Choosing a CDP That Drives Magic Results for Your Salesforce Tech Stack

Stack to the status quo. Feels easy, but won’t actually help you grow in the modern market.

Enterprise businesses have evolved past the “build vs. buy” debate, and are embracing flexibility, choice and openness in their martech stack — opting to design a modern customer data stack — one that provides the space to grow and adapt, rather than ushering you down a path of lock-ins.

The tech landscape is shifting and changing all the time — that’s why enterprise businesses need to consider the real costs of sticking to the status quo and instead, invest in the reality that things will continue to change. Adopting the best-of-breed approach with a customer experience tool as your customer data platform (CDP) in a Salesforce house is the key to winning and evolving in the modern market.

The right choice matters: only by constantly evaluating and choosing the right technology to add to the stack can brands derive value in a timely manner and deliver consistent and personalized customer experiences.

Are You Being Sold a Dream or Investing In Reality?

It may seem like a no-brainer to go with Salesforce’s offering for a CDP if you are already using or investing in Salesforce technology. You might even get a great deal (sign up discount) as part of a package.

But whether you call it Salesforce Customer 360, Salesforce CDP or Salesforce Data Cloud, the solution still lacks core functionality of the modern CDP that enterprise brands need to succeed — even with their menagerie of customer data acquisitions — and its offering may come with some costly implications.

Let’s review some elements of Salesforce Data Cloud (FKA Salesforce CDP, FKA Customer 360 Audiences, FKA Interactive Studio) and how they contribute to the enterprise customer experience.

Hidden Costs

Due to its lack of maturity and rigidity, even a sweet license deal for Salesforce CDP will require a lot of effort before any value can be visible. Expect deceivingly cheap starter packages outweighed by long-term services and customization costs.

Real-time Claims

Dreamforce 2022 was the stage to launch a Genie and the first truly real-time CDP. Since then, Genie has been put back into the lamp and customers are still complaining of the hours required to collect, process and activate data from the CDP.

Acquisition Marketing Desert

Salesforce has taken away its DMP, originally coming from the acquisition of Krux. It makes sense considering the deprecation of third-party cookies, the backbone of the solution. But customers have been left without a Salesforce alternative to solve for acquisition marketing use cases.

Operationally Unstable

Despite an integration with Snowflake Data Sharing, the deployment of Salesforce Data Cloud still requires many copies of the data across the entire stack. A challenge for data team to keep control and govern the data.

More could be told on the business front where users are left with many UIs/products to leverage for common tasks such as creating an audience segment.

Choosing the Right CDP For Your Salesforce Tech Stack

How ActionIQ Maximizes the Value of Your Salesforce Stack

Enterprise businesses that are seeking a CDP in a Salesforce tech stack should understand the benefits of evaluating beyond the ease of staying in house. But there are a few things you should specifically look out for when you’re evaluating a CDP for your Salesforce tech stack — think integrations, ecosystem and truly seamless, end-to-end CX.

ActionIQ’s philosophy is all about having an open relationship with tech partners — seamlessly integrating for a best-of-breed stack that generates the best experiences for customers.

In fact, about half of ActionIQ’s customers use a Salesforce solution. Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be integrated with ActionIQ in many ways: loading data into data extensions, triggering email sends, ingesting performance metrics and more.

With ActionIQ’s seamless integration into the Salesforce ecosystem, enterprise brands can benefit from the speed and function of the modern, composable CDP — without any timesuck.

Make Three Wishes For a CDP

We can’t exactly rub a lamp and summon a genie to get you more tech stack wishes, or 10 million dollars (although we can grant you the wish of real-time personalization…). However, we can give you a few ideas for your CDP wishlist.

Provide Choice and Flexibility With Composability in An Open Ecosystem

Enterprises that are adopting a composable approach get strong data management capabilities, alongside the flexibility to implement new and best-of-breed technologies for innovation. Meaning, brands are not forced to duplicate existing capabilities (click over for questions to ask CDP vendors claiming to be composable).

ActionIQ’s composable architecture integrates seamlessly with the Salesforce stack. With the data infrastructure HybridCompute built for flexibility and a user-friendly UI, ActionIQ empowers enterprise business users to take actions on their customer data faster and at lower cost compared to the Salesforce CDP.

Easy, Intuitive Customer Experience Activation for Marketing Users

A CDP is nothing without easy activation — speed to market means that marketing users can self-service audiences and launch them across channels quickly to keep up with the modern customer.

A CDP needs to have an intuitive UI that enables non-technical business users to quickly access the customer data they need and activate it across whichever final-mile experience delivery solutions they prefer.

Address Anonymous Shoppers and Support Acquisition Use-Cases

Enterprise brands need to address the entire customer lifecycle — from anonymous browser to loyal customer. That’s why CDPs should include functionality to connect the entire experience with a flexible identity framework, so organizations can manage identities across anonymous and known customers from first-, second- and third-party data sources.

With CDPs like ActionIQ, business users can efficiently analyze audience insights, segments and behaviors while orchestrating multi-step customer journeys — without having to simultaneously rely on technical resources.

Learn More About Maximizing Your Salesforce Tech Stack

When it comes to your customer data platform, invest in a solution that offers the real use-cases of a CDP that empower a connected customer experience — with the flexibility to grow your business.

To get the details on how to maximize your Salesforce stack with ActionIQ and explore the integration and key use cases that we seamlessly enable in the Salesforce stack, check out our guide — Increase the Value of Your Salesforce Stack With ActionIQ. If you’re looking to get started with a CDP that can scale a comprehensive, enterprise CX strategy with your business, we invite you to reach out to our experts to talk stack.