Salesforce Certified Marketing Cloud Next Consultant Exam Guide

About the Salesforce Certified Marketing Cloud Next Consultant Exam
Audience Description: Salesforce Certified Marketing Cloud Next Consultant
Purpose of This Exam Guide
About the Exam
Exam Outline
Recommended Training and Resources
Salesforce Certification Candidate Code of Conduct
Maintaining Your Salesforce Certification

About the Salesforce Certified Marketing Cloud Next Consultant Exam

The Salesforce Certified Marketing Cloud Next Consultant exam is designed for practitioners who work hands-on with Marketing Cloud Next in a consulting or implementation capacity. It assesses the ability to design data-first marketing solutions built on the Salesforce platform and Data 360, orchestrate AI-powered multi-channel campaigns using Agentforce and Flow, and advise customers on the appropriate Marketing Cloud Next architecture for their business needs.

This certification validates the skills and knowledge required to implement, configure, and optimize Marketing Cloud Next for customers across small business and enterprise environments.

Audience Description: Salesforce Certified Marketing Cloud Next Consultant

The Salesforce Certified Marketing Cloud Next Consultant works hands-on with Marketing Cloud Next in a consulting or implementation capacity. The Marketing Cloud Next Consultant has demonstrated the knowledge, skills, and experience to implement, configure, and optimize Marketing Cloud Next solutions. Marketing Cloud Next Consultants should have at least 6 to 12 months of hands-on experience implementing or administering Marketing Cloud Next in a consulting or customer-facing capacity.

The Salesforce Certified Marketing Cloud Next Consultant candidate has the experience, skills, knowledge, and ability to:

Guide discovery sessions to design adoption strategies.
Advise customers on Marketing Cloud Next governance.
Implement data isolation strategies leveraging the 1:1 relationship between Business Units and Data Spaces in various business scenarios.
Establish secure self-service domain delivery (DKIM-SPF) and manage automated dedicated IP scaling guardrails.
Apply Data 360 concepts, including Data Model Objects (DMOs), Identity Resolution, and segmentation.
Troubleshoot marketing data pipelines by validating data hydration across Data Model Objects (DMOs).
Apply consent management concepts and compliance requirements in the context of customer engagement.
Personalize cross-channel assets utilizing Handlebars or other personalization techniques.
Design and configure Salesforce Flow-based campaign orchestration and multi-channel messaging.
Use Agentforce for marketing use cases, including campaign creation and conversational messaging.
Deploy out-of-the-box Agentforce Marketing Agents to safely automate conversational campaign creation and audience generation.
Enable and extend native Salesforce reporting and analytics.

Candidates for this exam are NOT expected to have deep expertise in the following areas:

Developing custom Large Language Models (LLMs) or managing external AI transformer architectures
Writing raw programmatic AMPscript or heavy SQL scripts
Managing complex MuleSoft API integrations or writing extensive Apex code unless establishing basic data providers for high-throughput transactional sending
Executing raw database administrative tasks inside external data lakes, outside of standard Zero Copy or Data Share connections with Salesforce Data 360

Purpose of This Exam Guide

This exam guide is designed to help you prepare for the Salesforce Certified Marketing Cloud Next Consultant Exam. This guide provides information about the target audience, the recommended training and documentation, and a complete list of exam objectives. Salesforce highly recommends a combination of on-the-job experience and self-study to maximize your chances of passing the exam.

About the Exam

Here are details about the Salesforce Certified Marketing Cloud Next Consultant Exam.

Content: 60 multiple-choice questions and up to five unscored questions
Time allotted to complete the exam: 105 minutes
Passing score: 72%
Version: Exam questions align to the Summer '26 release.
Registration fee: USD 200, JPY 30,000, plus applicable taxes as required per local law
Retake fee: USD 100, JPY 15,000, plus applicable taxes as required per local law
Delivery options: Proctored exam delivered onsite at a testing center or in an online environment; find more information on scheduling an exam here.
References: No hard-copy or online materials may be referenced during the exam.
Prerequisite: None

This exam may contain up to five additional unscored questions to gather performance data. Unscored questions are randomly integrated and have no impact on your final exam result.

Exam Outline

The Salesforce Certified Marketing Cloud Next Consultant Exam measures a candidate’s knowledge and skills related to the following objectives.

Section 1: Platform Setup & Governance 13%

Explain the environment setup for Marketing Cloud Next including Core Org Edition requirements, Data 360 provisioning, Marketing Data Kit installation, and permission sets.
Given a scenario, identify when Business Units are required and configure an appropriate content and user governance model using roles and Enhanced CMS Workspaces.
Given a scenario, configure self-service domain authentication or domain authorization for branded, authenticated email delivery.

Section 2: Consent 13%

Explain consent management concepts and the role of consent in customer engagement and compliance.
Identify the purpose and relationships of the platform consent objects used to capture and manage consent preferences.
Given a business requirement, determine the appropriate method for creating, managing, and updating consent records.
Given a scenario, configure a consent banner on marketing landing pages and external pages to support consent collection.

Section 3: Data Modeling, Identity Resolution & Segmentation 25%

Describe data object concepts in Data 360 and how they are used to connect, harmonize, unify, and activate customer data for audience segmentation and content personalization.
Given a business requirement, identify how CRM data, including objects, records, and Actionable Lists, can be ingested and used for audience segmentation, activation, and content personalization.
Given a business requirement, configure Identity Resolution to link multiple data sources into a unified profile
Demonstrate knowledge of Data 360 consumption-based entitlements and evaluate how marketing automation design decisions impact platform consumption and usage.

Section 4: Campaign Design, Flow Orchestration & Content 30%

Given a scenario, identify personalization methods using Handlebars, AMPscript, merge fields, repeaters, and content variations to personalize channel content with customer data.
Given a scenario, determine the appropriate flow type, trigger conditions, and configuration settings required to achieve the desired marketing or messaging outcome.
Given a scenario, determine the appropriate data source to add personalized customer data to messaging content.
Given a scenario, identify the appropriate flow elements, logic, and configuration required to automate business processes and messaging activities.
Given a scenario, configure activation templates to select the appropriate contact point value.
Given a business requirement, identify the components and configuration needed to build a landing page.

Section 5: Agentforce & AI Innovation 11%

Given a scenario, automate campaign creation, audience segmentation, and content generation using marketing agents.
Given a scenario, configure conversational messaging to support customer engagement, response handling, and ongoing interactions across messaging channels.
Given a scenario, determine which predictive AI feature to use.

Section 6: Analytics & Performance Insights 8%

Given a scenario, identify a pre-built dashboard that best addresses the reporting and analytics requirements.
Given a scenario, describe how to surface marketing data and insights across the Salesforce platform.

Recommended Training and Resources

As preparation for this exam, we recommend a combination of hands-on experience, training course completion, Trailhead Trails, and self-study in the areas listed in the Exam Outline section of this exam guide.

The self-study materials recommended for this exam include:

Trail: TBD - coming soon

To continue developing your Salesforce skill set, visit Trailhead Academy to enroll in expert-led courses.

The courses recommended for this exam include:

The certifications recommended (not required) for this exam include:

Salesforce Certified Platform Administrator
Salesforce Certified Data 360 Consultant
Salesforce Certified Agentforce Specialist
Salesforce Certified Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Specialist

To review online documentation, tip sheets, and user guides, search for the topics listed in the Exam Outline section of this guide on Salesforce Help and study the information related to those topics.

Salesforce Certification Candidate Code of Conduct

At Salesforce, Trust is our #1 value. Protecting the security of Salesforce Certifications is up to all of us. As a participant in the Salesforce Certification Program, you’re required to review and accept the terms of the Salesforce Certification Program Agreement and Code of Conduct at the beginning of each exam.

Maintaining Your Salesforce Certification

One of the benefits of holding a Salesforce Certification is always being up to date on new product releases. You'll be required to complete the Salesforce Certified Marketing Cloud Next Consultant certification maintenance badge on Trailhead once a year.

Don’t let your hard-earned certification expire! If you don't complete all maintenance requirements by the due date, your certification will expire.

Bookmark these useful resources for maintaining your certifications.

Salesforce Certified Marketing Cloud Next Consultant Exam Guide

Contents