Is your business data-ready for AI in B2B

Is your business data-ready for AI in B2B?

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In this world of "staying connected" and "automation", you want to bring in all your customer data, use the data along with artificial intelligence (AI) to establish consensual connection with your customers, and send relevant campaigns to them across multiple communication channels. An automated solution that does all of that, will be an icing on the cake. This applies to not just Business-to-Consumer (B2C) scenarios where your customer is an individual but also, to Business-to-Business (B2B) cases where your customer is another company, organization, dealer, distributor, etc.

Salesforce is spearheading with Agentforce that lets you build and use autonomous agents that not only automates tasks but takes intelligent actions on its own. Enterprise data plays a crucial role in delivering meaningful agent based solutions. Salesforce Agentforce is based on Salesforce Data Cloud - a hyperscale data engine in the Salesforce platform. It uses Data Cloud as a trusted and scalable data foundation to ground the prompts to Large Language Models (LLM) for AI.

Why Salesforce Data Cloud? Salesforce Data Cloud provides a single platform to access and leverage all enterprise data. Salesforce Data Cloud enriches Marketing, Sales, Service and many more applications in your ecosystem. Its features like Segmentation and Activation are more commonly used in Marketing and Sales for both B2B and B2C scenarios. In this article, we will focus on Salesforce Data Cloud for B2B - that will help your business be data-ready for AI in B2B.

Key Data Cloud features for B2B

Unlike business-to-consumer (B2C) use cases, the business-to-business (B2B) use cases involve companies, organizations and people associated with these organizations. Salesforce Data Cloud for B2B provides end-to-end features to aggregate customer data from multiple sources, to create target segments for marketing campaigns, to drive sales initiatives.

1P and 3P Account data Ingestion

In B2B use cases, the key profile entities are Accounts, Account Contacts. Account represents a company, an organization, or a business party. Account Contacts represent individuals who are associated with an Account, for example, an employee working for the company.

Salesforce Data Cloud lets you ingest 1st party Account data from one or more Salesforce CRM orgs via Sales and Service datakit. You can aggregate it with 1st party data stored in your other applications like Oracle Fusion, SAP, ServiceNow, SugarCRM etc and, from other systems like SnowFlake, Databricks, Google BigQuery using Data Cloud's zero copy capability. You can ingest third party data from external sources using specific connectors like that of ZoomInfo or generic storage connectors like that of SnowFlake, AWS etc.

Account Harmonization

Harmonization is the step that lets you aggregate data from multiple sources with different names to a common harmonized data model. Salesforce Data Cloud is built on a metadata framework providing a common model that can then be used in other Salesforce applications and low code platform services like Agentforce's Prompt Builder.

Depending upon the use case, you may map the data from external sources to pre-defined data model objects like Account, Account Contact and Individual or, you may define custom data model objects to represent companies, organizations involved in B2B.

Account Unification

Salesforce Data Cloud lets you unify account data from multiple sources into unified account profiles. You can create identity resolution rules using pre-configured match ruleset based on exact name, normalized address, phone or, using custom match rulesets.

The resultant unified account profile can then be used for account based marketing campaigns, sales strategies, etc. The unification step ensures that you work with a unified golden record of an Account.

Account Segmentation

A B2C marketer sends targeted campaigns to individual consumers. That is, the segment is based on Individual, Unified Individual DMOs. However, in B2B use cases, the marketer targets companies and employees working for these companies, based on certain conditions. That is, the segment is based on Account, Unified Account, Account Contact, Lead DMOs. Filter conditions could be based on Opportunities, Cases, etc.

Salesforce Data Cloud provides advanced capabilities such as hierarchical aggregation in segmentation, that lets you consider the characteristics of accounts related in a hierarchy. For example, a global organization related to regional and country specific local organizations.

Account Activation

Activation is about publishing the segment audience population to marketing and advertising platforms like Marketing Cloud for personalized campaigns, or Google, Meta advertising platforms. While most of the marketing and advertising platforms used for B2C and B2B use cases may be common, activations to platforms like Google Ads, LinkedIn and Marketo may be used targeted ABM strategies.

Salesforce Data Cloud Activation's membership filtering and contact point filtering lets you target Account Contacts playing specific roles while ensuring that you comply with their consent preferences for contact points.

B2B use cases with Data Cloud

While there are many use cases of AI in B2B, here I am highlighting the top 3 B2B use cases with Data Cloud.

Account Based Marketing

Account based marketing (ABM) is a marketing strategy that is about focussing on key accounts and targeting the contacts within them. Salesforce Data Cloud provides capabilities to assist Marketers and Sales professionals to implement ABM strategies.

Data Cloud batch and real-time ingestion and zero copy capabilities help you to consolidate and enrich account and contact details along with their interactions or engagement data from disparate first and third party sources. Data Cloud's segmentation feature helps Marketing and Sales teams to identify and prioritize key accounts based on their company size, industry, annual revenue, past engagements or interactions, etc. And, with Marketing Cloud's Agentforce Campaigns (AI Agent), you can create such segments by entering text describing the desired conditions.

Data Cloud's activation feature helps these teams to drive engagement by running campaigns to key decision makers within targeted accounts.

Automated Prospecting in Sales

Salesforce Sales Cloud provides Automating Prospecting capabilities powered by Data Cloud and AI to help sellers supercharge top of the funnel velocity. It uses Data Cloud to unify first party data in Salesforce CRM with external data in real time. It creates various lists of prospects based on Account segments using Data Cloud's segmentation capabilities. AI based customer fit score and buyer engagement data helps Sales professionals to engage with customers who are more likely to purchase.

Unified Data for Service Agent

On a high level, service data in Salesforce CRM is available in the form of case data, knowledge articles, account and product data, etc. However, before filing a support case, Account Contact or representative from the customer side could be browsing your website, reading about a known issue in the product, giving feedback etc. All of these engagement data could provide a lot of contextual information to Support Agents or Helpdesk representatives using Service Cloud.

Salesforce Data Cloud lets you combine Service data from Salesforce CRM with engagement data from other sources to assist both Autonomous Service Agents and Support Personnel Agents to help their customers. And, combine it with IoT data to give a complete unified background of the account to the Field Service Agent on the go. You can ingest unstructured data such as Support teams voice calls, meeting recordings into Data Cloud and use that to derive insights.

Salesforce on Salesforce Data Cloud

Salesforce uses Salesforce Data Cloud to drive customer success. Our internal operations team uses Salesforce Data Cloud to aggregate profile data like Account and Account Contact data coming in from our CRM system with engagement data coming in from different systems like website, events, Trailhead, etc and, unify it to create a single view of each of our customers. Customer 360 helps our marketers to run targeted campaigns, our sales team to prioritize accounts and grow the pipeline. It helps our support team to efficiently handle issues and queries.

Closing Notes

As a B2B company, whether you are contemplating or you are ready to take on the AI journey, ensure you have worked on your data strategy. Data Cloud features like data ingestion, harmonization, unification, segmentation and activation help you be data-ready for your AI journey in B2B.

References

• About Salesforce Data Cloud
• Explore Data Cloud
• Get Hands on with Data Cloud

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