For a growing natural products company, marketing wasn’t the problem. They were already running campaigns, generating leads, communicating with customers, and collecting plenty of data.

The problem was connecting all of it.

Salesforce held one part of the customer story. Marketing platforms held another. Campaign activity provided another piece. Once a prospect moved further into the sales process, it became harder to see how those earlier marketing interactions connected to pipeline and, eventually, revenue.

The company wanted a better way to bring those pieces together.

The Challenge

Like a lot of companies we work with, this organization wasn’t starting from scratch.

They already had Salesforce. They had marketing programs. They had customer and prospect data coming from several different places. What they didn’t have was an easy way to follow someone across all of those interactions.

That created some pretty basic questions that were surprisingly difficult to answer.

Which campaigns were actually bringing in the right prospects? What had someone engaged with before they became an opportunity? Were different types of customers getting communications that made sense for them? And once marketing handed someone over to sales, what happened next?

Email opens and clicks could tell the marketing team something, but not enough. They needed to connect engagement to what was happening further down the funnel.

Connecting Marketing Cloud to Salesforce

Revenue Ops worked with the company to build a more connected approach using Salesforce Sales Cloud, Data 360, Marketing Cloud Engagement, and Marketing Cloud Intelligence.

The important part wasn’t simply getting the platforms connected. We needed to be clear about what each one was responsible for.

Sales Cloud remained the CRM and the primary place for sales and revenue information.

Data 360 helped bring customer information together and gave the team more options for building useful audiences.

Marketing Cloud Engagement handled the actual activation, including email communications and automated journeys.

Marketing Cloud Intelligence supported the reporting side, giving the team a way to bring marketing performance data together for analysis.

Instead of four products doing four separate things, the goal was to have information move between them in a way that supported the actual customer journey.

Marketing to People Based on Where They Are

One of the biggest opportunities was segmentation.

Not everyone in the database should receive the same message just because they happen to be on the same list.

A new prospect who just responded to a campaign is different from someone already talking with sales. An existing customer is different from both of them.

We designed the process around those differences.

Customer and prospect data can be used to build more relevant audiences. Those audiences can then be activated in Marketing Cloud Engagement and placed into journeys that make sense for where those people are in their relationship with the company.

As people engage, that behavior provides another piece of information the team can use.

It sounds straightforward. Getting the data, CRM processes, segmentation, and marketing execution to actually work together is where most of the work happens.

What Happens After Someone Clicks?

This was another important part of the project.

Marketing reporting often stops too early.

Someone received an email. They opened it. They clicked. Maybe they filled out a form.

Those are useful metrics, but they don’t answer the question the business ultimately cares about: Did any of this contribute to revenue?

To get closer to that answer, we looked beyond Marketing Cloud Engagement itself.

Salesforce Campaigns and Campaign Members help document marketing participation. Opportunity Contact Roles help establish which people are associated with opportunities. Sales activity adds another part of the story. Marketing engagement provides the behavioral piece.

When those relationships are maintained correctly, the company has a much better starting point for understanding how marketing and sales activity overlap.

It also opens the door to better questions.

What did someone engage with before an opportunity was created?

Which campaigns show up most often in successful customer journeys?

Are certain audiences progressing through the funnel differently than others?

Where are prospects engaging but failing to move forward?

Those questions are much more useful than looking at an email open rate in isolation.

Building Something the Team Can Expand

We also didn’t want to design the solution around one campaign or one immediate use case.

The company is going to change. New campaigns will launch. New customer segments will become important. The team may add data sources, channels, and additional automation over time.

The setup needed to account for that.

By connecting CRM data, customer data, segmentation, Marketing Cloud Engagement, and reporting, the company now has a structure it can continue building on instead of recreating the process every time marketing wants to do something new.

The Impact

The biggest change is that marketing activity no longer has to sit off to the side from the rest of the revenue process.

The company has a clearer way to connect customer and prospect information with segmentation, journeys, campaign activity, sales activity, opportunities, and marketing measurement.

That gives the team more flexibility to create targeted audiences and automate communications without losing sight of what happens after those communications go out.

It also creates better visibility between sales and marketing.

Rather than marketing measuring one set of activities and sales measuring another, both teams can work toward a more complete picture of the customer.

Technology Used

Salesforce Sales Cloud
CRM, sales activity, pipeline, and revenue data

Salesforce Data 360
Customer data, identity resolution, and segmentation

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement
Email marketing, audience activation, and automated journeys

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence
Marketing performance and analytics

Marketing Cloud Is Only Part of the Answer

It’s easy to look at a Marketing Cloud Engagement implementation as an email project.

We don’t think that’s where the real opportunity is.

Sending an email is the easy part. The harder questions are who should receive it, what you know about them, what should happen when they engage, what sales needs to know, and whether any of that activity ultimately contributes to the business.

For this company, the work was about connecting those pieces.

Marketing Cloud Engagement gave the team the tools to communicate at scale. Connecting it to the rest of the Salesforce ecosystem gave those communications context.

And that’s what makes the data much more useful.