Salesforce Inc. today launched a new suite of features called Salesforce Foundations to help larger businesses that span multiple industries unify their sales operations.

Salesforce Foundations is a free offering being made available to every Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud customer, and it bundles functionality from the company’s Sales, Service, Marketing, Commerce and Data Cloud offerings, so as to help them build more connected experiences across departments.

In addition, it provides free, trial-based access to various third-party applications that can be found on the company’s AppExchange marketplace.

The company said it’s doing this in response to the findings of a recent study that revealed that 55% of Salesforce customers say their interactions with different departments in their organization feel as if they’re communicating with an entirely different company. The reason is that their sales data and workflows often tend to be siloed within each department.

Salesforce is therefore trying to bring all of those departments together in one place, providing a more consistent view of the organization’s complete sales operations.

Foundational functions for all

Salesforce Foundations gives customers access to “foundational functionality” from each of its major cloud platforms, complete with free trials of top partner apps, and makes everything available through a new and customizable user interface (below) that offers a guided setup experience. So features such as email campaigns (previously exclusive to Sales Cloud users), secure payment links (in Commerce Cloud) and targeted segmentation (Data Cloud) are now available to every Sales Cloud and Service Cloud user, the company said.

The major advantage of Salesforce Foundations is that it helps to harmonize customer data from across various departments. This means that Sales Cloud users can now access data previously only available to Data Cloud users, for example. By making data available to every user, Salesforce believes it can deliver numerous benefits to its customers.

Perhaps the biggest benefit is that it can help to drive more revenue. Salesforce Foundations paves the way for more collaboration across sales, service and marketing teams, with a unified data set providing superior insights. For instance, marketing personnel will be able to keep track of a customer’s interactions with their colleagues in the organization’s service department, and use those insights to create more targeted advertising campaigns.

Customers will also be able to turn quotes into cash faster, Salesforce said, with sales teams able to access the secure payment links functionality previously available only in Commerce Cloud. Instead of sending instructions to the commerce department, sales personnel will be able to bill customers directly.

Moreover, service teams will be empowered to assist marketing teams and upsell products and services to customers, as they can now access functionality such as sales quoting and secure commerce payment links.

Salesforce Foundations can also help with artificial intelligence applications, the company said, as they can now be grounded in more contextualized customer data. As an example, the company said, marketing teams could use AI to create more targeted customer segmentation lists based on data they were previously unable to access, such as service case history or sales pipeline stages.

And in a nod to its partners, Salesforce is offering a number of free trials of third-party applications on the AppExchange, including Webex by Cisco, Docusign and RingCentral. Touting them as “launch partner apps,” the company says they can help customers to boost their productivity and lower their costs by enhancing collaboration, generating and managing documents and more.

Photo and images: Salesforce