The Silverline Media team conquered another Dreamforce this year, returning to the event in person after two years of virtual engagement. The days were full of informative sessions and enlightening client conversations, and the nights brought events like the Silverline happy hour before the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert and a closing afterparty with Salesforce employees. 

If you listened in on some of the media team’s conversations with clients and prospects at Dreamforce, you would have overheard us mention our work in the media industry and our point of view on various applications like self-service ad sales and Slack for Ad Sales. The media-focused Salesforce announcements at Dreamforce centered on three areas: CDP, Genie, and Slack. Here’s what we can look forward to with these new and revamped features and functionalities. 

Salesforce CDP: A self-service platform to drive personalization and engagement

You may have heard about Customer 360 Audiences in the past, but Salesforce CDP (Customer Data Platform) is the new branding. CDP is part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud tech stack, allowing organizations to harmonize a customer data set for use in Marketing Cloud. At Dreamforce, sessions about Salesforce CDP often included buzzwords like “Truth Profile” and “SSOT” (Single Source of Truth).

What is Salesforce CDP?

In its simplest form, CDP is a way to centralize the various pieces of data an organization may have about an individual customer across multiple systems and sources. This data can then be used to segment customers for campaigns and build more tailored journeys. For example, marrying customer data between Salesforce and eCommerce apps, social media profiles, proprietary data sets like an app’s user data, and any other sources that house individual data that are then used to target customers with marketing campaigns. 

CDP enables marketers to capture, unify, segment, and activate all their customer data. It provides marketers a single source of truth of their customer and makes that data available for creating personalized experiences across every touchpoint. 

Why does Salesforce have a CDP?

Today, technology is revolutionizing the customer experience, providing an opportunity to connect with customers in new ways. As a result, customer expectations are also rising, with customers expecting companies to deliver best-in-class experiences that are frictionless, connected, and personalized across every interaction regardless of the department.

According to the Salesforce Connected Customer report, 84% of customers surveyed say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. Additionally, over half of customers have stopped buying from a company altogether because a competitor beat them on experience.

Brands need a way for their marketing, sales, and service teams to connect these interactions across different channels and create the experience their customers are expecting. But this digital transformation hasn’t always been easy for companies. They’ve been met with many challenges along the way. Disparate systems pose great challenges: data is often siloed, companies are often disconnected from their customers, and not everyone has the skills needed to deliver seamless customer experiences.

How can this help my business?

Salesforce CDP is an enterprise customer data platform that helps marketers unify their data to personalize every interaction. Its self-service, marketer-friendly actionable system will help marketers digest all their siloed customer data, build unified customer profiles, and make these profiles actionable to any engagement platform, and all of this is built with insights and trust inherent to the system.

Salesforce Genie: Real-time data in CDP

As technology keeps moving forward, customer expectations are higher than ever. Data continues to be siloed and difficult to connect to the overall customer lifecycle. Not to mention customers need to engage with multiple data sources in real time. “Every business leader wants to take advantage of real-time data to create compelling, personalized customer experiences — milliseconds matter in this new digital-first world,” said David Schmaier, President and Chief Product Officer, Salesforce. “That’s why we built Genie, our most significant innovation ever on the Salesforce Platform. Genie makes every part of Customer 360 more automated, intelligent, and real time.”

Enter Salesforce Genie (announced at Dreamforce 2022), the real-time platform for customer magic! This is the entire Salesforce Platform with CDP capabilities built within. Salesforce Genie brings the power of real-time data to the entire Customer 360 to create a real-time, single view of the customer across any cloud.

Salesforce Genie is the world’s first real-time CRM, anchored on these three core pillars of the Salesforce platform:

• Real-time data with Genie
• Intelligence with Einstein
• Automation with Salesforce Flow

Thanks to this innovation, every interaction, ad clicked, sale, and service case come together in real time — with safety and security top of mind — to create the most innovative and complete customer profile imaginable. The result? Your whole business is united and up-leveled through data, so customer experiences feel like pure magic.

Genie paves the way for highly personalized 1:1 customer experiences, delivered in real-time. Genie ingests and stores real-time data streams at massive scale, and combines it with Salesforce data. The aim is to reconcile all the many identities one individual could have across the hundreds of apps your organization uses, creating a single, cleaned record for each individual customer.

Up until now, Salesforce CDP had only really been interesting to marketers/marketing use cases. Traditionally, marketers have been juggling multiple data sources at the top of the funnel — Genie takes Salesforce CDP’s capabilities and extends the offering across Salesforce’s product portfolio, providing the data unification, identity resolution, and activation that Salesforce CDP customers have been using to their advantage.

What is the difference between Marketing Cloud CDP and Salesforce Genie?

Marketing Cloud CDP is not the same as Salesforce Genie. Until now, the CDP was geared at marketers, helping them leverage a unified customer profile to provide more targeted campaigns to their customers. Salesforce Genie brings the power of automation, analytics, AI, data, and integration to the entire Customer 360 to create a single view of the customer across any cloud. Right now the generally available product for Salesforce Genie is the Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform, the foundation for Genie. 

Slack: More than a DM use case

Slack was everywhere at Dreamforce. There were Slack-specific booths, presentations, and demos for every industry vertical. A new functionality called Salesforce Canvas was announced, which pairs Slack with Quip and should be released next year. 

We heard a lot of chatter at Dreamforce that while companies are investing in Slack, they struggle to come up with use cases and value propositions outside of the traditional DMing. Customers are looking to Silverline, a Slack Industry Innovation Partner, to drive meaningful Slack-first media solutions. That’s why we were so excited about our Slack for Ad Sales demo, showing how Slack helps media organizations by automating and centralizing everything from knowledge processes to watercooler conversations along the entire sales journey. 

Use Slack for Ad Sales to improve upon your current use cases, such as: 

• Deal support requests: Provide support for media planning and integrated marketing teams by auto-creating Slack channels for specific deals to jump-start collaboration 
• Approvals: Accelerate deal approvals from management for rates and pricing or special insertion order terms and conditions
• Planning: Easily create a rollout strategy and plan, including guidelines for use, training and user adoption, and communication guidelines
• Upfront collaboration: Ensure a smooth upfront with dedicated Slack channels for deals, pitch events, activities, and presentation docs

How Silverline can help from Dreamforce and beyond

Silverline guides clients through every phase of their Salesforce journey, from strategy and implementation to managed services. The Silverline Media team keeps tabs on the industry by attending conferences like Dreamforce. We do this to bring media organizations the latest on Salesforce trends, such as CDP and make them aware of new innovations, such as Salesforce Genie and Silverline’s own Slack for Ad Sales. Find out how our Media team can help your organization.