Speaker 0: Okay.

Speaker 1: Welcome to MarDreamin, everyone. We are so excited to have you all here with us today. My name is Kelly Ryan, and I’m at Sercante, and I’ll be monitoring today’s session. Before we get started, I have a few housekeeping items to cover. Uh yes, the sessions will be recorded and available on demand after the event, um so we’ll be following up with those with email. If you have a question, post it in the Q and A tab above and we’ll be having a couple minutes at the end of today’s session to go over those. And lastly, use the chat. We wanna hear from you. There’s emojis, GIFs, you can write text, whatever you want. We’re monitoring that as well. Okay. So let’s get started. Today, I have John and Nicole, and we will be going over developing a complete digital customer experience within Salesforce. So I’ll go ahead and pass it to them.

Speaker 0: Thank you. Hi. Alright. We’ll just share our screen now.

Speaker 2: That’s it. Okay.

Speaker 0: We will share in a second. Please bear with us. Technical difficulties.

Speaker 1: Do you

Speaker 2: wanna give an intro in

Speaker 0: the news? Sure. So, um, we are from close quarters. Um, we are a bank in The UK. We are a merchant bank. We are primarily b two b, and most of our customers are SMEs based in The UK and also Ireland. We in the last year or so, we’ve been working with Salesforce and some of our partners to build a complete digital platform for our customers, um, which we would like to share with you as soon as we can get this working.

Speaker 2: For some reason, it won’t let us.

Speaker 0: It was working fine before. Okay.

Speaker 2: Right. So

Speaker 0: There we go. We’re sharing our screens now. Is that is that coming through okay?

Speaker 1: We’re just seeing your more dreaming tab

Speaker 2: of the session itself. Okay.

Speaker 0: The title slide?

Speaker 2: No. Just the session. Uh, okay. Right.

Speaker 1: Apologies

Speaker 0: for this, everyone. We will get there.

Speaker 2: Can you say another way?

Speaker 1: If you wanna send it to me too, we can, you know, that way.

Speaker 0: I was gonna say, do do you have our slides together? I sent them over to to Mark Russ before. Do you do you have them? Yeah. I’ll grab those. Yeah. That might be easier with just having a little trouble. It’s it’s not Good. To share for some reason. Thank you.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Okay. Sorry, everybody.

Speaker 0: Apologies for that.

Speaker 2: Should we give a brief overview in the meantime? Yes. To be shared. Yes. So we went on this journey. The problem we had is that we had, um, websites on a different c CMS to the CRM that we use in house, and we needed to find a holistic solution that would allow us to bring everything into one place, which gave us the best benefit both for us internally as a business as well as the end results for our customers, allowing us to be able to control all the different touch points, um, and giving that customer journey the most polished, um, I suppose, experience that we we could give as well as be able to report on that. So hopefully, once we get our slides, um,

Speaker 0: we’ll be

Speaker 2: able to share. We’ll be able to take you through that journey and show you what we did and how we got to the end results.

Speaker 0: But our but our initial starting point was was that we felt that as a team, we we had the skills in house to to do a lot more than we have the, uh, systems that to allow us to do. We had a lot of, um, reliance on third party, um, developers that we kind of had to go through them a lot, And it just it just meant that things would be slower than we wanted them to be, and we just really wanted to take that back control autonomy back into the team and then have a system that can effectively every single touch point that customer has with us can effectively be captured within the same platform, which makes it easier for us to to manage those platforms but also to report on them as well. So that was kind of the the starting point of what we wanted to get to. Um, so yeah. And then we can show you sort of, like, how we went through it, the project wasn’t it, how we went through, and then also what it can do now. We’ve got some, uh, some examples as well once we get the slides up, obviously.

Speaker 2: Have you managed to find me?

Speaker 1: I have an outdated version. Can you paste it into the chat here? Nicole, I know you had messaged me earlier.

Speaker 2: Yes. You want me to send it to you in the chat? Yes, please. There’s no option for that.

Speaker 1: Okay. I just

Speaker 2: grabbed upload.

Speaker 1: Got it. Okay. Let me pull up mine. Okay. Here we go. Sorry, everyone. Hey. With us, we are good to go. Hit the agenda. We’ve got Nicole and John. K.

Speaker 0: Excellent.

Speaker 2: Thank you.

Speaker 0: Right.

Speaker 2: Right. So let’s get straight to it. Okay. Um, if you so this was the problem. Yeah. So we had a all of our websites on an external CMS. We were using Drupal at the time. Um, if you can just click for me. So we were using Drupal at the time. We had a one way system where the information could come from our website, um, to, um, our c our CRM, but it couldn’t really go anywhere. We couldn’t really do anything with it. We were completely reliant on our third party agencies. If we needed any development work done or anything fixed, we’d have to raise a ticket. Our timings were completely controlled by them. Uh, we didn’t really have a say in the process of how those fixes were made. The end result wasn’t always ideal for for what we were looking for. And our reports our our reports were completely focused on traffic. We weren’t able to show ROI to the business. We had absolutely no idea what our return on investment on any of our marketing collateral was. It was was sort of guesstimates. We had a kind of idea, but not a good idea. We were using general tools like Google Analytics, um, Looker Studio, but nothing that was we were able to actually say, yes, this customer came from this journey, and this is the amount of money that we made out of that. You could move on for us, please, Kelly.

Speaker 0: Okay. So this was the dream we had effectively. So I mentioned earlier about having autonomy. Um, so, Kelly, if you wanna just, um, skip forward four steps and just get the oh, there we go. So we wanna have autonomy within the team so that the team themselves I mentioned we’ve got a list of digital team here. We wanted to give them full control to be able to do what they needed to do without relying on our third party, the part party. Therefore, we wanted that self reliance to be able to change websites, build websites, change features as when we needed to. We also, as Nicole mentioned, content from, uh, the websites themselves were outside of our Salesforce also. Data could go in, but we couldn’t come back out. So personalization is something we really wanna focus on. Um, we couldn’t really do that in our website. The websites themselves are effectively the same journey regardless of who you as a customer were, where it were you’re based anywhere in The UK or what industry you work in. And the ROI reporting, that for us has always been a big thing. It’s we wanna be able to know what activity we’re doing, what event we’re exhibiting at, what campaign we’re running, what efforts we’re really what’s actually turning into business for, and what’s working, what isn’t. So that for us was the dream of where we wanted to get to. So that was the problem. That was the dream. So what did we do? I’ll pass my phone to Nicole now. Go to the next section, please, Carol. Thank you.

Speaker 2: So our solution. So first of all, we had to find a new partner. Uh, we were lucky enough to partner with OSF. This was quite a, um, a long process for us to find the right partner in order to do this. They needed to have the right personality fit. They needed to have the right skill set. And most importantly, they had to come in and budget. Um, and if anyone from OSF OSF has dialed in, hi, guys. Um, so they were they they worked with us and it was a great partnership, um, while working with them. And we were then able to do a full audit of our current three websites that we had. And to do this, we had to look at every single aspect of that website, every component that was built in the Drupal site, and how we were going to find something from a Salesforce application that was going to be able to do exactly what our website looked like currently, because it was a complete shift in lift. We didn’t want to make any changes at this stage. So working with OSF, we were able to go through our entire website, do that audit, and we decided we only needed 49 components because there were a lot of components that we could use for multiple functions. We then created a sandbox environment. You could just give one more click for me, please, Danny. And within the sandbox environment, we were then able to to build these components and OSF were able to build key pages for us to show us how these components could could work and how they could benefit all of our websites. And then from then, we were then able to take over the reins and completely build these websites ourselves. So this project with OSF was project only. There was no long term reliance that was gonna be needed at the end of this project. And they were building all the tools that we needed to be completely self sufficient within our digital marketing team. Next slide, please. So these new systems that we used were Experience Builder within Salesforce. This allowed us to have a drag and drop environment of all the components that were built for us that were custom made to our website. Some were straight off the shelf with a little bit of, um, extra bells and whistles added to it. So we just try to do as many off the shelf as we could rather than creating those custom, um, components. And by doing that, we were able to completely lift and shift and redesign our websites exactly as they were looking on Drupal. We were able to use product forms, which we already had implemented. This allowed us to have full, um, scope as to how many forms we actually wanted. So we could, if we need a campaign form today, no problem. We can build it and use it harder forms. Anyway, we can then have it accessible on the website straight away. In the past, I think we only had three web forms, and we had to just make them work within our strategy because they were all very limiting, and they were all completely hardcoded. Now we’ve got multiple forms for different reasons. And we also have, um, access to CMS workspace, which allows us to have a database of of, um, content, blogs, um, all sorts of of data and news and insights, everything that’s on our website. And we can, like a headless CMS, share that across all the different websites. So from an SEO perspective, we don’t have duplicated content. As well as if there’s legal documents that need updating, you’re updating it in one place.

Speaker 0: Okay. Next.

Speaker 2: So how we did this, we migrated over a thousand pages of content across those three websites. But not only did we rebuild the three websites we already had, but within our team, without the help of an external agency, we were able to build another four websites in house, building up their themes, building up their skeleton structure, and migrating their content over as well. And including that, we also created the customer portal. So by the end of this project, we actually had eight websites in the time frame that we were only supposed to have three. And this was purely because we had the tools now in house and the easy access to this, um, platform to use. Um, included in that, if you could just go back one, included in that, um, was crew making sure, obviously, being a financial institution, that everything had to be completely safe and secure. Um, and we were still able to get our WACC security implemented, um, on top of our website, which made sure that all of our traffic was being controlled. And this project started last year September and was completed by this year, June.

Speaker 0: Yeah. So that was that was obviously the problem, the dream, and what we did. So how does it look now? So, effectively, we have four systems talking to each other now within our Salesforce org. So, um, Experience Cloud, account engagement, Sales Cloud, and Analysis Studio. So if I go into Experience Cloud, if you just go to the next slide, please, Kelly. So within Experience Cloud, this is where all of our websites sit. So all traffic to our websites, we tag it with UTMs that gets captured on Experience Cloud on the on the various websites, um, and we catch up through into the forms. We have all of the the content is sitting in our headless CMS, so the content can be actually used across multiple sites in our portal. And we also have, uh, full control over this now, so we can have several websites on our portal. What there’s there’s actually room to have as many more as we want effectively. I think the 200 is what you can can control. That then talks to, um, account engagement. If we go on to the next slide. Account engagement here. This is where all of our forms is. So we use the inquiry forms, but we also use kiosk forms, which if anyone, uh, has used before for events, um, we can capture leads directly from events now. So we can capture things from offline as well as online. Again, it attracts, uh, attracts that UTM so we know exactly where leads, uh, are coming from. Uh, we do all of our emails and surveys from here, which are all automated. And if you’re here tomorrow, uh, Juvet in our team is doing a talk tomorrow on how we use, uh, get feedback to automate a lot of our, um, communications for customers who do tune in for that one. And then we also do our lead queue assignment where a lead comes into here, and it goes into Sales Cloud, which is on the next slide. Uh, so within Sales Cloud, this is effectively our CRM. Most of our sales team, uh, use this platform day to day. Within here, all of our leads sit here. We have different lead queues based on, uh, things like postcode or industry depending on where that, uh, that customer’s based. And, again, all of the UTMs are captured here too so that now we’ve counted from the website all the way through to account engagement through to Sales Cloud. And then we go into the final slide of this section where you have Analytics Studio where it all comes together. So we have lots of reports and dashboards in here where we can track exactly where are our leads coming from, how are they converting, how are they being closed one, where did they come from, and so on. So that’s essentially what we’ve built in those four platforms. I’m now going through, um, a couple of examples for you to to show you how that works in practice. So let’s say we build a new form in account engagement. We add hidden fields to capture the UTMs, and then we add this form to our web page. Go to the that’s a perfect thank you. Um, customer now visits on a search engine. They go to Google. They’ve searched in for a keyword or advert appears. They click on that link, and they land on our website. The UTM’s there in the URL. They then fill in that inquiry form, and the UTM’s for the URL are automatically populated into those hidden fields so we know exactly where that customer came from when that lead is created. So the form then creates a prospect in account engagement. The fields for the UTM’s are populated automatically so we know where it came from, what the medium was, and also what the campaign was. And then using the postcode in industry, we assign it to the relevant lead queue. Now that’s just how we do it in in postgraders. Uh, other businesses might only have one lead queue or might have multiple, but that we effectively look at the industry in postcode to know where that needs to be assigned currently. And then the next stage is that lead appears in the lead queue. Let’s say that that lead then does convert into an opportunity from our sales team and then it becomes closed won. That point, you might say, okay. Well, we had this closed opportunity. How do we know where it came from? Well, that’s where we now use our Analytics Studio. So on the next slide, you’ll see that we’ll be able to see exactly how many leads we have generated. We can then break that down by date range or by particular campaign or by source, by medium. We can also see, um, how many have been created, also the value of them as well. Um, if you just click one more yeah. So you can start to think through the value. And once you know the value and you know how much you spent on that particular campaign or that event or that channel, you can then start to work out a real time return on investment. So that’s where we we wanted to get to. So if we just move on to the next one, please? Thank you. So did we get what we wanted? Uh, did we get autonomy? Yes. We did. We can now build as many websites as we want. We can change those websites. We can, um, update features, content as we only need to without any reliance on a third party. Do we have self reliance? Yes. We do. Uh, the team are skilled upon the fact we have to use all these platforms. There’s effectively nothing we can’t do within those platforms now. Do we have personalization? Almost. We it’s coming. Um, we we’ve got the tools in place to do it. It’s probably the next thing we’re looking at at doing in, uh, in the next year or so. Maybe this time next year, we’ll be back here talking about how we implemented in the personalization. But the tools in place now to do that, we’ve got websites which talk to our CRM. We can effectively take the data from CRM to populate the content on our website. So if we know who you are as a customer, the website can become a very personalized experience for you. And finally, do we have ROI reporting? Yes. We do. Um, we can now report on effectively every channel, every source, every medium, and know exactly which ones are turning into leads and which ones are converted to business one, and also which ones are not converting so we can know where to to spend our energy and opportunities on more effectively. So, overall, I think we’re pretty happy with the project. Um, so, yeah, that’s that’s what we did in those results last year. Um, I’ll now pass it if that’s okay. If there’s any questions or anything anyone has, I think we’ve got some time now to to go through them.

Speaker 1: No questions yet. Just a lot of

Speaker 0: No question.

Speaker 1: Love for all your beautiful slides. So I’m glad we got those out for everybody. Good.

Speaker 0: I’m glad people like to see it was it was worth the wait, everyone. See? Thank you everyone for your patience.

Speaker 1: Um, how were you able to identify you had that problem in the first place? Were you, did you gather requirements? Um, did someone bring it to your attention? What got you to that place where you needed that change to go through this whole process? I think as a business, if you’re gonna be spending money on any marketing activity, you wanna be able to show, like, your return on investment on that. So for years, we’ve we’ve done

Speaker 2: it based on web traffic and the assumption of what that that return is. But being able to actually report on it and show actual figures and, um, actual money towards what we’re doing, um, I think is key for any investment.

Speaker 0: And I think also the limitations we had in the previous setup, it just became more and more, uh, difficult to to do things. You know, if we wanted to if we had a campaign and we wanted to something to like, a landing page with a inquiry form, sometimes we might have to put a ticket in. It could take days. It could take weeks. It’s you kind of have very little control over that, whereas that for it just those frustrations, I think you just got them more and more often. Um, and we were like, there’s too much reliance here on a on a on a partner that, um, sometimes that that’s great having a with I know I don’t wanna say that you shouldn’t work with agents. I think you should. I think they can offer a lot to the table. But I think if you have that reliance on them where literally you can’t get things done unless they do that, um, that that’s where I wanted to get away from. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Oh, it’s a

Speaker 0: real question.

Speaker 1: Uh, another question just came in. How did you set up the team which did the transformation?

Speaker 0: Um, so in terms of internally, I mean, it was effectively our digital team. So it was myself, Nicole, and, uh, Spencer, um, who did most of the the work on that side. Uh, we also had internally, we do have a Salesforce team internal. Uh, we work very closely with them. And then for an external partner, OSF, we we actually worked with Salesforce initially to say, this is what we wanna do. When is this possible? And if so, who should we speak to? And they gave us a short list of of agencies who could do this project and and OSF were top of that list. So we spoke to them and, yeah, we just got really well with that team, and it was clear that they they got what we were trying to do. So it was quite easy to find that partner to work with on this. And then internally, it was the team who worked on it. So effectively, it’s the team who can manage it now.

Speaker 1: Perfect. Thanks. Within that team, um, a lot of these components of the moving migration, the new platform setups, how much of it was manual compared to automatic? One of it.

Speaker 0: The best way to learn the best way to learn a platform. Yeah. No. We did to keep costs down, because we did talk to ourselves about potentially them migrating the content over for us, but actually thought it keeps the cost of the project down, but also it means that myself, Nicole, and Spencer, we were able to effectively build the vast majority of pages that that are on that website across all of those several websites. So it’s, like, over a thousand pages that we had to build and migrate that content. By the end of it, we pretty much knew experience builder inside and out. So that that was a great learning curve, I think.

Speaker 2: As well as the admin side of Salesforce. So I think the tools that we we gained in rebuilding those websites, we wouldn’t have been able to to learn any other way. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I completely understand. Um, what types of transformations did you make in your organization, your processes, your brand, culture? Were there any larger impacts that did you anticipate that were actually positive?

Speaker 2: I think that the whole Salesforce transformation has been going on for for Since 2015, I think, 2016. For quite some years. So we’ve, as an organization, have moved over into a Salesforce culture. Um, but as our part of it, just our digital transformation of it, there was quite a lot of process change because it meant our sales team had to learn new processes. They had to learn new ways of doing things. Um, how they, um, engage with our website had to change. So there was quite a lot there. But from a culture perspective, the end result is better for the customer and should make the process quicker and easier for for people internally. So once they realized that, I think the adoption of it was quite positive.

Speaker 0: Because we’re actually saying to the teams, rather than having to use multiple systems to log into, you’re just going into Salesforce. Yeah. And because it might be a slightly different process, it’s one system. So so, actually, we’ve we’ve had very little pushback at all from it. It’s all been very positive.

Speaker 2: We also have an agile approach, not something needs to be changed. It could be changed instantly, which helps everybody.

Speaker 1: On that part, did you have documentation and training sessions to kinda prep everybody ahead of this large transformation?

Speaker 2: Yes. So there was process documents for everything. Um, we created internal mic trailheads, which our learning and development team helped with. Yeah. Um, training was rolled out so we can at least see who’s actually done that training, um, and if they need to follow-up on it. So yes. Absolutely.

Speaker 1: And a quick question on your tech stack. How did you end up on such a Salesforce heavy tech stack and how do you decide to bring in both Pardot account engagement, um, slash experience cloud? There’s a lot of moving parts here.

Speaker 0: Um, well, I think it was just the natural progression of it really because we had Salesforce as a CRM initially. With that, we got what was then part of at at the time, so we we were using that. Uh, we did use b two b marketing analytics for a while, which then kinda became Tableau CRM analytics, which then became marketing analytics. So it was after a while, we’re like, well, hold on. We’re doing most of our marketing here within with the data we have in CRM, we’re using Pardot, uh, for all of our emails and campaigns. We’ve captured information in Pardot. We’re doing our reports in Analytics Studio. The next stage felt, well, actually, if we have the websites there too, it’s one platform. It’s one system. They’re all talking to each other, and we can manage it all in one place. So it kind of just became like a a natural sort of idea of actually, will that make sense to to go that route, I think? So it was more of a having our websites and our our digital, uh, platforms external to that. Actually, after a while, I was like, well, why are they external? Because it’s another system we have to manage to support, to host, uh, more training. We have to get integrations with the with Salesforce and so on. We know we’re gonna be with Salesforce for for the foreseeable. That’s bringing the websites into into that platform. So it was it wasn’t really much of a a business case for that part, really. It was a Just depends. Why aren’t we? Yeah.

Speaker 1: Definitely. Makes sense to bring them all together instead of having redundant technology. If you were to do it again, are there any things you would skip, do differently? Just what is your feeling if you had to tell someone before they began this journey?

Speaker 0: Yeah. I think I think overall, we did I think the process we took was the right process. I think I think we spent a long time finding the right agency and gathering the requirements of the technical requirements of, okay. We have these three websites. If we’re to rebuild these, what will that look like? What will each component do? How do we manage them? So we did a lot a large part of the project was effectively just scope, really. How is this going to work? Um, finding the right partner, I think, is the most important part. Um, getting the right team internally getting buy in, that’s obviously important, but we were very lucky that because we weren’t really promoting, uh, a new platform, a new system. We were saying it’s an existing one in Salesforce. It’s just a new component within it. That was much easier to to sell in. I do think, though, if we were to to start again, one thing we we’ve learned is that bringing someone who is a Salesforce SEO specialist in at the beginning, we found that the way websites work with experience builder is very different to how we use things to headless CMS effectively.

Speaker 2: There’s a lot of quirks.

Speaker 0: A lot of quirks. Yeah.

Speaker 2: You can look at it from a SEO perspective. But if you really wanna get down to the the grits of the SEO on Salesforce, you actually do need a Salesforce SEO expert. Yeah. It’s not a bad thing, but you just need someone that understands the quirks of Salesforce.

Speaker 0: Yeah. So we’ve we’ve been working with someone since this project went live. I think that’d be about we probably should have bought them in sooner, but that’s what we you know, we live in there. Right?

Speaker 1: Definitely. Yeah. You can only improve from here.

Speaker 0: Exactly. Exactly.

Speaker 1: Okay. We have about two minutes left. Um, any other questions for Nicole and John here? Okay. No. No problem. No? So I think we’ll let you guys go then. Um, as always, this will be recorded. Thank you for dealing with us through the beginning of the technical issues. Yes.

Speaker 0: Thank you. Apologies.

Speaker 2: We thank you for the

Speaker 1: We got it, though. Though. With the most beautiful slides, probably, of Marjorie. If you have any other questions, feel free to follow John and Nicole on LinkedIn. There’s also an attendee chat section within this platform if you have any other follow-up questions. Otherwise, enjoy the rest of your MAR dreaming day today. We’ll see you throughout the rest of the week.

Speaker 2: Thank you. Thanks, everyone.

Speaker 0: Bye.