Making your data work harder with Adobe and Salesforce

The majority of clients we work with today are either using or looking at procuring an enterprise CRM system. Salesforce is an enormously popular candidate, with a 19.5% market share in the CRM arena in 2018. 

Similarly, the vast majority of organisations will be actively using, or procuring, a website content management system. Very often, the CMS and CRM systems will have been selected separately, with integration an afterthought. 

Adobe Experience Manager is typically one of the front-runners for an enterprise looking for a content management system. However, it is far more than just a CMS for a website. The full potential of the platform is often not being realised. 

One aspect of that potential is leveraging data that exists in CRM systems – like Salesforce - and using it to create a feedback loop between CMS and CRM, generating personalised experiences on the website and ensuring data flows seamlessly back and forth. 

The first step 

Adobe provide an out-of-the-box integration for Salesforce. It makes sense to use that as the starting point in understanding how the two systems can talk to each other.  

It’s simple to set up and will allow clients to realise the benefits of getting the two systems talking to each other rapidly – without a significant investment of time or effort. 

Adobe have published a guide to enabling the integration. The integration itself is fairly basic, and makes some assumptions about where your AEM data is stored, but it will allow you to: 

• Send users registered in AEM to Salesforce as leads 
• Surface Salesforce lead / contact information in AEM for use in personalisation 
• Surface data from Salesforce in AEM components 

Next steps 

The next steps will depend on two things - your current level of maturity when it comes to personalisation, and your wider digital ecosystem. 

For example, assuming that you’ve gone ahead and wired up the integration mentioned previously, you could then look at using Adobe Target and Adobe Audience Manager to start segmenting your audience and personalising your content at greater scale, with greater granularity. 

Target and Audience Manager can be used across multiple channels, not just web, and they utilise Adobe’s Sensei AI technology to identify trends and anomalies that you can capitalise on. A well-architected solution like this will result in a feedback loop allowing you to constantly learn and refine from the masses of data that is available, using the built-in automation and AI offered by these tools to keep costs down and the pace of innovation high. 

The insights gleaned from having a sophisticated, automated personalisation programme can then be fed back into Salesforce – Salesforce providing that coveted ‘single view of the customer’, the Adobe Experience Cloud allowing you to act upon the customer insight you have stored in Salesforce. 
However, in terms of your digital estate, a point to point integration between AEM and Salesforce may be at odds with your wider digital architecture strategy. 

Whilst the Adobe out-of-the-box integration may be better than not having any integration, it may be preferable to look at a publish / subscribe model for sending data between systems. 

Coupling systems tightly together makes it more difficult to change them and introduces dependencies on availability of individual systems for the platform as a whole. 

A potentially better architecture is one that is loosely coupled. Having a publish / subscribe architecture also means all systems can potentially consume data from AEM, not just Salesforce.

Ultimately, the best approach will depend on the specifics of the platform in question and what the requirements are – but if you haven’t yet explored connecting Adobe Experience Manager with Salesforce, then you should definitely consider doing so. 

If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you integrate Adobe and Salesforce please get in touch.