Free Salesforce Data Cloud is a low-cost/low-risk opportunity

Jeff Larche

Free Salesforce Data Cloud is a low-cost/low-risk opportunity

Salesforce is making it easy and affordable for their customer relationship management (CRM) owners to break down the walls of data silos. Fragmented customer data has always been a hindrance to agile, personalized customer experiences. And the frustration of enterprises trying to unify first-party data will only grow as third-party data becomes harder to acquire in 2024 and beyond. This has caused many to consider customer data platforms (CDPs). 

Salesforce to the rescue. 

They’re helping their myriad CRM owners achieve data unification without adding yet another MarTech logo. Instead, they would see their CRM data and CDP-driving customer experience improvements all contained in the newly announced Einstein 1 platform.

Eliminating tech stack bloat is appealing to any CTO. CFOs can also find something to smile about, as significant price reductions for current Salesforce CRM owners were announced at the 2023 Dreamforce conference. In many instances, we’re talking about a free CDP license!

Under the Einstein 1 umbrella, owners get the existing power of their CRM, activated in the Salesforce Data Cloud, all enhanced by their Einstein AI.

First things first: What is Salesforce Data Cloud?

Source: Salesforce Data Cloud Help

Data Cloud is Salesforce’s CDP offering. CDPs are designed to function as the single source of truth across your customer data ecosystem.

While they’re traditionally associated with marketing solutions, Salesforce is extending Data Cloud capabilities across the entire CRM spectrum, including sales, service, marketing, and commerce, all enhanced by AI. In fact, one of the most important headlines coming out of Dreamforce was that Data Cloud will be part of the backbone for Einstein 1, Salesforce’s new AI platform.

When enabled on a Salesforce org, Data Cloud can ingest and unify data from multiple sources (both Salesforce and external data) and provide insights and actions back to multiple activation destinations.

Now back to the free offer

The broad scope of Data Cloud is critical to note because this offer is actually targeting Sales Cloud/Service Cloud customers, regardless of their adoption of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. This free version of Data Cloud provides all its standard capabilities with the notable exceptions of Segmentation and Activation.

If you’re focused on marketing solutions alone, the absence of those two may seem like a deal-breaker, though it should be noted that they’re available for a reduced cost. But if you’d like your CDP journey to include improving sales or service performance, this is the deal for you!

What can you do with free Data Cloud?

Salesforce has emphasized that this version of Data Cloud will explicitly allow you to get started with one of two use cases (it’s not limited to these use cases, but the scope and scale of the offer was designed with them in mind):

Unify Prospects for Targeted Selling: Consolidate data across multiple orgs and data sources to identify opportunities with priority customers and increase revenue.
Unify Customers for Personalized Service: Consolidate data across multiple orgs and data sources to empower service agents with a unified, 360-degree view of the customer.

Across both, you can ingest data from multiple sources, unify data with identity resolution, calculate insights, visualize data in Tableau, and view consolidated data on the contact record.

Things to consider

As with most free offers, there are limitations and considerations to keep in mind. From a licensing perspective, the following are included:

250,000 Data Service credits (Unlimited Plus Edition customers get access to 2,500,000 Data Service credits)
1 terabytes of data storage
1 Data Cloud admin
100 internal Data Cloud identity users
1,000 Data Cloud Permission Set Licenses (PSL)
5 integration users

(Note: If you don’t “speak” Data Cloud, 250,000 Data Service credits are approximately the number required to manage a typical set of 10,000 unified customer profiles.)

Two Tableau Creator licenses are a separate line item and can be quoted by your account executive.

Free Data Cloud is worth the time and effort only if it enables your strategy! Review your organization's current and future data requirements, including data modeling, testing, and the need for separate environments.

The bottom line

TA Digital is a Salesforce Summit-tier, global agency alliance partner with a multitude of Data Cloud certifications and successes. Our specialists have created an accelerator package built specifically for the free Data Cloud offer.

We’ll help you procure your free licenses, design your optimal approach, and avoid the sometimes rough terrain of implementing Data Cloud, all while maximizing your return on this customer data journey.

Schedule a call with our Salesforce team to get started!