Unlocking More Value in Salesforce With Foundations for Sales and Service

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Eddie Cliff, VP of Product Management at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about Salesforce Foundations and why it’s the key to unlocking the power of Agentforce.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Eddie Cliff.

Introducing Salesforce Foundations

Everyone’s excited about Agentforce and everything you can do when you combine Salesforce with AI. But what about smaller orgs? How will EE or UE orgs be able to keep up without access to all of the bells and whistles?

That’s exactly what Eddie and his team have been working on with Salesforce Foundations. It’s a free way to add the basic capabilities of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud, and Agentforce to your org.

How Salesforce Foundations supports AI and Agentforce

Salesforce Foundations eliminates the need for 3rd-party solutions to do that one little thing, like creating a payment link, or triggering a marketing campaign based on Commerce data. You can get all this cool cross-cloud functionality without having to upgrade your org, allowing you to start building that full Customer 360 in Data Cloud.

And this is crucial because Salesforce Foundations also gives you access to a freemium version of Agentforce. “What’s really cool,” he says, “is that as you do more and you use more of these cross-cloud capabilities, your data in Data Cloud gets richer and more powerful and so does Agentforce.”

And did I mention it’s free for Sales or Service EE and UE users?

How to activate Salesforce Foundations

Getting started is as easy as going into Setup and clicking on the Salesforce Foundations node. You’ll go through a checklist of everything you need to get going. From there, you’re in for a whole new world of segmentation, personalization, and automation.

Listen to the full episode for more from Eddie on Salesforce Foundations and what’s coming next, and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode of the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

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Learn more

• Trailhead: Salesforce Foundations: Quick Look
• Help docs: Considerations for Salesforce Foundations

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• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
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• Mike on Bluesky social
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:

This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we’re talking with Eddie Cliff, VP of Product Management at Salesforce, about some exciting developments in Salesforce Foundations. It was the subline to Agentforce that you heard at Dreamforce this year. Eddie has been at Salesforce for nearly 14 years, transitioning from roles in go-to-market and solution engineering to now product management. And in this episode, Eddie shares insights into the evolution of Salesforce products like Starter, Pro Suite, and we learn about Salesforce Foundations.

Now, before we get started, I just want to make sure that you’re subscribed to the Salesforce Admins podcast on whatever platform you get your Salesforce podcast on. Go ahead and click that subscribe, or sometimes it’s a follow button. And that way, when new episodes come in every Thursday morning, they will be downloaded to your phone. So with that, let’s jump into our conversation with Eddie where he explains how Salesforce Foundations is designed to give customers access to even more capabilities within sales, service and beyond, including all of their existing Salesforce implementations at no cost. So Eddie, welcome back to the podcast.

Eddie Cliff:

Hey, thanks for having me again. Good to be here.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, product managers that work on good features that admins love, we love to have on the podcast. So if people aren’t avid listeners, let’s refresh their memory. Tell me what exactly you do at Salesforce and how you came to be?

Eddie Cliff:

Yeah, definitely. So my name is Eddie Cliff, VP of Product Management, leading product for our Starter, Pro and now Foundation Suite, which I’m really excited to talk about today. I’ve been at Salesforce for almost 14 years now, and I’ve done a variety of roles, from go-to-market and sales and solution engineering and customer success prior to moving into product management about eight years ago now.

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow, I didn’t know you were an SC. I don’t think you said that in the last podcast. That’s awesome.

Eddie Cliff:

Yeah, SCs are amazing in what they can bring from their technical understanding and how Salesforce works, but also working with our customers to understand their requirements and needs, and ultimately designing the solutions that they can present back to the customer to hopefully prove out the value of Salesforce as they look to explore it. So actually, have a couple of SCs on my team… Well, former SCs that are now PMs. SCs make really great PMs because of that solutions mindset that’s really tied to customer outcomes, which is super valuable.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, no, I hear you. I also steal from the SC pot as well because they make for good evangelists too.

Eddie Cliff:

Definitely.

Mike Gerholdt:

And they help us present and run demos at Dreamforce, so it doesn’t hurt. Speaking of Dreamforce, maybe not lost in, but the byline under Agentforce was Salesforce Foundations, which we announced, and you’re leading as the PM for it. So let’s talk about what Salesforce Foundations is.

Eddie Cliff:

So it was buried there at the very end of the keynote. So perhaps some people missed it because it was all about Agentforce and it was an amazing keynote. But we’re really excited about Foundations because it’s going to help customers unlock Agentforce. And so before I talk about Foundations a little bit more, I want to take a step back to talk about AI in general, which I know is top of mind for a lot of businesses today and probably a lot of the admins listening today. And I promise we’re going to get to the meat of Foundations, but I think it’s important to talk about this first. So first and foremost, great AI starts with great data, and you can only have great data if all of your apps and systems are connected and you have that single source of truth. And that’s what Data Cloud really does for a lot of our customers.

Now, bringing all that data into one system will lead to happier customers because now you can do targeted marketing, smarter commerce, and more effective sales. And what’s really cool is that this also gets all of your data centralized and ready for AI, but it’s not easy for a lot of our customers to go from say just Sales Cloud or just Service Cloud on their own to the full Customer 360 that we talk about a lot. You need time and resources, and I know from a lot of customers I talk to, that’s not something that they have the luxury of having. And so that’s the goal here with Foundations is we’re making this easier by bringing all of these capabilities to all of our customers through Salesforce Foundations.

So Foundations gives all of these sales and service customers access to more of Salesforce included with their existing Salesforce implementation, and this is free. I want to make sure that’s clear. That’s not something we’re charging for, and you can add this to your existing org and we’ll talk a little bit about that. But ultimately, with Foundations, we’ve made it easier than ever before to get started with that Connected Customer 360 by building our foundational apps into your CRM. And this includes the basic capabilities within Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud, and now Agentforce, which is really exciting because it’s now available at no additional cost as part of Foundations.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, free is always good. I also thought for a second that I was like, somebody said, “Well, did you hear about Salesforce Foundations?” And I think they dropped the S and I was like, “Yes, I’ve heard of the Salesforce Foundation.”

Eddie Cliff:

No, that’s right. Yeah, I know there’s a lot of words that we use at Salesforce and a lot of them sound familiar. This is Foundations with an S, not our .org and all of the amazing things that we do via the Salesforce Foundation. This is, if you think about it, like the foundations, the platform, the beginning point of your Salesforce journey and all the power you can bring.

Mike Gerholdt:

So I feel like all of this existed prior, we just brought together… I’ve seen all this stuff. How did Foundations come to be?

Eddie Cliff:

Yeah, and I think, Mike, last time I was on, we were talking about the Pro Suite and hopefully everybody had an opportunity to listen to that, but