Miracle happened. Actually miracles.
What we worked on for a few months, finally has been realized and success. With Fabio and Orla we agreed to organize Salesforce Certification Days at the Actum office. We would provide space and refreshment, they will provide free certification vouchers as they want to help partners to get more certified.
All set in motion, mailing to partners has been sent, personally reach out and finally, at the beginning of November, just a day before Prague Innovation Days, people gathered in our offices to pass their next certifications. At the end we had 50+ attempts during two time slots, where people from the whole CEE showed their readiness.
And readiness was high as 70 % of them passed and gained a new certification. We had some experienced people working on their architect exams, some newbies who covered their very first one, we even had one who used to be certified but let their certifications expire. We had the typical mix of no-problems and challenges, where our IT was able to quickly secure two clean computers for those who had challenges with their lock-down corporate laptops.
Data Cloud Certified
I could not let this opportunity pass without proper try and for that I chose the last certification Salesforce published just a few weeks ago – Data Cloud Consultant.
I must say, that the technology is interesting. Historically we tried all we could to limit duplicates in the system, using out-of-the-box functionality or 3rd party applications. Sometimes – I have at least one such customer – we let duplicates in the system intentionally, the reason being external databases they buy and want to see how many records they already have in the system. Cleaning data in such case would mean paying again and again for the non-clean/old data.
Data Cloud uses a different approach, keeping all those „duplicates“ across one or multiple systems and just virtually merging them based on set identity resolution rules. After that it can calculate all kind of insights to add some additional meanings to data (such as the total of all orders across different identities) and finally you can segment data and push them somewhere (Amazon S3, Marketing Cloud, Google) or just visualize in Salesforce.
There is a great trailmix and partners have (probably, didn’t check) some extra content in the Partner Learning Camp. Arjan is happy what he learnt, Johann shared how he studied and key take aways and I would say he hit the nail – as long as you understand the order of operations in the process (Ingest -> Map -> Transform -> Segment -> Activate) you are good to go and figure out the answers. Having a clue about technologies around will definitely help, as well as realizing it is cloud based solution, which will (probably) limit some applications and they use different one for the same purpose. I really loved all the information about harmonization and unification as they clear show how much you need to understand your data (and there are plenty of questions about it).
Real life
It is pretty interesting system after all, which will allow us (finally!) to make some sense of CzechDreamin data. Yes, our own Salesforce is a mess, because we work on yearly basis and use the simplest approach which is possible. Every year our web-to-lead form will allow people to submit their abstracts and we don’t look at the history, we only filter down that one year. Which means that we have multiple leads for the same person across years or just because they submitted multiple session in a single year. With Data Cloud, which we get for free as we are still under 10 000 unified profiles, we can finally see the complete history on every single (duplicated) lead.
Cannot be excited more for that!