, they are taking away one of the barriers customers will face in adopting their premium AI features.
We can expect a huge amount more AI capability to be announced at Dreamforce and now companies will be able to get their hands on it and try out the features without having to totally re-platform their marketing and commerces functions.
Marketing on Core
Since Salesforce announced Marketing Cloud Growth edition in February, there has been huge speculation in the community about if and when the existing platforms will be retired. It doesn’t look like Marketing Cloud retirement or Account Engagement end-of-life is planned for any time soon, so existing Marketing Cloud and Account Engagement customers need not panic. However, the roadmap for Growth edition is stacked full of innovative and exciting features, while the roadmaps for existing products are a little less shiny.
And now, with every customer getting a taste of this new functionality for free, I think we can be pretty sure where Salesforce are investing their resources. We should expect to see marketing capability continute to shift over to the core platform at a much quicker rate now, with some huge functionality improvements being announced at Dreamforce.
How can I get Salesforce Foundations?
All we know so far is that this upgrade will be available to all Enterprise Edition Sales and/or Service customers “later this fall”. My best guess is that we will know much more after Dreamforce, so make sure you catch the keynote on Salesforce Plus!
And if you want to get a head start on the latest about Marketing Cloud Growth, check out our resources on this topic.