When starting at Salesforce, I had the incredible opportunity of being hired as the first local Solution Engineer for our NYC office (as everything was previously run out of Toronto). Being part of a new team for Emerging Small Business segment allowed me not only to learn great leadership qualities as we built out the team but also taught me a lot about the struggles of startup and the technological inefficiencies that get created around customer data. Salesforce’s platform is best known for being a cloud CRM that allows you to connect disparate customer data into a single place allowing businesses to scale.
If you consider the traditional problems of any business: A typical business could have customer data stored in an Excel spreadsheet, be processing sales and commerce through platforms like Venmo or Stripe, have customer support data in email providers like Gmail, and be sending marketing campaigns through another platform like MailChip or HubSpot. That said, these are 4+ vendors, applications, data silos we’re talking about and you can only imagine the complexity a small business would face trying to integrate all these data sources together with the very limited resources.
Salesforce solved this problem by bringing all these applications and tools into a single cloud platform allowing you to leverage a single customer ID and record. By seeing all of your customer data in one place, it makes it extremely easy to now connect the dots to see how best to scale. One example of this could be around trying to upgrade “Monthly” subscription members to a higher tiered “Yearly” subscription product. By being able to see a single record of your customer, you can see not only the email address but what products they purchased. By filtering by purchased products, in this case “Monthly” subscriptions and segmenting that list, you can now target only those people with an email campaign to convert them into “Yearly” members. Without your customer data being in a single place, the alternative would be having to export all of the data into Excel spreadsheets, manipulating the data manually, and then reimporting that data sheet into something like MailChimp. But guess what? The data is only as good as the last time you exported so you never see real-time information making it nearly impossible to scale successfully. This will all become important later when we talk about applying these same concepts to Discord communities.
<aside> 💡 Technology is what makes or breaks a business and it is easier to have your customer data in one place vs. spread disparately across multiple different silos.
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