Marketing Cloud Next: Why It Might Be Salesforce’s Biggest Leap Yet
Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud Next is far more than just the next chapter in its evolution—it represents a complete rewrite of the entire marketing playbook. This is not merely a technological upgrade or incremental improvement; it is a transformative shift that has the potential to redefine how businesses approach marketing, engagement, and customer experience in the Salesforce ecosystem. Beyond the innovative tools and enhanced functionalities, Marketing Cloud Next carries profound implications for the Salesforce partner network, fundamentally reshaping the way partners collaborate, deliver services, and create value for clients.
By streamlining complex workflows, enabling more intelligent automation, and offering deeper insights into customer behavior, this release empowers marketers to craft highly personalized, data-driven campaigns at scale. At the same time, it challenges partners to rethink traditional engagement models, explore new opportunities for consulting and implementation, and strengthen their strategic role in guiding businesses through this marketing evolution.
In essence, Marketing Cloud Next is set to influence not only how businesses operate and engage their audiences within the platform but also how the broader Salesforce ecosystem—including partners, consultants, and developers—interacts, innovates, and thrives in this new era of marketing excellence.
It Has Always Been (Overly) Complex
Let’s face a reality: Salesforce has long provided incredibly powerful marketing tools, but they’ve also been notoriously complex. Platforms like Pardot and ExactTarget were brilliant solutions in their own right, yet because they originated as acquisitions, their integration was often uneven and felt more like a patchwork than a seamless system.
Using these tools effectively required specialists for each platform, connectors to integrate with Salesforce Core, and often technical architects just to get basic segmentation or automation up and running. On top of that, organizations frequently faced a tough choice: work with a creative agency that could struggle with the technical intricacies, or a technical partner who didn’t fully understand brand strategy and creative storytelling.
Yes, these solutions worked—but they were messy, resource-intensive, and far from scalable. For many businesses, achieving a truly unified, efficient, and strategic marketing operation was a constant challenge.
Marketing Cloud Next: A Platform That Finally Makes Sense
Salesforce is now taking a bold step: rebuilding its marketing stack from the ground up—not just rebranding, but truly reimagining it. Marketing Cloud Next is no longer a standalone product; it has become a native layer built directly on Salesforce Core, offering seamless integration and a unified experience.
The platform leverages the power of Data Cloud for intelligent insights and Agentforce for AI-driven acceleration, while incorporating low-code and no-code tools designed specifically for marketers. This means less reliance on technical skills and more focus on strategy and creativity.
Gone are the days of writing complex SQL for segmentation, scripting personalization logic, or constantly switching between different clouds. With Marketing Cloud Next, segments, campaigns, and automations are all embedded into the core platform, and even AI-powered prompts can guide the creation process.
This is the kind of marketing platform marketers have been waiting for—not simply because it’s new and flashy, but because it finally works the way marketing should: intuitive, integrated, and intelligent.
The Real Shift: From Plumbing to Performance
For far too long, marketers have spent the majority of their time building pipelines, connecting disparate systems, writing complex scripts, and managing tedious integrations. That’s not marketing—it’s essentially plumbing.
Marketing Cloud Next is set to change that paradigm. It empowers marketers to focus on what truly matters: strategy, creativity, experimentation, and campaign optimization. Instead of constantly relying on IT to implement their ideas, marketers now have the tools to take action directly, turning insights into results faster than ever before.
That said, this doesn’t mean technical experts are any less important. On the contrary, their roles are evolving. They will move from being gatekeepers of technology to strategic enablers, helping to architect scalable solutions, optimize AI-driven workflows, and support marketers in unleashing the full potential of the platform.
Data Cloud: Powerful, But Not Plug-and-Play
Take Data Cloud as an example. It’s undeniably powerful, yet it’s far from simple. Operating on a pay-as-you-go model—common in cloud computing but relatively new in the MarTech world—it adds a whole new layer of complexity that agencies and partners must fully understand to harness effectively.
We can think of its challenges in terms of the “Three Cs”:
Consistency: From data ingestion to activation, proper data modeling is critical. Unifying data incorrectly can create chaos rather than clarity.
Connectivity: Real-time, batch, API, zero-copy—each method carries unique implications. Success isn’t just about how you connect systems; it’s about understanding the purpose and impact of each connection.
Cost: Every interaction comes with a price. Refreshing massive datasets daily for something as routine as a monthly newsletter? That’s money wasted.
In this environment, agencies and partners need to be both technically adept and financially savvy. It’s no longer just about building data architectures—it’s about advising on solutions that are both cost-efficient and high-performing. This represents a significant shift in how MarTech consulting and execution operate.
Rethinking the Agency Model
The reality is clear: traditional agency models are no longer sufficient.
When creative agencies are expected to understand technical architecture and cost modeling, and technical partners are asked to contribute to strategy and design, the lines between roles blur. Separating these functions into silos no longer makes sense.
The future belongs to multi-disciplinary teams—where strategy, technology, design, and AI all work seamlessly together. This integrated approach is how we deliver real value to clients, maintain relevance, and drive meaningful results. In truth, this is how the model should have been from the start.
At Brinkview, we didn’t wait for the market to catch up. We proactively merged our Core and Marketing teams months ago, introducing new ways of working, investing in upskilling, and encouraging our people to move beyond their comfort zones. This is how we prepare for the future—by building teams that are versatile, forward-thinking, and fully equipped to navigate the evolving marketing landscape.
Final Thoughts: Looking Ahead
Marketing Cloud Next is more than just a product update—it’s a wake-up call for the entire Salesforce ecosystem. It challenges us to rethink how we work, how we structure our teams, and how we deliver meaningful impact for our clients.
It’s not without its imperfections, and it’s still evolving. Yet, it stands out as one of the most strategic moves Salesforce has made in years.
At Brinkview, we see this as an opportunity to embrace not just the tools, but the mindset behind them. By doing so, we can shift from plumbing to performance, break down silos to achieve true synergy, and transform complexity into clarity. This is the future of marketing operations—and the future we’re building toward.