An independent Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next consultant

Looking at Marketing Cloud Next

If your team runs its marketing automation on Salesforce, one open question is whether to move to Marketing Cloud Next.

I’m Alexander Andersson, an independent Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next consultant, with fifteen-plus years running CRM from the inside.

Next is Salesforce’s rebuild of Marketing Cloud, on Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud) and Agentforce. Many teams still run the earlier product, Marketing Cloud Engagement.

Whether and how to move to Next

Most of the decision to move is about the program you run. Before any Marketing Cloud Next implementation, these are the first things I look at:

• The programs you run today. Which journeys earn their place, which nobody has checked in a while, and which would be rebuilt from the trigger up.
• The data underneath. Next runs on Data 360, so the question is whether the events your triggers need, and the consent behind them, reach it in a shape a segment can use.
• What you’d hand to an agent. Briefs, segments, content and journeys are all open to Agentforce. Each needs a guardrail someone on your team owns, and a job it does better than the person doing it now.
• How you’ll know it worked. A holdout group where the volumes allow it, so a journey in Next is read against customers who didn’t get it.

That list is where a Salesforce Marketing Cloud audit would start. With me it’s the first step of the work below.

What I do as a Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next consultant

• Own the platform and the program. As Fractional Head of CRM I sit in your team part-time, decide what runs in Next and build it. It fits a team that has bought the platform and has nobody senior deciding what it should do.
• Build one program in Next. Onboarding, retention, win-back, referral or loyalty, with its segments, journeys and measurement. That’s a fixed-scope lifecycle marketing program; when I leave, it’s running in Next.
• Work out where Agentforce pays off. The AI marketing audit ranks which jobs are worth giving to AI agents in Next, and what to build first. It runs on a lesson from Spark, the AI email and content tool I built on Braze at Tibber, where the feature the tool was designed around went unused. So the first question for any agent is what job it does for your team.

Who you’d be working with

I was Head of CRM at IKEA Ingka Group across 30+ markets, and at Bauer Media Group across 20+ brands in six European markets, where I built CRM as a revenue line across the portfolio. Bauer’s CRM ran on Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and its receipt is below. At Tibber, energy-tech in four markets, I built the referral program and Spark; those receipts are on the home page. The work that carries from those roles to any platform is deciding which journeys run, which wait, where consent stops a send and how a program proves what it adds.

Next is one of three CRM platforms I build in hands-on, alongside Braze and Klaviyo. For data and scoring I work in Databricks, XGBoost, MLflow and Python.

Based in Malmö, a short train ride from Copenhagen. I work in Swedish or English.

Where to start

Start with the 20-minute call below. If someone has already proposed a move to Next, we start with the flow the proposal matters most for.