Salesforce CDP

A shift to business-driven development, starting with transparent tech

The president and board of this mid-sized business were tired of failed initiatives—big ideas with even bigger budgets and low impact. 

The development team continually built new offerings that took too long to get to a market that didn’t even want them. Even worse, everything was custom built in a homegrown black box solution only a handful of developers could navigate. 

Enough was enough. The director of special projects got our name from a decade-prior client and brought Remio on board.

Salesforce logo

The mission

After initial discovery, Remio recommended flipping the cart and the horse—letting the business lead product development based on market needs. 

Our perspective? The key to innovation and execution would come from close collaboration between sales and marketing (the business side) and the development team. After all, even the most brilliant, highly skilled developers aren’t likely to know what the market wants. They couldn’t be expected to have their finger on the pulse of the industry and competition.

This would be a tremendous lift, due to the chasm between teams. The development team sincerely believed they understood modern marketing and market needs. We knew this engagement would be as much about listening and educating as updating the tech.

Remio’s solution

Remio suggested a modern, declarative tech stack that could be managed by any new hires to assist the organization in shifting responsibilities. 

Ideal for a situation like this, we established Salesforce as the customer data platform. This would help identify and create a detailed view of prospects and customers based on data from multiple disparate sources. This armed sales and marketing with actionable, data-informed insights. Next, we replaced the home-built marketing engine with Marketing Cloud, integrating automated SMS and direct mail. Once the base engine was running well, we began to design and build new marketing techniques for testing.

There were many novel aspects to this project, including using one Marketing Cloud business unit to market discrete businesses with separate branding and reporting requirements. Another was building an engine that could create a single view of a customer by connecting several data sources, scoring and displaying all naming conventions and contact information, and suggesting the best to use based on past interactions—all without adding to data storage costs.

What happened next

The marketing and sales teams are able to create and send more relevant communications, based on a single, detailed customer view, and new advances, based on strategic business needs, are deployed quickly.

Platforms and services

  • Salesforce
  • Marketing Cloud
  • CRM-A
  • Valence
  • AtData
  • Twilio SMS
  • Send 360
  • Stensul
  • Marketing agency services
  • Project management
  • Change management
  • New hire job descriptions, interviewing and onboarding