When it comes to its customers and users, Salesforce wears a lot of hats. Its suite of CRM, marketing, and commerce technologies help thousands of companies find success on a daily basis by growing their pipeline, converting customers, and creating impactful customer experiences across CRM, commerce, marketing, customer service, and much more. But in order to ensure its customers’ success, Salesforce still has to focus on its own pipeline and growth.
Like Salesforce, Studio Science’s hat collection is vast. In addition to being a long-term consulting partner for Salesforce users, Studio Science has also served as one of the tech company’s brand and CX consultancies for years. And when Salesforce’s teams needed to expand what was possible with its commerce products, it asked Studio Science to throw on its design and technology hat to help.
At the beginning of 2024, Salesforce Commerce Cloud CMO Kelly Thacker approached Studio Science with a request: help the team brainstorm how to create go-to-market assets that position its Core and Commerce Cloud platforms as best-in-class solutions and help the team grow its pipeline. In order to do that, Salesforce needed to determine both how to get this in front of customers and also how to educate and enable its sellers.
The teams began with storyboards, but the goal for Salesforce was always to expand the work into a real, tangible demo. Several hurdles stood in the way, the tallest being time, as Salesforce hoped to launch the first iteration of the demo at its TrailblazerDX conference just three months later, with a second phase in time for its Connections conference in late May.
This was not a proof of concept. The directive for the initial – and then subsequent – demos was that they be real. This both meant that the solutions featured could actually be created should an organization ask for them, but also that what is shown is not just a Figma file of screenshots and half-created ideas. If these were going to be found on stage, they had to be the real thing.
The plan was to first create a demo focused on a direct-to-consumer path using commerce on the Salesforce Lightning Platform. This would be presented at TrailblazerDX. Then after seeing the demo first hand, Salesforce’s Data Cloud team immediately realized the value and potential of working with Studio Science to build on top of the solution. The team began working with Studio Science to tell a cross-cloud story with Data Cloud at the center of the tech stack for Connections just three months later. This new partnership would help broaden the value of Salesforce across the C-suite with new bleeding-edge technology.
But before all of that, Salesforce needed a story. Because despite having impressive technology, the message falls short without the right narrative. The Studio Science and Salesforce teams collaborated on the use case and personas it wanted to highlight, crafting the right story arc to let the technology being featured shine. Studio Science’s CX team created a fictional home renovation brand called EcoElite, which would be the central focal point of the demos.
With a brand and story in place, Studio Science’s design and technical teams got to work bringing it to life. Working on an expedited timeline compared to a typical implementation, Studio Science prioritized the features most important to Salesforce, while maintaining true functionality. The EcoElite site consisted of product pages with 3D imagery thanks to an integration with ThreeKit, product search, smart promotions, recommendations, and even a payment gateway to show a test mode of the full payment process using credit cards.
From a Data Cloud perspective, the goal was to redefine what a CRM could look like, personalizing the experience for each person logging in and showing data and action updates in real time. CRM data was integrated with the commerce platform, allowing customers and fictional EcoElite employees to see customer purchase history, activity, attributes, and preferences. One of the biggest challenges was the development of Co-Pilot, a real AI chatbot built into the site that could provide recommendations, initiate service cases, and handle order management logistics.
In the end, the demo showcased both the B2B and B2C experience with a site integrated with Data Cloud, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud. Salesforce could now detail everything from how to set up a new storefront and build personalized promotions to the full B2C consumer journey of buying a new faucet and a B2B reseller’s capabilities working inside a dealer portal.
These assets allow Salesforce to demonstrate its competitive advantage in being able to quickly enable commerce and cross-channel experiences with real-time data and AI interactions natively to the platforms.
With the live, interactive demos complete, it was time to spread the word. Studio Science experts joined the Commerce Cloud teams at Trailblazer DX and Connections, performing in-person demos at their booths to show the power of the platforms. The teams also created multiple videos, from one-minute teasers to in-depth deep dives, and has hosted a number of webinars and virtual presentations to both internal Salesforce teams and their clients and prospects to walk through the solutions and capabilities.
Promotional efforts are ongoing, with new iterations of the materials being created and adapted based on the audience and need. Studio Science is in the process of helping multiple companies implement these solutions and recognize ROI. As they plan their tech stacks for 2025 and beyond, they now have a better idea of what’s possible and inspiration for the next generation of commerce using Salesforce platforms.
