What’s it like working for a Marketing Cloud Consultancy?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is aimed at marketing professionals who are looking to gain a better understanding of customers by giving them the ability to speak to customers with the right message, in the right tone, at the right time. This platform has so many possibilities, all targeted around the world of marketing with the objective of putting the customer at the centre of every interaction and experience. Trying to manage how and when a customer interacts with a brand can be complicated just by using traditional methods but Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows you tailor make content for customers across multiple channels such as email, online, mobile, e-commerce, social and communities, and report back in real time.

Over the next few weeks we are talking about what it’s like working in a Marketing Cloud Career with a range of guest speakers:

• Day in the Life of a Marketing Cloud Consultancy  
• Day in the Life of a Marketing Cloud Consultant
• Day in the Life of a Marketing Cloud Admin 

To get a weekly notification of the up coming blog series, sign up to our Boost your Salesforce Career Bulletin. Or if you want to take your knowledge even further, check out our most recent Marketing Cloud Discovery Session and hear from guest speakers as they share their tips, advice and answer your questions. Register to access the replay.

What is it like working for a Marketing Cloud Consultancy?

This weeks blog is all about what is it like working for a Marketing Cloud Consultancy as we shine the spotlight on Tom Ryan, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, MarCloud.

Why did you decide to launch a Marketing Cloud Consultancy?

I want to bring together other passionate people who also love solving Marketing Cloud problems. By building an elite team of innovators, we’re creating a challenging, fulfilling and rewarding environment that attracts the best talent in the space, which is great news for our clients.

What makes you different as a Consultancy to others out there?

Innovation and a relentless desire to continuously optimise the Marketing Cloud platforms. We’re building world-first apps, designing unique solutions and providing on-demand training courses for clients and aspiring MarTech experts!

What are the benefits of working for a Consultancy as opposed to in-house?

I’ve been agency, client-side and consultancy-side myself and I can boil this down to a top four:

1. Fulfillment – being a subject matter expert means you’ll often feel like the smartest person in the room on a specific topic. You’re building solutions that clients will actually use and you can see it from idea all the way through to results. Finally, by being Consultancy-side, your voice holds more weight and you aren’t involved in any internal client-side politics or bureaucracy. 
2. Learning – you won’t experience anything else like it. If you want to be the best, you need to be exposed to lots of different problems. However, one thing often overlooked is our clients. We work with very senior marketing experts and we’re always learning, collaborating and growing off their feedback and ideas. 
3. Every day is different – forget any repetitive tasks or mundane meetings, consultancy life is fast-paced and often throws curveballs. Yes, this can be stressful but you always have an amazing team around you and once solved, that’s where fulfillment lives. 
4. Autonomy – consultancies thrive in efficient environments so feel free to say no to that calendar invite and take initiative by suggesting you meet a client face-to-face (especially if they’re based in cool locations!). You are responsible for being proactive and using your intiative to do the best for our clients.

What type of projects do you work on?

Anything related to marketing automation. We’ve developed a bit of a rep for being the team you call when the customer is really in a twist over their marketing ROI or their Sales and Maketing alignment. Our team are unreal at getting root cause pains found and fixed. This typically means we are involved across Salesforce clouds like involves: 

• Marketing Cloud Engagement & Account Engagment (fka Pardot)
• Sales Cloud
• Service Cloud
• Development work (HTML/CSS/JS/AMPscript/SSJS/APEX/React)

We could be working on a very strategic transformation project one day and then switching to training and troubleshooting the next. It’s common for us to be the first to explore a new integration or strategy for combining softwares that have never met before! 

And of course, there is all of the marketing campaigns that we get to build, report on and enjoy the results.

What skills and attributes do you look for in talent you hire?

To be successful at MarCloud, our team look for people who are:

• Honest – saying you don’t know something or owning up when a mistake is made is seen as a positive at MarCloud because it gives us an opportunity to swarm and fix problems together.
• Curious – someone who dives head first into a problem to explore possible solutions is a person who is likely improving day by day. This natural curiosity for problems goes a long way and will make you very popular with our team. 
• Brave – being bold and sharing your ideas regardless of your seniority in the company is the right thing to do as it contributes towards a collaborative culture. 
• Good communicators – Salesforce can be complicated so how someone conveys information is crucial for success, whether it’s talking to a colleague or talking to a client, it all matters equally. We want to be around people who make our work easier! 
• Always improving – what certification have you got your eyes on? What do you want to specialise in and do you have a plan to get there? Ambition with a tangible plan is seriously exciting.

How is success measured for the Company?

From a business perspective we look at lots of metrics but our core focus is: 

• Client satisfaction
• Client retention 
• Revenue

For our team, we have different KPI’s per job function but in a nutshell we look at: 

• Customer satisfaction (we have a bonus scheme tied to this)
• Utilisation
• New skills acquired (and certifications)
• Business impact – getting involved with MarCloud side projects

What do you think is the future of Marketing Cloud?

Marketing Cloud is going to continue to get closer and closer to core Sales Cloud and integrations will be made even easier to implement. At some point, Marketing Cloud will benefit from the same level of integration as MCAE (fka Pardot but in it’s own way). 

Beyond this, Artificial Intelligence will play a starring role on the platform which will change the way we report on campaigns but also other useful functions will being baked in. Things like generating a very targetted email to a specific customer segment at the click of a button and even generating an AI image of your choosing to add to a landing page. The possibilities are endless.

Why do you think people should skill up in Marketing Cloud?

It’s an exciting time to work on the worlds #1 CRM marketing platform. It’s a skillset that is not going anywhere anytime soon and by having a deep understanding of the platforms as a core speciality, you could become an innovator just like us.

MarCloud is a leading marketing automation consultancy and Salesforce partner specialising in Pardot, Marketing Cloud and Salesforce CRM.

Our mission is to bring together the most passionate and competent Salesforce marketing professionals in the space to make businesses more competitive through the effective use of the entire Marketing Cloud and Salesforce CRM.

We’re partners with Salesforce and Salesforce.org, currently have 4 Salesforce Marketing Champions in the team, are accredited ISO27001 certification and are trusted by some of the biggest companies in the world.