The painful reality of a clunky CRM configuration is low adoption, messy data, and an estimated 14% drop in closed deals. When your CRM is built for management oversight instead of seller enablement, everyone suffers, especially your buyers. But knowing you have a problem is only half the battle. The real questions for Marketers, RevOps, and Sales Operations leaders are: What does an ideal CRM seller experience actually look like in 2026, and how do we get there? Why does this matter now more than ever?
As we outline in our 2026 CRM Optimization Playbook, three major industry forces are shifting CRM optimization from a “nice-to-have project” to an absolute revenue priority. If you want your tech stack to act as a force multiplier for sellers rather than a budget drain, you need to understand the modern blueprint for a frictionless CRM.
Why Are the Stakes Higher in 2026?
We aren’t operating in the same B2B landscape we were a few years ago. If you are still running a CRM configured for 2018 reporting needs, you are actively fighting three major headwinds:
ROI is Under a Microscope: CFOs are holding the tech budget to a much higher standard. It’s no longer about whether a platform is successfully deployed. It’s about whether it’s actually being adopted by the front lines.
Buyers Are Further Ahead: Prospects are over halfway through their buying journey before they ever talk to sales. Sellers need instant, unified context the second a lead routes to them to add value in the few moments they have left.
AI Raises the Stakes on Clean Data: Everyone is eager to layer in AI assistants or platforms like Agentforce. But here is a sobering reality: at least 50% of generative AI projects were abandoned after proof of concept because of factors including poor data quality, inadequate risk controls, escalating costs, or unclear business value (Gartner).
The Modern Blueprint: An Ideal CRM Seller Experience
When you optimize the seller experience, the wins ripple across the entire lead-to-revenue lifecycle. It stops being a “Sales Ops project” and becomes a multi-department win.
Here is what happens when you design a CRM for your front lines:
Focus Area
The Frictionless Workflow
The Impact
Smarter Prospecting
Intent and signal-based outreach take the guesswork out of who to call and what to say.
~47% higher conversion rate over traditional scoring models (Landbase).
Frictionless Activity Management
The system automatically captures email, meeting, and call data, giving sellers next-best-action coaching without manual data entry.
Data-driven whitespace identification points account for teams exactly where cross-sell and upsell potential is highest.
~Sales teams using AI are 30% more likely to report year-over-year revenue growth (Salesforce).
Seamless Sales Processes
Headless CRM systems, like Salesforce, allow data and actions to be used inside additional tools sellers are already using, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, email inboxes, or AI agents. Allowing them to access clean data in their flow of work, across all channels.
~49% increase in seller productivity and 28% shorter sales cycles from process automation(Rox).
How AI Acts as the Ultimate Friction-Reducer (If You Let It)
Once you lay a solid data foundation, AI can step in to eliminate the heavy administrative burden that has plagued sellers for decades. Instead of forcing sellers to be data-entry clerks, optimized platforms allow AI to do what it does best:
Capture the Busywork: Auto-logging meeting notes, participants, and next steps directly from calls without the salesperson typing a single line.
Read the Room at Scale: Surfacing real-time deal health alerts and coaching prompts to catch stalling deals before it’s too late.
Draft the Follow-Up: Triggering timely, personalized outreach based on real-time buyer engagement signals so hot leads never go cold.
By removing the digital drag, you free up your sellers’ brainpower to focus on what they actually do best: building relationships with buyers.
The 2026 Mandate: Trade the Junk Drawer for a Seamless Seller Experience
At this stage in the B2B landscape, a CRM configured merely for management oversight is an active drain on your pipeline, your budget, and your team’s performance. The modern blueprint for growth requires shifting away from the digital drag of manual data entry and embracing a frictionless, optimized CRM seller experience. By laying a clean data foundation and allowing AI to automate the busywork, capture real-time deal health, and surface actionable intent signals, you transform your system from a static reporting tool into a high-powered revenue engine.
Tackling this all on your own can be overwhelming, and you may not have the bandwidth or the resources to evaluate your CRM and the friction it’s causing on your sellers and your pipeline. Tap into the expertise of the Sercante l Trilliad team with our Seller Experience Audit to fast-track your path to an optimized CRM and get a customized blueprint for quick wins and major revenue impact.
Artificial intelligence and real-time data are shifting the landscape under our feet. For a long time, Salesforce Flow was considered “admin territory.” Marketers stuck to traditional journey builders and engagement programs. But things have changed. Flow is no longer just a backend automation tool for admins. It can now be directly harnessed by marketers in the Agentforce Marketing platform (also known as Marketing Cloud Next, or Marketing Cloud Growth or Advanced Edition) to streamline workflows and deliver personalized, multi-channel journeys at scale. And for marketers with Marketing Cloud Engagement or Account Engagement, they can already access these features. To start taking advantage, it’s critical to start learning Agentforce Marketing Flow fundamentals.
See how fellow marketers at Denver Public Schools are already using Flow and Agentforce Marketing features to streamline campaign workflows, deliver multi-channel campaigns, and track attribution. Register Here
The Foundation: Diving into Flow Basics
Historically, Flow Builder was seen as a tool reserved only for Salesforce Admins because of its ability to perform deep backend activities like creating records, automating heavy backend logic, or running APEX.
With the arrival of Agentforce Marketing, we now have Marketing Flows—sometimes referred to as “citizen flow”. It uses the exact same interface and requires a similar foundational skillset, but it gives marketers unprecedented control over their campaigns. Don’t worry, admins: access to Marketing Flow does not equal full admin rights. Granular control remains secure through specific user permissions.
What is Flow Builder?
Flow Builder is a drag-and-drop visual interface used to automate complex business processes, workflows, and user interactions. Think of it as the core automation engine of Agentforce Marketing. It seamlessly orchestrates your three most vital assets:
Segment: Your targeted audience.
Content: Your dynamic messaging.
Actions: Your delivery mechanisms.
What can you do with Flow?
Marketing Flows provide a massive playground of strategic options:
Send: Deploy emails, SMS, and WhatsApp messages directly through the canvas.
Wait: Pause an individual’s progress for a specific amount of time (from minutes to months) or until a specific event occurs.
Update: Dynamically push data to multiple objects or auto-create tasks for your internal team members.
Customize: Branch engagement paths using real-time data or user interactions.
Optimize: Utilize built-in Path Experiments to split-test channels, content variations, and delivery cadences.
What are the types of Flow?
There are several core marketing flow types tailored to your specific orchestration needs. Below are the most common flow types you’ll need in Agentforce Marketing:
Automation Event-Triggered: Runs quietly in the background and fires immediately when an action occurs—such as a form fill, an email click, or a new subscriber signup. These are frequently used as completion actions or to instantly route leads.
Segment Triggered (recently renamed to “Audience Flow”): Targets a specific group of people (segments, lists, campaign members, etc.) when the flow runs. It is ideal for nurturing new leads or managing ongoing communications, allowing users to exit via rules or end steps.
Data 360 Flows: Powered by Data Cloud permissions, these flows can auto-convert records or trigger automation based on calculated insights and real-time score changes.
CRM Record-Triggered Flow: This type fires the moment CRM record data changes or updates.
Autolaunched Flow: Background automation kicked off by subflows, Apex code, or REST APIs.
Elements: The Building Blocks of Flow
Every flow you build is constructed using three basic types of canvas elements:
Logic Elements: Includes options like Decisions to branch your paths, Wait Time based on a date, time, or event, and Path Experiments to test different paths.
Data Elements: Elements that let you directly Create, Get, Update, or Delete records across the platform.
Interaction Elements: The execution steps, where you can Send Email, Send SMS, Send WhatsApp, create Consent, or trigger a Subflow.
Agentforce Marketing Flow: Three Ways to Build
Building out your vision doesn’t mean staring at a blank whiteboard. Agentforce Marketing gives you three flexible onboarding paths depending on your technical comfort level and campaign complexity.
Start learning how to build your own flows with this hands-on training, Agentforce Marketing Flow Fundamentals Workshop. Learn more and sign up here.
Building Flows with Agentforce
If you are a new Flow user or simply want to quickly stand up a simple nurture, you can use the conversational Agentforce Campaign Creation interface. By providing a prompt grounded in a campaign brief, Agentforce will automatically generate a campaign preview and lay out the flow steps for you. From there, you can ask the agent to refine text tones, add messages, or alter paths using natural language.
Building Flows with Campaign Canvas
The Campaign Canvas is perfect for simple nurtures and straightforward customer journeys that do not require complex decision splits. It offers a streamlined “Quick Start” interface where you can rapidly add linear steps for your triggers, target segments, message content, and wait periods.
Using Flow Builder
When your campaign demands advanced nurtures, exit rules, behavioral decisions, or experiments, it’s time to open up the full Flow Builder. Here, you get full access to the toolbox, manager tabs, canvas layout, and the ability to cleanly cut, copy, paste, and configure every element.
You can also combine these approaches to building flow. Using Agentforce or the Campaign Canvas is a great way to start your flow structure. You can then use the Flow Builder to fine-tune the flow details and add more advanced flow logic.
Lean on Flow Templates to Save Time
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you launch a new campaign. Salesforce provides over 300 out-of-the-box templates, including multiple marketing-focused options.
Furthermore, once you build a custom flow architecture that works perfectly for your brand, you can save your own flows as templates for your wider marketing team to replicate safely. Flow templates are a great way to avoid starting from scratch. Learn more about Flow Templates from Mike Morris’ blog, Saving Time with Flow Templates in Agentforce Marketing.
Getting Started with Flow & Agentforce Marketing
It’s critical for marketers to start learning Flow to take advantage of the latest automation, AI, and real-time data features in Agentforce Marketing. However, the path to not only learn Flow but also figure out the best deployment approach for your organization to start using these features alongside your current platform can feel overwhelming.
You don’t have to continue on this journey alone. Tap into the expertise of the Sercante | Trilliad team. We’ve developed a proven Marketing Cloud Convergence Path that we tailor to each marketing team’s business outcomes, ensuring you can continue maximizing your existing platform while fast-tracking your overall time to value.
For years, email marketers have relied on email opens to measure campaign success. However, privacy features such as Apple Mail Privacy Protection, inbox security tools and email client behaviour have made email opens an increasingly unreliable measure of engagement.
Now, European regulators are moving the conversation one step further by questioning whether tracking pixels should be used at all without prior consent.
Fortunately, Salesforce has recently introduced new controls in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) that give organisations much greater flexibility over how email tracking is managed.
This shift isn’t just about the reliability of email opens – it’s about whether organisations should be collecting that data in the first place.
What Has Changed?
In 2026, both the French CNIL and Italian Garante published guidance on the use of tracking pixels in marketing emails.
The guidance explains that, for many marketing use cases, tracking pixels should only be used with the recipient’s prior consent under the existing ePrivacy Directive and the GDPR. This isn’t a new law. Rather, it explains how existing privacy requirements should be interpreted and applied to email tracking technologies. CNIL recommendation on tracking pixels in emails
Both regulators have also provided transition periods to allow organisations time to review their email marketing practices. In France, the CNIL’s transition period for existing marketing databases runs until 14 July 2026, while the Italian Garante’s guidance provides a six-month transition period ending on 28 October 2026.
Although the guidance currently applies specifically to France and Italy, many organisations operating across Europe are reviewing their wider email tracking strategy rather than implementing different approaches for individual countries.
Why This Matters for Account Engagement Customers
Many Marketing Cloud Account Engagement features have traditionally relied on email open data, including:
Engagement Studio programmes
Dynamic Lists
Automation Rules
Lead scoring
Campaign reporting
If collecting email open data requires additional consent, organisations need to consider whether email opens should continue to drive marketing automation, segmentation, lead scoring and reporting – or whether stronger engagement signals should take their place.
Salesforce Has Introduced a Better Option
Historically, Account Engagement customers had limited choices. If you wanted to stop collecting email open data, you generally had to either:
Send text-only emails, or
Disable email tracking across the entire Business Unit, which also disabled click tracking.
Salesforce has now introduced new account-level Email Tracking settings that allow administrators to independently manage:
Email Open Tracking
Advanced Email Analytics
Email Click Tracking
This is a significant improvement for Account Engagement customers.
Rather than choosing between tracking everything or nothing, organisations can now disable email open tracking while continuing to send HTML emails and retain click tracking.
For many organisations, this provides a much simpler alternative to maintaining separate consent programmes or separate HTML and text-only marketing journeys.
Configuring the New Email Tracking Settings
The new tracking controls can be found under:
Account Engagement Settings → Email Tracking
From here, administrators can independently configure:
Email Open Tracking
Advanced Email Analytics
Email Click Tracking
These settings apply at the Business Unit level, so any changes should be agreed with your Legal, Compliance and Marketing teams before being implemented.
Review Your Automations Before Making Changes
Before disabling email open tracking, it’s worth identifying where email opens are currently used within your Account Engagement instance.
Common areas include:
Engagement Studio programmes
Automation Rules
Dynamic Lists
Completion Actions
Lead scoring models
Fortunately, Account Engagement already provides an Open Rules Audit report to help identify these dependencies.
Navigate to:
Reports → Marketing Assets → Automations → Open Rules Audit
This report provides a quick overview of any automation currently relying on email open criteria, making it much easier to understand what may need updating.
Best Practice: Don’t simply replace every Email Open condition with Email Click. Use this opportunity to review whether a stronger engagement signal – such as a landing page visit, form submission or consultation request – would provide a more meaningful measure of buying intent.
Focus on Meaningful Engagement
Even before these privacy changes, email opens had become an increasingly unreliable indicator of genuine engagement.
Rather than asking “Did they open my email?“, marketers should increasingly ask “Did they do something meaningful?“
Consider measuring outcomes such as:
Email click-through rates
Landing page visits
Form submissions
Content downloads
Webinar registrations
Consultation or demo requests
Campaign influence
Pipeline generated
Revenue won
These metrics provide a much stronger indication of customer intent and marketing performance than whether a tracking pixel happened to load.
Final Thoughts
The conversation around email open tracking isn’t really about losing a metric – it’s about improving the way we measure marketing success.
Privacy expectations will continue to evolve, but the most successful marketing teams won’t be the ones collecting the most data. They’ll be the ones measuring the data that genuinely reflects customer intent.
With Salesforce’s new tracking controls, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement customers now have the flexibility to align with evolving privacy requirements while continuing to deliver engaging HTML email experiences and shifting their focus from increasingly unreliable open rates to the engagement metrics that truly drive business results.
If you’ve spent years building Dynamic Lists and Engagement Studio programs, opening Data 360 for the first time can feel overwhelming. Unified Individuals, Segments, Calculated Insights, Data Spaces; it looks like a whole new world. But here’s the thing: it’s not.
At its core, segmentation hasn’t changed. You’re still trying to get the right message to the right person at the right time. What has changed is how much data you have to work with. Instead of building audiences from Prospect records and email engagement alone, Data 360 lets you layer in website activity, CRM data, opportunity history, subscription preferences, and more.
Here’s how to bridge what you already know with what you’ll find in Data 360.
The Biggest Mindset Shift: From Lists to Audiences
In Account Engagement, everything starts with a list.
Need a webinar audience? Build a list.
Need a re-engagement campaign? Build a list.
Need a nurture track? Build a list.
In Data 360, you build reusable audience definitions instead. One segment can power multiple campaigns, journeys, and channels. You’re not creating a new list for every initiative. Think of it this way:
Account Engagement: Campaign → Build List → Send Message
Data 360: Define Audience → Activate Anywhere
The shift from campaign-specific lists to reusable audiences is the most important concept to internalize before you start building.
Terminology Translation
Before you build anything, here’s the cheat sheet:
Account Engagement
Data 360
What It Means
Prospect
Unified Individual
The person you’re marketing to
Dynamic List
Segment
A reusable audience built from defined criteria
Dynamic List Rules
Segment Criteria
The logic used to determine audience membership
List Member
Segment Member
Someone who qualifies for the audience
Prospect Activity
Engagement Data
Behavioral data used for targeting
Marketing List
Published Segment
A ready-to-use audience for activation
Score & Grade
Attributes
Signals used to identify high-intent audiences
Once that mapping clicks, the platform becomes a lot less intimidating.
Before You Build: Know Your Data
One thing that surprises most Account Engagement users is how much data is available in Data 360. Depending on your setup, you may have access to:
Prospect data
CRM data
Email engagement
Forms
Landing Pages
Website activity
Preference center subscriptions
Opportunity data
External data sources
This is where Data 360 starts to shine.
In Account Engagement, we ask: “Who opened my email in the last 30 days?”
In Data 360, we ask: “Who opened my email in the last 30 days, visited my pricing page, and doesn’t currently have an open opportunity?”
That’s a fundamentally more sophisticated audience, and it’s exactly why organizations are investing in Data 360.
One important caveat: Not every org has the same data sources connected. Before building complex segments, take time to understand what’s actually flowing into Data 360 and how frequently it refreshes. Knowing your data inventory upfront will save you a lot of troubleshooting later.
Building Your First Segment
Navigate to Data Cloud > Segments and select New. You’ll see four segment types:
Standard Segments are your go-to. These are the closest equivalents to Account Engagement Dynamic Lists and support the vast majority of marketing use cases. Start here.
Waterfall Segments let you prioritize audiences and prevent contacts from qualifying for multiple competing campaigns simultaneously — useful when running multiple offers at once.
Real-Time Segments evaluate audiences on demand for use cases requiring immediate qualification. Powerful, but they come with limitations.
Once you’ve selected Standard Segment, there are four ways to build your audience.
Option 1: Use the Visual Builder
The Visual Builder offers the most flexibility and is where most marketers spend the majority of their time. The process is straightforward:
Create a New Segment
Select your Data Space (most often your Default Data Space)
Choose the object you want to segment on (most often Unified Individual)
Name your Segment
Configure your publishing settings
Drag attributes onto the canvas and define your criteria
Save and publish
Understanding Direct Attributes vs. Related Attributes
This is one of the biggest mindset shifts for Account Engagement users.
When building criteria in the Visual Builder, you’ll typically see two types of attributes:
Direct Attributes
Direct Attributes live directly on the object you’re segmenting against.
For example, if you’re building a segment on the Unified Individual object, direct attributes might include:
First Name
Last Name
Country
State
Preferred Language
Think of these as fields that belong directly to the person.
Example: Country = United States
This is a simple, direct attribute filter.
Related Attributes
Related Attributes come from connected objects that are related to the object you’re segmenting on.
Examples include:
Email engagement activity
Opportunities
Campaign Membership
Website activity
Orders
Cases
Think of these as records associated with the person rather than fields that live directly on the person.
Example: Opened an email in the last 30 days
The email open isn’t stored directly on the Unified Individual record. It’s stored on a related engagement object.
When Should You Use Each?
A simple rule:
Use Direct Attributes when filtering on profile or demographic information.
Use Related Attributes when filtering on behavior, engagement, transactions, or relationships.
If you’re asking “Who is this person?” you’re usually looking at Direct Attributes.
If you’re asking “What has this person done?” you’re usually looking at Related Attributes.
Understanding that distinction makes segment building much easier and helps explain why some criteria appear in different areas of the builder.
Option 2: Use Quick Filters
Need a common audience fast? Quick Filters offer predefined criteria for standard scenarios like:
New Contacts created today
New Leads created today
Recent Campaign Members
Contacts related to a won Opportunity
Access Quick Filters by navigating to Campaign while in the Marketing Cloud Next app. Open a campaign and select Select Segment. It’s a great starting point if you’re brand new to the platform.
Option 3: Use Einstein to Build a Draft
Not sure where to begin? Einstein Segment Creation lets you describe the audience you want in plain language:
Show me subscribers who opened an email in the last 30 days, visited our pricing page, and are subscribed to product updates.
Einstein generates a draft segment you can review, refine, and publish. Think of it as a shortcut to a first draft and always validate the output before going live.
Option 4: Use a Dynamic Segment
If you find yourself creating the same types of audiences repeatedly, Dynamic Builders can help streamline the process. Instead of starting from scratch each time, Dynamic Builders let you create reusable audience templates with configurable criteria. Marketers can then generate new segments from those templates by simply selecting or updating a few values, helping ensure consistency across campaigns while reducing manual effort. They’re especially useful for organizations with standardized audience definitions or recurring segmentation needs, allowing teams to scale segmentation without rebuilding the same logic over and over.
Which option should you choose? If you’re just getting started, use Quick Filters for common audiences or the Visual Builder for custom logic. Einstein Segment Creation is a great way to generate a first draft from natural language, while Dynamic Builders are best when your organization wants to standardize and reuse the same audience patterns across multiple campaigns.
Tips, Gotchas, and Things I Tell Every Client
Use the IN Operator Instead of Stacking OR Conditions
If your CRM has multiple versions of the same value, the IN operator saves you a lot of time. Instead of building three separate OR conditions, write:
Country IN (USA, US, United States)
It supports up to 100 values. Clean, readable, and much easier to maintain.
Understand Measurements, Operators, and Values
When working with behavioral data, Data 360 often asks you to combine three pieces:
Measurement
Operator
Value
For example: Email Opens → Count → At Least → 1
This translates to: “The person has opened at least one email.”
Another example: Email Clicks → Count → Greater Than → 5
This translates to: “The person has clicked more than five emails.”
Think of it like a sentence: Measurement + Operator + Value = Audience Rule
Examples:
Count At Least 1
Count Equals 0
Sum Greater Than 1000
Count Between 5 and 10
If a segment returns unexpected results, this combination is often the first place I investigate. The measurement may be correct, but the operator or value may not align with the business requirement.
Use Include and Exclude Intentionally
One of the most common mistakes I see is placing all data requirements into the “Include” section. Instead, think of Include as those who belong and Exclude as those who don’t belong. Separating those concepts creates cleaner segments and makes troubleshooting much easier.
Include Criteria: Country IN (USA, US, United States)
Exclude Criteria: Emailed in the last 3 days
Use EQUALS When Your Data Is Clean
When a field is standardized, and you only need one exact match, EQUALS is the right call. Country EQUALS USA will only return records where the value is exactly “USA.” No flexibility, but that’s the point.
Build Frequency and Recency Into Your Logic
This is where Data 360 starts to feel genuinely different from Account Engagement. You can filter by:
Has been emailed X times in the last Y days is great for suppression. If someone has received 3 emails in the last 7 days, you probably don’t want to send them a fourth.
Has not engaged in X days is your re-engagement and deliverability workhorse. Use it to identify lapsed subscribers before they become a problem.
Subscribed to [Preference] will build audiences based on what contacts have explicitly opted into. Increasingly important for compliance and deliverability.
Always Preview Before You Publish
Segment Preview lets you check audience size, sample records, and whether your include/exclude logic is working as intended. A few minutes here can save hours of troubleshooting later.
Account for Processing Time
Data 360 isn’t always instantaneous. Initial data ingestion can take days, depending on volume. Segment calculations take time and Dynamic Lists connected to a Data 360 Segment can take up to three hours to populate the first time. If nothing shows up immediately, give it time before assuming something is broken.
Not All Account Engagement Activity Is Automatically Available
A common misconception: not every historical activity flows into Data 360 by default. What’s available depends on your connector configuration and the Filter By Date you set when connecting. Before building complex engagement-based segments, confirm what data is actually being ingested.
Data 360 Doesn’t Honor CRM Visibility Rules
This one surprises many Salesforce Admins. Users can segment records in Data 360 that they can’t see in the CRM. If access control matters for your org, address it before rolling out segmentation broadly. The most reliable controls are user permissions and Business Units.
From Segment to Activation
One of the biggest misconceptions I encounter: adopting Data 360 means abandoning Account Engagement. It doesn’t. One of my favorite use cases is building sophisticated audiences in Data 360 and activating them directly through Account Engagement via the Data 360 Connector. To connect a Data 360 Segment to Account Engagement:
Navigate to Account Engagement → Segmentation → Lists
Create a Dynamic List
Select Data Cloud Segment as the Dynamic List Type
Choose your published segment
The first sync takes up to three hours. After that, membership updates automatically whenever the segment refreshes. Once connected, the Dynamic List works anywhere in Account Engagement, including Engagement Studio, Automation Rules, List Emails, Completion Actions, and Reporting. Data 360 identifies the audience. Account Engagement engages it. That’s where the value compounds.
Three Segments to Build First
Not sure where to start? These three are worth building in almost every org.
Recently Engaged Contacts: people actively interacting with your brand. Use for webinar invitations, product launches, or newsletters.
Opened an email in the last 30 days, OR
Clicked an email in the last 30 days, OR
Visited your website in the last 30 days
Inactive Subscribers (90+ Days): Subscribers who’ve gone quiet. Use for re-engagement campaigns, deliverability cleanup, or preference center outreach. This audience frequently surfaces new pipeline.
Opted in, AND
No opens in 90 days, OR
No clicks in 90 days
Preference Center Subscribers: Contacts who’ve told you exactly what they want. Use for targeted newsletters, product announcements, or event promotions.
Opt in to Product Updates
Data 360 segmentation isn’t replacing the skills you’ve built in Account Engagement; it’s extending them. You’re still defining criteria, building audiences, and activating campaigns. The difference is you now have richer data and more ways to use it. Start simple. Build a Quick Filter segment, get comfortable with the interface, then move into the Visual Builder. Before long, you’ll stop asking how to recreate Dynamic Lists and start asking what was possible all along.
Think about your last pipeline review. How many times did you hear “oh yeah, I just haven’t updated that”? Meanwhile, marketers, RevOps, and sales leaders are left with limited pipeline visibility, wondering which campaigns are actually moving the needle, and how far off the team will be from the original forecast. This CRM data quality issue is the symptom of a much bigger problem. And it’s quietly costing you revenue. With how much the CRM can impact sales performance and the buyer’s experience, it’s critical that marketing, sales, and operations leadership understand the case for CRM optimization.
For most revenue teams, the CRM has become the thing sellers tolerate rather than the thing that helps them win. That’s not a people problem. It’s a design problem. Sellers are wrestling with clunky interfaces and manual processes, while hunting down intel in fragmented systems, and buyers feel the friction when they’re waiting to be followed up with, or have to repeat themselves on a call.
In Sercante l Trilliad’s playbook, The CRM Paradox: Why Your System is Killing Pipeline (And How to Fix It), it dives into the statistics and impacts on sellers, buyers, and the overall business when the CRM is not set up to be aligned with how sellers actually sell, and includes a proven framework for identifying the friction and how to start solving it. Get the highlights on the case for CRM optimization below and download the playbook to get all the details.
The case for CRM optimization: Your real cost of a “broken” CRM
CRMs weren’t originally built for sellers. They were built for reporting, tracking, and management oversight. So when we drop a seller into a system designed for someone else’s job, friction is the natural result.
The numbers tell the story:
48% of sales leaders say their CRM is more of a burden than a help (Forbes).
76% of salespeople say their CRM is too complex, time-consuming, and outdated (Medium).
Companies with low CRM adoption have reported closing 14% fewer deals (ARP Ideas).
Here’s the cycle every revenue leader knows but rarely names: friction leads to low CRM adoption. Low adoption leads to bad data. Bad data leads to obscured buyer views, bad forecasts—and lost revenue.
You’ve most likely felt the downstream cost of seller friction firsthand.
For marketers:
The leaky funnel: Marketing hands off a lead and loses sight of it. Without tracking, delayed follow-ups let hot leads go cold.
Painful ROI reporting: Low CRM data quality hides campaign impact, making it impossible to prove what actually drove the deal.
Limited personalization: Poor data tracking means limited customer insight, stopping teams from building the tailored experiences today’s buyers expect.
For sales leaders:
Blind forecasting: Low CRM adoption leads to inaccurate deal data, forcing leaders to guess on pipeline numbers, making forecasting challenging.
Limited coaching: Without the right deal context in the system of record, managers can’t spot where sellers are stuck or guide them effectively.
For RevOps:
Funnel visibility gaps: Siloed intelligence makes it impossible to accurately track funnel velocity and shifting conversion rates.
Legacy drag: Outdated setups force teams to build manual workarounds rather than scalable, automated workflows, making the data issue worse as well as efficiency.
For customer success:
Reactive support: A lack of proactive data insights means CSMs can’t identify or save at-risk accounts before they decide to churn.
Eroded kickoff trust: Passing accounts with limited sales context creates a clunky onboarding experience that kills lifetime value.
Where the CRM friction actually lives
Before you can fix it, you have to find it. In most organizations, the drag clusters in five predictable places.
Administrative burden. Sellers spend 60%+ of their time on manual data entry instead of selling (Salesforce). Every redundant field and extra click is selling time you’re paying for and not getting.
The seller’s CRM perception. If sellers don’t see the CRM as being useful and only have frustrating experiences when using it, their view of the CRM will only continue to lead to low CRM adoption.
Siloed intelligence. Critical deal context lives in Slack, email, and “shadow” spreadsheets—everywhere except the system of record. When the insight isn’t where the seller is working, it may as well not exist.
Legacy configuration. Many orgs are running a CRM built for 2018 reporting needs, not 2026 workflows. The business changed. The setup didn’t.
The marketing visibility gap. This is the one that quietly breaks cross-functional trust. Marketing hands off a lead and loses sight of it. Sales picks it up with no context. And no one can prove what actually drove the deal.
Ask yourself: Which of these five is costing my team the most right now? You probably already know the answer.
Your buyer feels every bit of it
Here’s the part that’s easy to miss from inside a pipeline dashboard: internal friction never stays internal. If your sellers are fighting their tools, they aren’t fighting for your buyers.
In Part III of Sercante l Trilliad’s series, Built to Buy, industry experts explore what a broken seller experience looks like from the buyer’s side of the table:
The delayed hand-off. A hot marketing lead goes cold because the assignment logic is broken or buried in a rep’s queue. The buyer raised their hand—and heard nothing back.
The interrogation session. A prospect repeats their pain points, budget, and scope on a call because the marketing context never synced to the record. To them, it feels like your left hand doesn’t know what your right hand is doing.
The missing follow-up. A customized proposal arrives days late because the seller is drowning in admin instead of engaging. By then, attention has moved on.
Your customer doesn’t think, “Am I in a marketing, sales, or success experience?” They just know they’re having an experience—and they want it to be easy. When your departments feel out of sync, buyers quietly move to a competitor who feels organized. A CRM that feels clunky to your seller feels clunky to your buyer.
Getting started on your CRM optimization
The key to getting started is acknowledging the impact that the state of the CRM has on your business for sellers, your buyers, and every department. Then it’s about spotting where the friction actually lives and mapping out the next steps for solving it.
If you’d like to fast-track getting started with your CRM optimization, reach out to the Sercante l Trilliad team for a Seller Experience Audit. Then, receive a clear blueprint for quick wins with a big impact and a roadmap for your ideal CRM seller experience.
Agentforce Marketing has quickly become a focal point for Salesforce Marketers. However, many Account Engagement customers are still trying to understand how this new platform operates and how it fits alongside their current tools. While Agentforce Marketing is designed to encompass all the features of Account Engagement, it introduces distinct features and a completely new lexicon. To bridge the gap, let’s dive into the Account Engagement that you know and love and how these features are translated, in name and functionality, to Agentforce Marketing.
What’s in a Name?
Let’s start with what initially trips users up – the product name. A common question I get from users is whether this new platform is called “Agentforce Marketing” or “Marketing Cloud Next” and the answer is both!
“Agentforce Marketing” appears to be the name that will stick around in the long term, but “Marketing Cloud Next” is used in most of the help articles and guides about this new platform. My guess is “Marketing Cloud Next” may be phased out as the tool grows and evolves. For the time being, both names are correct and refer to the latest Marketing Automation Tools from Salesforce.
There are also a few other names you may run into, including
Marketing Cloud Growth: This refers to the “Growth” edition of Agentforce Marketing.
Marketing Cloud Advanced: This refers to the “Advanced” edition of Agentforce Marketing.
Marketing Cloud on Core: This name was adopted by the community pre “Marketing Cloud Next”. It helped us designate a difference between OG “Marketing Cloud” (aka Marketing Cloud Engagement) and the new platform. “On Core” designates that this Marketing Platform, unlike Engagement or Account Engagement, is truly built on the core Salesforce platform.
Account Engagement +: This term is more Salesforce SKU-based and refers to Account Engagement users who are also using the Agentforce Marketing Platform alongside their Account Engagement org.
Engagement + / Marketing Cloud +: Similar to the above, this is Salesforce SKU-based and refers to Marketing Cloud Engagement customers using the Agentforce Marketing Platform alongside their Engagement org.
Features and Terminology
Prospects
In Account Engagement, a Prospect refers to an identified individual. Prospects can remain solely in Account Engagement or sync to Salesforce Leads and Contacts. The equivalent of a Prospect in Agentforce Marketing is a Unified Individual.
A Unified Individual is a consolidated record of metadata related to multiple Prospect, Lead, and Contact records for the same person. To put this in simpler terms, say you have multiple Lead and Contact records for the same individual within your CRM. Each of these records has different information about said customer and each record retains its own engagement and activity data. This disparate view of your customer gives your teams an incomplete and sometimes incorrect picture of your customer. Data 360 unites these disparate records using Identity Resolution rules and provides your team with a consolidated and complete view of each customer, the Unified Individual.
Now, a few releases ago, Salesforce also added a Prospect object to CRM. This means that marketers can create pre-lead or unqualified records directly in Salesforce to mimic the same functionality we have in Account Engagement. Currently the CRM Prospect record cannot sync with Account Engagement Prospects, but I expect functionality around the Prospect CRM object to grow and this could be something we see in a few releases.
Lists
In Account Engagement, there are two main List types:
Static Lists are built one time and only update with manual changes.
Dynamic Lists are rule-based and automatically update when a Prospect’s data changes.
The equivalent of a List in Agentforce Marketing is a Data 360 Segment.
Data 360 Segments consist of Unified Individuals that match filtering rule criteria that you set. Similar to Account Engagement Dynamic Lists, you can assign multiple rule criteria to a Segment with AND/OR logic between each rule. You can also match a field against multiple values using the “Is In” operator. The image below shows an example of a Segment using multiple rule criteria in Agentforce Marketing.
Whether a Data 360 Segment is static or dynamic depends on its publish schedule. You can set a Segment to “Do Not Schedule”, essentially making the list static, or configure a publish schedule to refresh your Segment as needed. The image below depicts the Edit Properties window in Agentforce Marketing where the publish schedule is defined.
Segments can be used in Agentforce Marketing or, with the Data 360 Connector, synced down to Account Engagement as a Dynamic List.
Now, if you prefer to curate your list rather than use Segment rules, you can either add Leads/Contacts to your Campaign and then create a Segment of Campaign Members:
Or, after the Summer ‘26 release, utilize the new List and Audience Flow features to circumvent the need for a Data 360 Segment.
Engagement Studio Programs enable you to automate multi-touch customer journeys using triggers, rules, and actions. These programs nurture Prospects through the sales funnel and ensure timely and relevant communications. The Agentforce Marketing equivalent to Engagement Studio Programs is Flow Builder.
Flow Builder is the automation engine of Agentforce Marketing, helping you build and execute complex, multi-channel marketing campaigns. Engagement Studio Programs and Flow Builder have a lot of overlap: They both have a top-down vertical layout, use elements as steps within the program/flow, and allow you to customize processes down different paths based on conditions.
In Account Engagement, Completion Actions trigger when a Prospect takes a specific action, such as filling out a form. The Agentforce Marketing equivalent of this is Automation Event-Triggered Flows.
Automation Event-Triggered Flows, sometimes referred to as Form-Triggered Flows or just Event-Triggered Flows, trigger when an individual takes an action. Automation Event-Triggered Flows allow you to trigger a single action or build an entire customer journey to nurture the individual after an event.
Agentforce Marketing includes several pre-configured events and Engagement Signals can be used to build any additional desired events.
Automation Rule
Account Engagement Automation Rules are repeatable, criteria-based rules that find matching Prospects and apply actions to them. The Agentforce Marketing equivalent to Automation Rules is Flow Builder, but the type of flow depends on your criteria.
If you are converting Lead records when they meet specific criteria, use a Data 360 Triggered Flow.
If you have multiple criteria and/or want more control over when the action fires, create a Segment and use a Segment-Triggered Flow.
Scoring and Grading
Account Engagement uses Scoring and Grading to help you identify, qualify, and prioritize Prospects in your org.
In Account Engagement, Scoring indicates how engaged a Prospect is by assigning numerical points to each activity the Prospect performs, its Agentforce Marketing equivalent is Engagement Scoring. Similar to Account Engagement Scoring, Agentforce Marketing’s Engagement Scoring assigns numerical points to activities. A default scoring system is provided, but you can fully customize the conditions and points.
In Account Engagement, Grading indicates how closely the prospect fits your ideal customer by evaluating pre-configured criteria and assigning a letter grade. The Agentforce Marketing equivalent of Grading is Fit Scoring. Similar to Engagement Scoring, Fit Scoring assigns numerical points to individuals if they match your fit criteria. Fit Scoring conditions and points can also be fully customized.
In Account Engagement, Prospects do not have a metric that reflects a combination of the Score and Grade. Score and Grade are kept as completely separate metrics, but can be used together to establish a qualification threshold. In Agentforce Marketing, individuals do have a combined rating called Overall Score. The Overall Score will always be between 0 and 100. The Overall Score is initially 50% Engagement and 50% Fit, but this can be customized as needed as well.
The image below shows how Agentforce Marketing’s score weights can be customized.
In Account Engagement, a prospect’s mailability or mailable status refers to whether or not they can receive marketing emails. If an Account Engagement Prospect has a hard bounce, five soft bounces, has unsubscribed themselves, or has been manually opted out, they are considered unmailable.
Agentforce Marketing uses Consent for a more comprehensive approach to mailability. Within Agentforce Marketing, individuals set their subscription preferences to indicate the channel they want to receive communication within (Email, SMS, WhatsApp) and the subscription (newsletter, events, product updates etc.). For example, an individual may subscribe to receive event updates via SMS and receive your newsletter via email. Agentforce Marketing will create a consent record within Data 360 for each choice.
In Account Engagement, A/B Testing allows you to optimize your email content by sending two versions of an email to a small subset of your recipient list. The engagement data of these two email variations is used to determine a winning version that is then sent to the remaining subset of your recipient list. Agentforce Marketing’s equivalent is Path Experiment, however Path Experiment allows you to do much more than send just two variations of a single email.
Path Experiment, which is available for the Advanced Edition of Agentforce Marketing, allows you to experiment with up to 10 different versions of a customer journey to determine the most effective path. This means you can test content variations (i.e. which subject line gets more opens?), channel variations (i.e. do you get more opens with email or sms?), and even cadence variations (do we get better results sending more or less emails?). Similar to A/B Testing, Path Experiment allows you to test with a subset of your audience before sending your remaining audience members down the winning path.
In Account Engagement, Sender Domains define where you can send emails from. For example, if my Sender is [email protected] then Salesforce.com is my Sender Domain. The Agentforce Marketing equivalent is Authenticated Domains. For both sender and authenticated domains you will need to work with your IT team to create DNS records. These records help improve the deliverability of your emails by defining you as a legitimate sender.
In Account Engagement, Dynamic Content enables you to create field-based variations of content. If the Prospect’s field matches the designated field value, then they will see that content variation on your website or within your marketing assets. Agentforce Marketing also has Dynamic Content, but it has more advanced functionality.
Agentforce Marketing’s Dynamic Content functionality allows you to personalize your email based on fields or any data source connected to your individual. For example, you can build the variations based off of Account data or data from an event the recipient recently attended. You can also personalize multiple sections of your marketing assets, or personalization points, within one Dynamic Content variation. This allows you to dynamically update nearly every aspect of an email more efficiently.
Agentforce Marketing Dynamic Content relies on:
Personalization Point: An element of content that’s eligible for a personalization decision. For example, an email’s subject line and preheader or an image component within the email are “points” that you can personalize.
Personalization Decision: Criteria that determines who’s eligible to receive a personalization response.
Targeting Rule: Conditions for showing a specific variation.
In Account Engagement, Page Actions trigger additional actions after a Prospect views a specific page of your website. In Agentforce Marketing, you can accomplish the same goal using website tracking and the Website Engagement Data Model Object (DMO).
The Website Engagement DMO records website page views and clicks, and engagement signals can be created to zero in on specific page view activities. For example, you can create an Engagement Signal that records when a visitor lands on your Pricing page, a good indicator that they may be interested in making a purchase. These Engagement Signals can then be used to trigger Automation Event-Triggered Flows so you can further automate next steps.
Account Engagement uses both Salesforce and Account Engagement Campaigns. Account Engagement Campaigns are considered thematic touchpoints (similar to a source in other systems), while Salesforce campaigns are a Salesforce CRM object used to plan, manage, and track marketing initiatives. Salesforce and Account Engagement Campaigns are united with the Connected Campaigns feature.
Agentforce Marketing utilizes the Salesforce CRM Campaigns object for both purposes. Campaigns are not only a record that helps organize the audience, assets, and metrics for a specific marketing effort, but they also indicate a touchpoint for your individual.
Campaigns serve as a centralized hub for a marketing initiative within Agentforce Marketing. Within a Campaign you will find all the relevant information for your Campaign including your Campaign Brief, Campaign Members, associated flows, and reports.
The user interface shown above is unique to viewing Campaigns within the Marketing app. Don’t let the user interface confuse you though, this is the default Salesforce Campaign object that is used by other processes and applications within Salesforce.
Campaign Influence
In Account Engagement, Campaign Influence helps you tie marketing efforts to your opportunities to see which campaigns are the most influential and successful. Account Engagement Campaign Influence can be a little hands-on, requiring you to add all Leads/Contacts that engage with your Campaign as Campaign Members. Agentforce Marketing uses Opportunity Influence to automate and streamline influence. Opportunity Influence uses engagement data to automatically tie Opportunity revenue back to a specific Campaign without the need for Campaign Membership.
In Account Engagement, AI Assistant is generative AI that assists in drafting forms and landing pages as well as creating email subject lines, headers, and body copy. Agentforce Marketing uses Agentforce and Generative AI to assist with generating copy and so much more. Agentforce Marketing not only helps you generate forms, landing pages, and email content, but can also streamline the entire campaign creation process with the Campaign Creation and Content Builder agents.
Learn more about Agentforce Marketing’s AI features in the AI in Marketing Cloud Next Trailhead Module.The above gives you an overview of how terminology and features translate between Account Engagement and Agentforce Marketing. If you are ready to take the next step in your Agentforce Marketing journey, check out our A Strategic Path to Navigating Marketing Cloud Convergence blog post or contact us!
