Data Cloud

Salesforce product for managing and importing large amounts of data into Salesforce orgs.

Overview

Allows organizations to bring data in from various other sources into a single view, helping businesses to get a more unified view of a given customer
Helps as a precursor to be able to better discover insights, automate, predict outcomes, and generate content via AI

Valuable Use Cases for Data Cloud Usage

Being able to have 1 place for all of your data to be stored
- Essentially replacing a data lake / data warehouse / data lakehouse solution like Snowflake or DataBricks
- If you want to stick with one vendor and get a solution for data lake / data warehouse, you can turn to Salesforce for this
Identity and Profile resolution across many different internet / web-domain presence
- This is especially attractive for B2C companies, but can also be beneficial for B2B motions
  - Especially if the marketing org at the firm is robust, with several different web presences, pages, domains, etc…
- This opens the door to help segment and market better to entities or people better
  - It does NOT require that you use Marketing Cloud, you can use this to help you market better on a different marketing tool
Analytics - Calculated Insights, Streaming Insights / Data Actions
- The more systems that you have data in, the more valuable this becomes
- Streaming Insights / Data Actions - Basically firing off a Platform Event when certain things happen with your data, which you can respond to in Salesforce
  - Again, could be really valuable in a B2C motion like, “Customer checked ticket prices in domain X, then also took a look at some merch in Domain Y, let’s automatically send them a discount code right now.”
- Calculated Insights: SQL-based metrics that are generated across all of the data that you have in data cloud
  - Runs regularly across all of your data, could potentially be a replacement for something like DLRS or scheduled jobs that query data in the SFDC database and runs calculations accordingly
  - Note: Calculated insights are fairly expensive if you consider the price / calculation
- You can relate data that comes into Data Cloud to “unified profiles”, including to Accounts
- You can have a deep level of introspection into the data, dropping directly into raw SQL to review the data and run analytical queries
  - You can save and store these queries to allow for easier review of data and certain “views”
AI Readiness
- Assuming that you’re bought into Salesforce AI, this ends up being a really excellent step in the right direction towards adopting future AI tools and features
- Allows for creating vector databases that will power RAG on your Salesforce-based AI tools like Agentforce, Marketing Cloud Growth, and some of the other more AI-based tools that Salesforce is releasing.
  - Note: You can also do your own “prompt grounding” in these tools in which you can reference Data Cloud objects or data stored in Data Cloud. Technically not “RAG”, but it assists with the prompt portion of working with Generative AI

What Sets Data Cloud Apart from Competitors?

You can still use other competitors like Snowflake & Databricks
- “BYOL” - Bring your own lake
- 0 copy model of setting up your data transformations, unified profile mappings, and the overall data model in Salesforce Data Cloud, while retaining and not copying the actual, underlying data from your lake
Its level of integration directly into Salesforce
- You can have related lists of Data Cloud data on traditional Lightning Record Pages
- Data Actions are valuable to do things in Salesforce

Specific Thoughts on B2B Use Cases

General thought: Most companies could benefit from having their ALL their data consolidated
- Especially as AI gets better
Product-based feedback / data that drives better upselling / renewals or outreach (Post Sale Actions)
- E.g., Product usage data funneling into Data Cloud that can trigger a Data Action that drives outreach or other Salesforce record updates. This data could be references by account managers during renewal conversation preparation
- Could also ingest data from other service providers like ZoomInfo, Zoom Webinars, events software, etc… to allow for better unified profiles, which would also assist with a better

Alternative for Integrations?

Should we be considering using Data Cloud instead of traditional integrations that we design to bring data into Salesforce as records in standard and custom objects?

Additional, Miscellaneous Thoughts

Data Cloud is really a good reference tool, with some “operational” bells and whistles tacked on right now
- Though the operational portion is fairly expensive at this time

Database