A MOP for MOps - DESelect’s Journey to a Marketing Optimization Platform

Just last week we announced the launching of our Marketing Optimization Platform, or MOP. Over the last 5 years since our conception, we’ve released a tremendous amount of features, and I'd like to reflect on how we evolved from a very niche problem to an extensive platform supporting multiple capabilities.

SEGMENT

The Salesforce ecosystem has been my home for over a decade. When I was first learning about customer journeys and data extensions, the platform had only just switched from being called ExactTarget. I remember when Salesforce swooped in and rebranded its new acquisition Marketing Cloud.

I held many roles at many different companies over the years, and loved it – the data, the migrations, everything. During my consulting tenure with a global automotive logo you would recognize, I encountered many marketers who also worked in Marketing Cloud, but often they held a different view.

As non-technical marketers, their roles centered on copywriting, ideation, and strategy. But getting the most out of Marketing Cloud requires extensive technical queries. Campaigns stalled or lost valuable time as IT professionals with the necessary SQL knowledge spent hours writing and troubleshooting the code needed to create audiences or clean up databases.

It was here I first recognized an opportunity to address a longstanding issue for marketers and improve the Salesforce ecosystem where I’d grown as a professional. DESelect (now 'DESelect Segment') was born out of this inspiration.

Teaming up with Jonathan van Driessen, my longstanding friend (whom I actually met on a CRM project while both working for a Big 4) and now DESelect’s Chief Technology Officer, we established a company aimed at becoming the go-to segmentation solution for Marketing Cloud. Rooted in a user-friendly drag-and-drop design integrated into Marketing Cloud itself, DESelect Segment quickly emerged as our flagship product.

We started off as a small group of ambitious minds, and some of our first employees (some of them initially interns) still work at DESelect, having grown by such leaps and bounds that they now work essential roles very different from where they started.

SEARCH AND THE RISE OF A PLATFORM

As our company expanded, so did our aspirations. Consequently, we set our sights on evolving from a "point solution" that did "just segmentation" into a multi-capability platform.

This originally began almost haphazardly, by recognizing the need for a functional search bar in Marketing Cloud, and so DESelect Search came to be. Within DESelect Segment, features for deduplication, waterfall segmentation, and engagement scoring grew.

In tandem with DESelect’s growth, both Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and Data Warehouse-native (DWH) approaches gained prominence. While valuable for certain specific use cases, like data unification, CDPs present challenges, such as prescriptive data models and long implementation cycles. On the other hand, large data warehouses have their own limitations, especially when it comes to real-time use cases and data governance. Instead, DESelect’s solutions work at the marketing execution level, combining access to data where it resides with the flexibility to control and create impactful campaigns. That is where we make our stand.

This objective was captured by our mission statement: “to elevate engagement through human intelligence at scale.” Our ultimate goal is to give marketing leaders powerful, user-friendly tools that empower marketers to efficiently create campaigns that truly resonate with consumers and maximize results.

ENGAGE AND THE MOP

DESelect remained a dynamic entity. We identified another customer need – a way to prevent contacts from receiving too many communications, or even having more transparency into all the communications sent out by Marketing Cloud. To address this, we developed DESelect Engage, which provides marketing frequency optimization across channels within or without Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Just as Marketing Cloud has had to evolve over the years to improve its offerings, DESelect is also evolving. With new capabilities having been added over the years and a fresh mission statement, we asked ourselves some questions. Who were we? How could we capture the overall value of DESelect??

After some soul-searching, we repositioned ourselves as a Marketing Optimization Platform, or MOP, for Salesforce and beyond. That we came up with “a MOP for MOPs” seems all too fitting. Our turnkey platform allows those in Marketing Ops and Marketing Automation to clean up their Marketing Cloud, by getting more out of their data and customer engagement.?

With that, the DESelect platform has become a mission control center for Marketing Operations.

EPILOGUE

It’s important as a founder to, once in a while, look back and realize just how far you’ve come. Building a company is not easy (shocker). While building something cool definitely gives a sense of achievement, besides that one of the best levers for happiness we have as humans is practicing appreciation.

On that note, I’m very grateful to the awesome people at DESelect who have helped us take the steps to where we are today.???

The step in becoming a Marketing Optimization Platform is our most recent step, but by no means the last. We will continue to “elevate engagement through human intelligence at scale” as we build cool features for marketers using Salesforce, and beyond…