PeerNova is a decision-science company whose mission is to enable organizations to make confident and timely decisions using contextual insights.
In order to better serve its customers, PeerNova needed to address a business need of partially re-platforming its sales, marketing, and support application stack. Initially, PeerNova selected Hubspot and Zendesk. After becoming a Salesforce partner, PeerNova transitioned its Salesforce ISV business to Salesforce Sales and Service Cloud while continuing to use HubSpot for marketing. This led to process inefficiencies and the decision to adopt Marketing Cloud Account Engagement for the ISV business.
PeerNova’s team recognized having data siloed in different systems was hindering their ability to gain a clear and complete understanding of all of their business relationships. So, they engaged Modelit to help them evaluate the cost/benefit of consolidating on Salesforce.
The Challenge:
PeerNova had a handful of challenges to address.
- They wanted a unified understanding of their total business relationships, consolidating company relationships and business contacts across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, and HubSpot.
- They needed to make sure any data assessment and migration work would be done with strict data protections in place.
- Through the Data Cloud POC, PeerNova wanted to quantify the business impact of distributed customer engagement caused by their business application architecture.
- Secondarily, PeerNova wanted to assess the complexity of migrating from HubSpot to the Salesforce Platform, since the two configurations were known to be different.
They wanted to make investment decisions based on evidence, ensuring careful and conscious use of their free Salesforce Data Cloud credits.
The Solution:
To quantify the business impact of continuing to run each business unit on separate infrastructure, we completed a Data Cloud POC to unify PeerNova’s customer data. The POC enabled us to quickly and cost-effectively show the potential missed business opportunity of not having a complete, consistent, and current view of customer engagements. For the POC, we limited our client’s CRM data sources to Salesforce and HubSpot. We developed an API-based connector to securely ingest HubSpot data into Data Cloud. We performed all data assessment work directly in the Salesforce environments, ensuring compliance with established data security and access controls. We also focused on only three objects per data source to guarantee a more manageable and focused scope. In order to optimize data processing and credit consumption costs, we selected only relevant fields on each object.
With the scope and work methodology defined, our team underwent a three-week solution implementation process that included:
- Maintaining Stakeholder Alignment: Continuous engagement with PeerNova’s stakeholders was fundamental. We provided frequent progress reports and sought feedback regularly, ensuring that the project would remain aligned with business objectives and expectations.
- Using Native Data Profiling to Accelerate Harmonization: To accelerate attribute identification and harmonization, our experts utilized CuneiformⓇ for CRM and Cuneiform for Data Cloud, native data profiling tools that simplified the field scoping and design process. Since we could take advantage of data and metadata pattern analysis, we did not have to analyze the data points one by one, and the team completed the planning phase of the Data Cloud implementation within a few days. Our efficiency allowed us to deliver faster time-to-value while keeping time investment costs to a minimum. This freed us up to focus on core business activities that directly generate value, including quantifying the business benefits of data identity resolution and unification.
- Using a Smart, Data-Driven Testing Strategy: Since we wanted to use our Data Cloud credits wisely, we implemented a testing strategy that involved deliberately choosing data samples to represent broader data trends. This way, we would refrain from excessive credit consumption and ensure our testing would be both impactful and cost-efficient.
- Focusing on Data Security and Governance: We strictly adhered to best practices for data security and governance at every step, from requesting access to external databases to obtaining and processing that data. This included testing, building our custom connector, and determining which team members would have access.
- Developing a Custom Connector: Currently, there is no standard Salesforce Data Cloud connector for HubSpot. That’s why we built and implemented a custom connector with Data Cloud’s Ingestion API to meet our client’s specific requirements for safe data ingestion and integration.
- Ensuring Accurate Identity Resolution: PeerNova, like many Salesforce customers, uses standard and custom fields to track customer contact points. We quickly verified the standard data kits would not address their needs and developed a tailored approach to achieve accurate identity resolution without losing any data context or granularity.
“As a software company with customers in regulated industries, data security and reliability are paramount. Modelit’s innovative approach to data analysis and design ensured none of our data left secure environments and enabled us to complete our Data Cloud proof of concept in record time and with free credits to spare. Instead of relying on us to explain our data, they used native data profiling to guide modeling decisions and dramatically shorten the project's planning phase. This approach allowed us to focus on the results of the POC, which revealed the extent of data disconnect across our business application architecture and its impact on the success of our customer outreach.”
Mehmet Orun - GM and Data Strategist
How We Helped:
Upon completing our POC, PeerNova gained the following:
- Validated Business Value: The POC quantified the amount of customer engagement disconnect and associated manual reconciliation effort, justifying migration from HubSpot to Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.
- Validated Technology Viability: The POC showed that Salesforce Data Cloud was effective in unifying data from disparate sources in a secure and efficient way, laying the foundation for further initiatives such as leveraging Einstein CoPilot to act on historical unstructured engagement data.
- A Cost-Effective Implementation of Data Cloud: By carefully managing the scope and testing processes, we made sure that this project stayed within budget. We were also able to optimize our client’s Data Cloud credit usage.
With our strategic approach to this POC, we were able to showcase the capabilities of Salesforce Data Cloud in such a way that allowed those at PeerNova to see its full value. By taking careful advantage of our client’s Data Cloud credits, focusing on targeted use cases, and adhering to strict security protocols, we proved the technology’s effectiveness and demonstrated its potential value for future implementations.
