Expert view on Marketing Cloud Next, the new marketing engine in Salesforce
Discover how Marketing Cloud Next unifies data, enables real-time marketing and helps organisations move faster, scale smarter and drive better performance.
Scattered data, complex integrations, endless manual work and data that’s not ready for AI. These are often treated as technical challenges. In reality, they are creating daily business problems, especially when it comes to performance and innovation. Think about the slowing down of go-to-market speed and limited marketing performance due to misaligned data sources and lacking integrations. This will make it harder for teams to act on insights. Instead of enabling growth, technology becomes a bottleneck that frustrates teams and holds back innovation. To overcome this, organisations require a more streamlined way to connect with customers.
Good news! The Salesforce marketing landscape is undergoing a significant transition towards more unified ecosystems. Marketing Cloud Next (MCN) represents this shift: moving away from fragmented tools and disconnected data towards a single, integrated platform where marketing, sales and service operate on the same real-time foundation. In this article, we examine how implementing Marketing Cloud Next can improve your business’ performance, speed and scalability based on the experience Gen25 has as a Salesforce Summit partner
Bridging marketing into the Salesforce core platform
While Salesforce’s shift in their marketing approach is architectural in nature, its impact is directly felt in how organisations operate. In the current setup, Marketing Cloud Engagement (MCE) and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE, also known as Pardot in a previous life) are not fully natively integrated with the Salesforce core platform. Because they operate on separate databases, organisations rely on connectors to bring data together. This results in data being spread across systems, creating possible silos between teams and capabilities. These silos make it harder to work efficiently. Data needs to be synchronised between systems, which adds complexity and makes processes more dependent on integrations.
Marketing Cloud Next changes this by bringing marketing onto the Salesforce core platform. With Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced, built on the Data 360 data layer, marketing data and CRM data are no longer separated. Instead of synchronising data between systems, they exist within the same environment. This removes the need for continuous data syncing and reduces the reliance on connectors, allowing teams to work from one shared foundation across marketing, sales and service.
The importance of the core platform and Data 360
To enable more connected and effective customer engagement, access to reliable and unified data is essential. Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud) is a customer data platform that brings together data from multiple sources such as CRM, web, mobile, ecommerce and advertising platforms into a single customer profile. This unified view allows sales, service and marketing teams to work with the same information, making it easier to create personalised experiences and trigger data-driven actions.
With Marketing Cloud Next built directly on the Salesforce core platform, this data is no longer separated from the systems teams use every day. Instead, marketing operates on top of the same data foundation as sales and service. Because of this, marketers can respond to real-time events, such as a customer interaction or website activity and trigger journeys based on the most up-to-date information. This ensures that every interaction is relevant and based on the most current customer information.
From delayed automation to real-time action
Automation plays a key role in how quickly and effectively marketing teams can respond to customer behaviour. In current setups, automation in MCAE and MCE relies on separate, rule-based engines and scheduled data transfers. This means there can be delays between a customer action and the system response, making it harder to act in the moment.
With Marketing Cloud Next, automation is built on the Salesforce core platform and uses Flow Builder to trigger actions directly from the Data 360 layer. This allows organisations to move from scheduled, delayed processes to real-time, event-driven automation. Instead of waiting for data to be processed, teams can respond immediately to customer interactions. For organisations already using Salesforce Flow, this also means they can build on existing workflows and capabilities. Marketing automation becomes part of the same environment, making it easier to manage, reuse and scale processes across the business.
Unifying B2B and B2C marketing in one system
Before Marketing Cloud Next, B2B and B2C marketing were managed in separate systems, each designed for different use cases: MCAE focuses on B2B marketing, Marketing Cloud Engagement, on B2C. While both platforms are powerful in their own domain, this separation also introduces complexity. Data, processes and teams are split across systems, making it harder to work efficiently and maintain a consistent approach. In addition, each platform comes with its own limitations. MCAE is limited by its campaign-based and batch-driven logic, while Marketing Cloud Engagement can be more complex for non-technical users when it comes to segmentation and data management.
Marketing Cloud Next brings these worlds together. By leveraging the Data 360 architecture, B2B and B2C data can be accessed within the same environment. Instead of operating in separate systems, marketing, sales and service teams can work from a shared foundation. This reduces the need for integrations within the marketing stack and across the wider platform, helping to lower the overall cost of ownership. It also enables larger or multifunctional teams to collaborate more easily within one platform, rather than across multiple tools.
How Agentforce reduces manual work
Want to extend your Marketing Cloud Next platform even further? Agentforce offers multiple benefits and is known as Salesforce’s solution for building and managing autonomous agents that handle tasks across the platform. By using data from Data 360, these agents can analyse information, make decisions and execute actions independently. This allows marketers to automate a wide range of tasks that would otherwise require manual effort. With Agentforce seamlessly integrated in your Marketing Cloud Next platform, campaign creation can be automated end-to-end. Based on prompts, the platform can generate campaign briefs, define audiences, build flows and create email or SMS content. Campaigns can also be monitored and adjusted continuously based on performance and customer engagement.
In addition, agents can respond to customer inquiries directly through channels like email and SMS, enabling more interactive, two-way communication. The impact of this goes beyond efficiency. By reducing the need for manual execution, Agentforce changes the role of the marketer. Instead of focusing on building and managing campaigns step by step, marketers can shift their attention to strategy, optimisation and driving business growth.
Conclusion
To conclude, if you’re looking for a more integrated and less complex marketing technology stack: Marketing Cloud Next is the way to go. Due to the possibility to combine multiple solutions in one single core platform, data silos and integration friction won’t be your organisation’s problem anymore! Because of this, your company will be able to:
- Go to market faster;
- Improve marketing performance;
- And scale and innovate more efficiently.
However, successfully realising this shift requires more than implementing new technology. It requires translating platform capabilities into practical solutions that support your business goals. This is exactly where Gen25 can support you. By combining business insight, technology expertise and hands-on execution, Gen25 can help your organisation turn this transformation into measurable impact. With a track record of over 400 successfully delivered projects, our business and technology consultants work side-by-side with you to unlock this digital transformation.
Thus, if you want to save time and money and are interested in knowing more about how Gen25 can support you as a challenge-driven business partner in transforming your marketing stack with Marketing Cloud Next, reach out to us now!
