his month, we hosted our very first Coffee with Clients of 2023. Our goal for this and every client round table is to bring like-minded Lev clients together to get to know each other, discuss challenges, and suggest potential solutions based on their experiences so everyone can grow their marketing strategy by learning from each other. Here are some of the many lessons we all learned from the discussion:  

Increasing The Adoption of New Tools is Key to Ensuring New Processes Take Root

One core challenge our clients experience is increasing the adoption of new tools and processes. Salesforce's Distributed Marketing is one of those tools where increasing buy-in can make or break the program's success. While Salesforce’s Distributed Marketing tools enable non-marketers to easily inform, market, and sell to their consumers at scale, it’s only useful if marketers make the barrier to entry low.   

One of our clients had to fast-track their Distributed Marketing implementation to ensure the features were available in time for a sales training they had scheduled at the beginning of the year.   

Not only did the Lev team fast-track the work in time for launch and get 20 templates created quickly, but they also developed a roadmap for the rollout to demonstrate the custom messages the sales team could send out without an incredible amount of external help. By doing this, Lev helped them hype up the process change, ensuring their sales team was excited to experiment with the new templates and messaging strategies.   

“[When launching Distributed Marketing across both of our Salesforce Sales Cloud Instances], we couldn’t have done it without Lev. Due to having some sales meetings in early January, we had to fast-track our implementation as they needed to see it in action before the launch. Without the Lev team, we couldn’t have scrambled and gotten it done. The team had all hands on deck and was able to get 20 templates completed across our business.”  

While Data Architecture Continues to Be a Challenge, Lev is Helping Clients Streamline and Get More Out of Their Data 

We had a great conversation with the clients who participated in the round table regarding the implementation of Marketing Cloud (MC) Personalization (Formerly known as Interaction Studio). When employing sensitive data with MC Personalization, storing and utilizing data continues to be a challenge for many marketers, including our own clients. Some struggle to:  

• Segment and send data downstream due to a lack of unique identifiers. For example, email is not always the best unique identifier because some family members share the same email address.   
• Personalize communications. In some industries, such as healthcare, there are a lot of legal and compliance concerns surrounding the capturing of sensitive information. 
• Establish business units. There are many ideas within their organizations on how to better align business processes. 

Data needs and challenges are always evolving, so our clients appreciate that Lev is finding new opportunities to discuss these difficulties and come up with new solutions. We are always helping establish best-in-class strategies to better capture data, ensure the data being processed is compliant, and implement account and business unit structures that make sense across global and enterprise companies and brands.   

During this client round table, we discussed how our clients could pull together internal round tables to begin getting more aligned across different groups, so everyone is working based on a single strategy. One major takeaway from our conversation was the importance of having monthly collaboration sessions with key cross-functional contacts who are involved in managing marketing data and operations. These sessions help everyone to get to know each other, share new ideas and solutions, and think through ways to work better together. For one of our clients, not only does this ensure everyone is aligned, but they are also beginning to build an internal community.   

If you need help determining use cases for MC Personalization or guidance on capturing and using potentially sensitive data, reach out to Lev. Clients repeatedly tell us that setting up MC Personalization right the first time is critical to getting the most out of the tool. And remember, you don’t have to set it up all at once. MC Personalization is designed to be iterative.  Here is what we heard from a couple of our clients: 

“For us, we have some challenges surrounding our CMS. It is a different team who handles that, so there’s some inherent challenges in integrating MC Personalization right out of the gate. What we are doing instead is putting in the main beacon of MC Personalization while we figure out those technical challenges, so we don’t lose out on tracking data. So, when you have your CMS ready to go to begin your personalization, you already have data to work from and it’s easier to do it. You don’t have to boil the ocean right off the bat. You can start small and start accumulating.”  

“Lev was invaluable in helping us set up [MC Personalization]. Left to our own internal resources, it would have been disastrous, so again, setting it up right the first time is the most important part.” 

Clients Appreciate How Lev Simplifies Complex Challenges

While Salesforce Marketing Cloud does have a slew of capabilities, it does have quite a learning curve. Knowing what functionality to implement and how to set it up is difficult without a knowledgeable partner.   

All of the clients in this session voiced how much they appreciate how they can focus on strategic objectives that grow their business knowing that Lev is simplifying their most complex challenges within their MarTech suite. Because we have ‘been there and done that,’ we can provide recommendations on initial use cases for new technology, help set expectations on timelines and possibilities, and lend credibility when getting buy-in from multiple client teams.     

“Lev has been invaluable to me coming in with no experience. They’ve really taken the time to help build my skills and now I am more confident in what I can do now. I can’t say enough good things about them.”  

“Lev has worked very closely with our team, and they’ve been amazing. They are truly an extension of our team. In fact, we haven’t had a marketing operations person today, so we’ve been heavily reliant on the team at Lev.”  

For more on how we partnered with specific clients to level up their marketing efforts, check out some of our innovative approaches to solving marketers’ toughest problems. Or if you are interested in joining in the fun and becoming a Lev client yourself, let’s chat.