Salesforce Solution Engineering teams first pioneered the concept by releasing accelerators for nonprofits, education providers, and the public sector. These accelerators were based on real-world customer needs, distilled into solution templates that reflected best practices.
Although accelerators are not official Salesforce products, they are often tested and hardened in the same way AppExchange solutions are. Many of them are open-source, giving both partners and customers the freedom to adapt them further. The result is a toolset that increases adoption, reduces development cycles, and ultimately shortens time to value.
In practical terms, an accelerator can be as simple as a guest checkout add-on for Commerce Cloud or as complex as a pre-configured CPQ package with price rules and product bundles ready to deploy. For organizations under pressure to launch quickly, accelerators are often the difference between waiting months and going live in weeks.
A Salesforce accelerator is more than just a template. It is a tested framework that embeds industry knowledge into Salesforce products.
Where a typical customization project starts from scratch, an accelerator begins at 70–80% completion. For example:
The value of accelerators lies in three things:
Starter stores, like FortéNext’s B2B Starter Store, are essentially accelerators for digital commerce. They include all the foundational features needed to begin selling online such as product catalog, pricing, cart, checkout, and order history without requiring a ground-up build.
Instead of spending 6–12 months on a custom Commerce Cloud project, businesses can launch in as little as four weeks. From there, they can iterate and extend, adding features such as product comparisons, wishlists, AI recommendations, or subscription billing.
In this sense, a starter store functions the same way as any accelerator: it packages the essentials, solves for the most common needs, and provides a launchpad for future growth.
By 2024, Salesforce had accumulated two decades of customer implementation data across industries. One insight was clear: customers were solving the same problems over and over.
The accelerator program was created to codify those lessons and make them reusable. By packaging repeatable solutions, Salesforce aimed to help customers achieve value faster, reduce failed implementations, and align more closely with industry best practices.
The timing was also strategic. Post-pandemic, organizations were under more pressure than ever to deliver digital projects quickly, with fewer resources. The accelerator program gave them a pragmatic way to do more with less.
Accelerators provide an alternative to:
For many businesses, accelerators strike a balance: faster and cheaper than full custom work, but more flexible and integrated than third-party apps.
Both B2B and D2C companies are under pressure to meet rising customer expectations while keeping implementation costs in check. The reality is that many face the same obstacles:
Accelerators exist precisely to remove these roadblocks. They give companies the ability to bypass lengthy build cycles and gain immediate access to best-practice solutions.
Accelerators are built to complement the entire Salesforce ecosystem. Some focus on core CRM capabilities, while others target commerce or marketing automation. Common examples include:
By covering this breadth of Salesforce products, accelerators allow organizations to achieve value across the full customer lifecycle from demand generation to service and retention.
FortéNext has spent over 20 years implementing Salesforce across manufacturing, healthcare, distribution, retail, and fintech. In that time, one truth became obvious: the same challenges kept resurfacing.
Businesses struggled to launch storefronts fast enough. Sales teams spent too much time on manual pipeline tasks. Service teams lacked automation. Marketers couldn’t make the most of Pardot without months of setup.
Rather than solving these issues from scratch on every project, FortéNext built a suite of accelerators to address them. These accelerators are not theory - they are battle-tested, project-proven solutions that reduce risk, shorten timelines, and help clients achieve ROI faster.
If any of these sound familiar, FortéNext already has an accelerator designed for you:
At FortéNext, we often get asked: what’s the difference between an accelerator and a managed package?
Think of accelerators as blueprints and packages as ready-made components.
After delivering over 60 Salesforce projects, FortéNext built both. Accelerators provide quick-start guidance, while packages deliver turnkey functionality. Together, they form the backbone of FortéNext’s approach to reducing implementation risk and accelerating time to value.
In short:
At FortéNext, both are valuable. For example, the Guest Checkout Accelerator is a configuration-based solution that can be rapidly tailored to a storefront, while the Shopify Connector is a managed package that provides a permanent, supported bridge between Shopify and Salesforce OMS.
Understanding the difference helps organizations plan effectively: accelerators provide speed and flexibility during implementation, while managed packages add stability and vendor-supported functionality.
FortéNext’s curated collection of accelerators built from years of delivering Salesforce projects across manufacturing, healthcare, distribution, retail, and fintech. Each accelerator targets a common business challenge and is designed to deliver rapid TTV while leaving room for customization.
Accelerators don’t exist in a vacuum. They are instrumental parts of broader Salesforce programs such as:
In this way, accelerators are not just add-ons - they are the connective tissue between Salesforce products and the services that bring them to life.
They represent the accumulated knowledge of hundreds of implementations, condensed into reusable frameworks and solution kits that solve the most common challenges businesses face.
For B2B and D2C organizations, accelerators are now foundational to how Salesforce projects are delivered. They speed up Commerce Cloud implementations, enhance the impact of staff augmentation, provide repeatable frameworks for managed services, and strengthen the value delivered through consulting engagements.
As businesses continue to demand faster time to market, reduced risk, and greater ROI, accelerators are becoming not just complementary tools, but essential building blocks of modern Salesforce strategy.
