How to Implement Salesforce and Data Cloud for Unified Business Insights and Chart Your Path to Deploying AI

AI is the hot, if not the hottest topic on peoples mind now in the technology space - businesses, users, developers, and implementers alike. It's a race to the future to unleash LLM models and the like to reap business value at scale. However, it's not necessarily an easy thing to "turn on." It takes some thought and a series of steps to get to this end goal.

For growing businesses using multiple applications, gaining a unified view of data and measuring critical KPIs can seem like a daunting challenge. Salesforce, combined with Data Cloud, offers a powerful solution to bring all of this data together, providing clear insights into your marketing, sales, and service efforts. But to get there, you need to take a few important steps. Here’s a simple roadmap to help you implement Salesforce and Data Cloud to transform how you manage and measure your business.

1. Assess Your Current Systems and KPIs

The first step is understanding what systems your business is currently using and which KPIs matter most to you. These might include:

- Customer relationship data from Salesforce CRM

- Marketing data from social media platforms, email marketing tools, Google Analytics, and the like

- Sales data from e-commerce platforms and/or third-party tools

- Customer service interactions from help desk software

Make a list of the most critical KPIs you want to track, like Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Sales Conversion Rate, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and others. This will help guide the next steps in the process.

Short on ideas for KPIs? Check out Unlocking Business Success: How Salesforce and Data Cloud Drive Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

2. Set Clear Goals for Integration

Next, outline what you want to achieve by integrating Salesforce and Data Cloud with your existing systems. Some common goals for businesses include:

- Unifying customer data from multiple sources for a single, 360-degree view of customers

- Tracking sales rep performance across multiple channels or regions

- Gaining insights into product performance and customer preferences to improve marketing strategies

- Mastering excellence in customer satisfaction (CSAT, NPS, and similar) in service delivery, issue management, and supply chain management

By setting clear goals, you can ensure your integration efforts stay focused on delivering real business value.

3. Work with an Expert Data Architect & Engineer

To integrate Salesforce with Data Cloud effectively, you’ll need the expertise of a skilled data architect and engineer. These professionals will help:

- Design a scalable data model that can grow with your business

- Identify how data from external systems (like marketing or customer service tools) can be brought into Salesforce

- Set up the necessary data pipelines, ensuring that data flows seamlessly between systems and remains up to date

This step is critical, as the success of your integration relies heavily on how well the data is structured and managed. I can't underscore or emphasize this point enough - data architecture in and across systems will make or break your success, by orders of magnitude.

4. Clean and Standardize Your Data

Before connecting all your systems, you need to ensure your data is clean and consistent. Data Cloud allows you to bring together data from multiple sources, but if the data is inconsistent (e.g., different formats for dates or inconsistent naming conventions), it can lead to confusion and inaccurate reporting. Data Cloud can handle transformation and help, but extreme cases may be unsolvable. Invest time in cleaning and standardizing your data so that it can be easily understood and analyzed. While not very sexy and often a point of contention in implementations, this step is necessary to hit the goal of harmonization, which is fundamental to enabling all that follows.

5. Integrate Your Disparate Systems with Data Cloud

Now it’s time to connect your various applications to Salesforce and Data Cloud. This will involve setting up integrations for:

- Marketing tools like HubSpot, MailChimp, or social media platforms

- E-commerce platforms or financial tools for sales, order, and/or related transactional data

- Customer service software to track interactions and support requests (like Salesforce Service Cloud)

By connecting these systems, you create a unified view of all your data. This allows you to track KPIs from every department in one place, providing more accurate and actionable insights.

6. Create Dashboards for Monitoring KPIs

With your data integrated, the next step is to build dashboards in Salesforce, or better, in Tableau. These dashboards should be tailored to your specific business goals and KPIs. For example, you could create dashboards that:

- Track marketing performance by measuring Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and conversion rates

- Monitor sales performance by tracking lead conversion rates and sales rep activity

- Measure customer satisfaction by looking at resolution cycle times and Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT)

Dashboards help your teams quickly access the data they need, improving decision-making and performance across the board. They can serve front line operations to visualize the activity of the day (or any time frame), management to monitor and guide performance objectively, based on real, live data, and executives to assess and re-direct strategic priorities for the company.

7. Automate Reporting and Analysis

Once your dashboards are set up, you can automate reports to track key metrics on a regular basis. This means your teams won’t have to manually pull data every time they need to check performance. Automated reports ensure that KPIs are always up to date, making it easier to spot trends, opportunities, or issues early on.

8. Iterate and Improve Over Time

The final step is to continuously monitor your KPIs and make improvements over time. With Salesforce and Data Cloud, you can easily adapt your reporting and data models as your business grows or new challenges emerge. By regularly reviewing your data and processes, you can identify areas where automation or refinement can help boost performance and deliver even greater value to your business.

Final Thoughts

For businesses using multiple disparate applications, gaining a unified view of data and effectively tracking KPIs can be transformative. By implementing Salesforce and Data Cloud, and working with expert data architects, you can bring your data together, enabling smarter decision-making, better customer insights, and ultimately, improved business performance. With the right steps, you’ll be well on your way to unlocking the full potential of your data and driving measurable business success.

Bonus: Leverage AI for Smarter Insights and Process Automation

Once your data is unified in Salesforce and Data Cloud, a powerful next step is to harness the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to further optimize business processes. Salesforce's AI tools, such as Einstein AI, can analyze your data and provide predictive insights and recommendations. Here’s how AI can support monitoring and improving your business processes:

- Predict Customer Behavior: AI can analyze historical data to predict future customer actions, such as purchasing trends, potential churn, or the likelihood of a lead converting into a sale. This helps your marketing and sales teams focus on the right customers at the right time.

- Automate Routine Processes: AI can automate repetitive tasks, such as data entry, lead scoring, and follow-up actions. This increases efficiency and frees up your teams to focus on more strategic activities.

- Monitor Performance in Real-Time: AI can monitor KPIs continuously and alert you to any anomalies or potential issues, such as a sudden drop in customer satisfaction or an unusually long sales cycle. This real-time analysis allows businesses to act quickly and resolve problems before they escalate.

- Optimize Customer Service: AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can help manage customer inquiries 24/7, improving response times and enhancing the overall customer experience. AI can also suggest solutions to customer service agents, helping to improve First Contact Resolution (FCR) rates.

By feeding your unified data into AI tools, you can take your business insights and performance monitoring to the next level, enabling smarter, data-driven decisions and faster improvements across all areas of your business.