With all the changes happening regarding Marketing Cloud, I was eager to speak directly with Bobby Jania, CMO of Marketing Cloud, to unravel the direction Salesforce is taking with their collection of offerings for marketers.
First, some context on why Bobby was such a valuable source of information. Having worked in the Marketing Cloud organization for a decade, he has witnessed, first-hand, the slew of marketing-related acquisitions that needed to be integrated into the product.
I’d be remiss not to mention the rapid advancements seen in the wider technology landscape, and with that, customers’ expectations going up ‘another notch’. Like every leading technology vendor, Salesforce have had to keep up – and has done so with its own USPs (unique selling points).
I joked, saying that Bobby is in a position where he and his team have to market to some of the most sophisticated marketers out there. Nevertheless, he and the other Marketing Cloud leaders are up for a wild ride ahead. Our conversation covered everything from the priorities for Marketing Cloud leadership to how Einstein Personalization is the ‘next evolution’ of Marketing Cloud Personalization. We also discussed the move towards usage-based pricing, possible plans to converge the three main Salesforce marketing products, moving Marketing Cloud “on core”, and more.
With each topic, I will endeavor to provide my perspective and offer you some context throughout this summary. Having said this, we need to respect the mammoth task that Salesforce is tackling, which has been gaining traction in the past year plus.
Your priorities, or opinions, may not be shared by others in this growing space; hence, I’ve remained diplomatic in this write-up from an enjoyable conversation.
Salesforce’s Priorities for Marketing Cloud
As CMO, messaging and communication fall squarely within Bobby’s remit. The first priority mentioned is focusing on clearer messaging to Salesforce customers and prospective customers on what is actually happening when your organization’s data is paired with Salesforce’s AI functionalities.
Many marketers have a heightened awareness of privacy and data handling due to the increasing number of regional legislations, so clear communication is paramount (i.e. the Einstein Trust Layer). Bobby sees a parallel between this AI revolution and the introduction of cloud computing back in the day when organizations had to be convinced that ‘the cloud’ was stable and safe to run their business on.
With communication, there needs to be a continuous two-prong approach. Bobby is enthusiastic about educating the internal teams at Salesforce on how AI works with Marketing Cloud, the changes to some infrastructure, new releases, and the roadmap. A lag in communication between those working on the product and those selling it can result in customer confusion. Luckily, this is high on Bobby’s list to mitigate.
Finally, Bobby emphasized the concept of “AI is the new UI”, giving examples of how he uses AI as opposed to traditional search engines. He is a true advocate for interfacing with AI.
Einstein Personalization vs. Marketing Cloud Personalization
Having watched the keynote or reading our summary, you will have seen the announcement of Einstein Personalization.
Einstein Personalization feels a lot like Marketing Cloud Personalization (formerly Interaction Studio), so I was keen to get some clarity on this – especially after some interesting commentary on social media from those who hold expertise in the tool.
Opening the point of conversation, I said that this is a well-loved tool, based on the number of users that I’ve spoken to over the past few years.
In a nutshell, Einstein Personalization is the ‘next evolution’ of Marketing Cloud Personalization. The main difference is that with Einstein Personalization, the decision engines that power the highly personalized experiences run on Data Cloud. The SDKs will also be used natively from Data Cloud.
Fixing (and Delivering) ‘Easy Wins’
We can be honest here. While there is plenty of juicy innovation at Salesforce conferences, most of us feel that there are functionality gaps that have an impact on how we work, day to day.
I will use Journey Builder as an example. There’s no doubt that this is a fantastic tool to map out marketing sequences visually. However, as one tool that marketers use extensively, there are requests.
Having spoken to one source, I gathered a couple of example requests around resending emails to non-opens/non-clicks (having an actual option in the UI), and exit criteria (can’t update once contact has exited, e.g. the CRM record with exit reason).
With a peek behind the scenes, we start to understand that the strategy has been to make Data Cloud stronger first – as the foundation – and then to power other functionalities. While there is no information on the examples I gave above, this paints a future where a whole lot more power can be granted to these core tools to deal with the increasing demands that will be placed on them, with marketing data use cases set to, inevitably, grow in sophistication.
Moving to Usage-Based Pricing
A heated topic that’s being talked about – pricing. Marketing Cloud is one Salesforce product that’s always been based on credits in some respects (e.g. Super Messages).
Limits were established over a decade ago, and some are changing, which has left some people questioning why. Consider what’s now possible in Marketing Cloud, versus what was a decade ago. While next to no one likes parting with their marketing budget, we need to be cognizant of the computing power running behind the scenes – especially with Data Cloud on the scene.
Consider the idea that not all organizations are equal. If you’ve worked in multiple orgs using Marketing Cloud, you will know that marketing maturity varies. What Salesforce doesn’t want to happen is for customers with lower usage to be subsidizing customers with more complex usage cases/higher consumption. This is a fair comment and a mindset that democratizes Marketing Cloud usage. While more transparency is needed on the topic (an online calculator, perhaps?), the sentiment makes sense.
Further, Salesforce (Bobby) points out that the more sophisticated experience will garner the greatest ROI.
Feature Consolidation vs. Choice?
There are over 10 ways to send an email in Marketing Cloud and multiple ways to segment data in Marketing Cloud Engagement. Last year, I observed that with the move toward Data Cloud, we’d be consolidating the ‘ways to do X’. In some ways, my observation was on the right track, but in other ways, I was naive.
As Bobby mentioned, while they want to build a path for their customers to move toward the ‘new’ ways of operating, they are not going to shut off features unnecessarily. If features are on the way to being sunset, there will be plenty of warning – Social Studio is an example, where customers had two and a half years’ worth of warning.
Bobby gave another example from history that hadn’t occurred to me before: with the introduction of Marketing Cloud Journey Builder, were they going to pull Automation Studio? As those familiar with Marketing Cloud Engagement will know, Automation Studio is still ‘alive’. This decision was made with respect for customer choice.
While there are hints about feature consolidation (in terms of functionality and/or UI – see next section, as this is unconfirmed), Salesforce is committed to not disrupting your current ways of working with their tooling.
Asking Bobby: “Is there something we can look forward to in the run-up to, and at, Dreamforce?” we got no real response. But there was a visible signal – a ‘sparkle in the eye’ – that there will be a bright future ahead.
Plans for Convergence?
In the Salesforce product catalog, there are now three main products: Marketing Cloud Engagement, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, and the recent addition, Marketing Cloud Growth Edition.
Renaming the first two listed was the first step (in 2022) to make all marketing products understandable – and more importantly, to bring them together under the ‘Marketing Cloud’ label (under the same ‘umbrella’).
Salesforce has been making sense of their marketing products and the tech stacks they run on. While consolidation was ‘on the cards’, there’s still technology fragmentation between the products:
- Marketing Cloud Engagement (historically ExactTarget): Still mostly operates on a separate tech stack (gen AI features have been built on the ‘core’ Salesforce platform).
- Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot): Still partially operates on a separate tech stack. Significant work has been done to move Pardot onto the ‘core’ platform, piece by piece (e.g. object alignment).
- Marketing Cloud Growth Edition: Operates fully on the ‘core’ Salesforce infrastructure (more specifically, it leverages the Data Cloud infrastructure).
The first step (renaming products) caused concerns in the community for the best of two years. Why rename products without changing or aligning the technologies? We can now speculate that this was leading up to a unified Marketing Cloud in the future. It could be said that Salesforce used Marketing Cloud Growth Edition to illustrate this.
We’ve been told to ‘hold tight’ until Dreamforce, where we could be hearing more on the topic.
Marketing Cloud Growth Edition: What’s Next?
Following on nicely, we already mentioned Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, released in February 2024 with great fanfare as the first iteration of Marketing Cloud ‘on core’ (i.e. Data Cloud).
This neat product didn’t get much limelight during Connections. If you’re as keen to learn about this product as we have been, you will have many questions about its reception upon being launched to the market.
I assumed that firstly, the pioneer (closed customer pilot) is still ongoing. It’s a thorough, multi-step program that gives existing Account Engagement customers access to Growth Edition features. Some of the brightest minds in the space are involved, so solid feedback is anticipated. Secondly, Salesforce would have been advertising too much; as was pointed out, Connections is more about Salesforce’s existing customer base. Us marketers working with the Salesforce product suite likely have heard about Data Cloud and copilots, and are wanting to discover how to adopt them in our organizations; practical use cases were the focus of this year’s event.
Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, as described by Bobbly, is more relevant for net new entrants to the whole Salesforce platform, or new to running their marketing operations using a Salesforce product. There may have been Connections ‘24 attendees with that intention, but Salesforce determined that they would not be in the majority.
When Moving Marketing Cloud ‘On Core’
I love getting an insight into challenges that have been and anticipated challenges that could be. As someone whose role requires a ‘bird’s eye’ view, Bobby had some good insight into how Salesforce is steering this incredibly ‘big ship’.
I prefaced my question by acknowledging that there must be so many interdependent teams having to work in tandem. If Marketing Cloud is moving to operate on the Data Cloud infrastructure – and as Account Engagement has been moving on to the ‘core’ Sales Cloud platform over the past half-decade – the importance of alignment with those teams enhancing the underlying architecture shouldn’t be underestimated. Feature releases need to be aligned super closely to ensure what’s ‘new’ (innovative), what can be delivered, and more importantly, what can be supported.
This has been a long explanation; however, as much as I would love to give insight into timelines, I wanted to take this opportunity to emphasize that no area of Salesforce works in isolation any longer. What’s below the surface in product development is more complex than what these seamless conference demos and release schedules may let on.
Summary
There’s a bright future ahead for Marketing Cloud – both their ‘Engagement’ (ExactTarget) and ‘Account Engagement’ (Pardot) offerings. As mentioned, with Marketing Cloud reaching a new phase in its technology, its development needs to be dependent – teams working in harmony – with both the ‘core’ platform (i.e. Sales Cloud and Service Cloud) and also Data Cloud.
We really appreciated Bobby’s time in speaking with us to clarify some of the changes and hint at future ones. It should be said that Salesforce does a good job of listening to their Marketing Champions and MVPs, where multiple topics were raised and solutions already in the works; as the session was a ‘safe space’, nothing further can be disclosed publicly at this time. From Bobby’s ‘sparkle in the eye’ that I detected, I sense that there is much more that he wanted to disclose, but we will have to wait until Dreamforce, or beyond.
While you may have your own day-to-day frustrations, we must be cognizant of the stronger foundation that the Marketing Cloud teams have been working on behind the scenes. Entirely rearchitecting the Salesforce platform (Einstein 1) and implementing a hyperscale data engine (Data Cloud) means that Salesforce customers will continue to benefit from this ‘future-proof’ foundation far into the future.