If you’re already using Salesforce and you haven’t heard about Foundations yet, you might be leaving some pretty powerful tools on the table. Salesforce Foundations isn’t a new product you have to budget for — it’s a free upgrade that’s already available to you, just waiting to be switched on.
If your business management tools are disconnected, it costs time, creates blind spots, and makes it nearly impossible to deliver a consistent experience to your customers. Here’s how Salesforce Foundations can help you connect those tools, now with a side of artificial intelligence (AI).
What Salesforce Foundations is (and who gets it)
Foundations is a built-in add-on available at no extra cost to existing Salesforce customers. Think of it as a free expansion of your existing customer relationship management (CRM) investment — one that brings together Agentforce Sales, Service, Marketing, Commerce, and Data 360 under one roof, with a refreshed interface and AI woven throughout. If you’re a Salesforce customer currently operating on an Enterprise license, you get Foundations!
The Foundations features you get — broken down
Here’s what Salesforce Foundations for small business actually includes across each product area:
- Sales: Lead and case management, Sales quoting tools, Secure Pay Now payment links
- Service: Case management and macros to automate repetitive service tasks, Multi-channel support tools
- Marketing: A drag-and-drop email builder, Up to 2,000 email sends per month, Built-in analytics to track campaign performance
- Commerce: One direct-to-consumer (D2C) digital storefront (U.S. only), Managed checkout and merchandising tools, Secure Pay Now payment links
- Data: Unified customer profiles pulling data from across your systems, Segmentation tools for up to five data streams, 10,000 annual segmentation credits
- Agentforce: 200,000 Agentforce Flex credits, Generative AI responses, and Prompt Builder, One AI agent skill
How Foundations solves real problems for SMBs
One of the biggest pain points for small and medium businesses (SMBs) is data that lives in silos. Your sales team doesn’t know what your service team is seeing. Your marketing emails go out without any context from customer interactions. And your commerce tools have no connection to your CRM system. Foundations changes that.
VEV Romerike, a telecom company with fewer than 30 employees, faced exactly this challenge — fragmented service cases, limited marketing insights, and no way to act on cross-sell opportunities across departments.
After activating Foundations with Agentforce, they resolved service cases 40% faster, automated 30% of their cases entirely, and started delivering targeted marketing communication in real time. As VEV CTO Asbjørn Basnes put it, “People think Salesforce is only for large companies. We’re proof that it works very well for businesses of our size.”
The AI advantage: Agentforce is built right in
The inclusion of Agentforce is one of the most compelling reasons to activate Foundations now — especially if your team has been curious about AI but hasn’t had a risk-free way to test it.
Foundations includes 200,000 Agentforce Flex credits, giving you real runway to build and test AI agents without any upfront commitment. You can use these credits to automate lead qualification, speed up service responses, or personalize marketing at scale with AI agents. Agentforce is built into Foundations and ready to work with the customer data you already have in your CRM.
AgentExchange integrations included
Beyond the core product features, Foundations also gives you access to extended free trials from over 25 partner apps on the AgentExchange — including tools for document generation, contracts, telephony, video conferencing, and more. That means you can explore integrations like Docusign, RingCentral, and ZoomInfo without adding to your software budget.
How to get started with Foundations
Activating Foundations takes just a few steps inside your existing Salesforce Setup. You choose which features to enable, and you can move at your own pace — turning on marketing tools first, then exploring commerce, then AI agents as your team gets comfortable. The goal isn’t to overhaul everything at once. It’s to start getting more value from the CRM you already use, on the timeline that makes sense for your business.
To activate Salesforce Foundations, follow these steps within your Salesforce account:
- Log in to your Salesforce account.
- Navigate to “Setup” and search for or select “Salesforce Foundations”.
- Click “Add to my Contract”.
- Add the Salesforce Foundations products to your cart.
- Complete the checkout process.
- Return to the “Setup” menu to begin enabling and configuring your new features.
Get your data ready for AI with Salesforce Foundations
Easily activate Foundations in your existing CRM to use Agentforce 360 — all for free.
Start getting more from your Salesforce investment today
If you’re already on Salesforce Enterprise Edition or higher, you have everything you need to get started. Activate Foundations today to get the full picture of your customers across sales, service, marketing, and commerce — all in your existing CRM. Ready to go further? Activate Foundations to try out Agentforce today.
AI supported the writers and editors who created this article.
Is Salesforce Foundations really free?
Yes — Foundations is a free add-on for existing Enterprise Edition customers or higher. There are no additional licensing fees to activate it, though some usage-based features (like Pay Now transaction processing and Agentforce overages) may incur fees if you exceed the included limits.
Do I need to be a Salesforce developer to activate Foundations?
No. You activate Foundations directly in Salesforce Setup, and many features are designed to get your team up and running quickly — in some cases in just a few minutes. The Trailhead module Grow Your Business with Salesforce Foundations walks you through the setup step by step.
What’s the difference between Salesforce Foundations and Salesforce Starter Suite?
Starter Suite is a standalone product for businesses just getting started with a CRM. Foundations is a free upgrade layered on top of an existing Agentforce Sales or Service Enterprise subscription — it’s designed for businesses that already use Salesforce and want to expand into marketing, commerce, AI, and unified data without purchasing separate products.
Can I use Foundations to send marketing emails?
Yes. Foundations includes a drag-and-drop email builder and up to 2,000 email sends per month per org, along with built-in analytics to measure how your campaigns perform. It’s a great entry point for small teams that want to run basic email marketing from within their CRM.
What happens when I’ve used up my Agentforce Flex credits?
Foundations includes 200,000 Agentforce Flex credits to get you started. Once you’ve used those, additional Flex credits are available for purchase. The included credits are intended to give you enough runway to test meaningful use cases and see the value before committing to more.
