Michiel van Gaalen: Application Architecture, Consulting, and Becoming a Member of the SFMC Community

AL: Great. So actually there’s one thing that you said that to me being, you know, having a background in psychology. You said you’ve always been interested in measuring people’s behaviour and seeing how that can be influenced. So where does that come from?

MG: Well, I did a marketing… a background and especially direct marketing and… the, yeah, that’s what we did during a joint study mainly by analytics. So in a regular direct marketing, we would send out… a postal mail and then we expect certain kinds of, we could measure usually by after months looking back into the customer database and see, what happens and then make an assumption that our campaign was the campaign that influenced that, that’s specific piece of behavior and that, so that’s there’s no, yeah. There’s no. I think that’s because of the education. Yeah. And I like pushing people’s buttons. So.

AL: Okay. So listeners beware.

MG: Yeah.

AL: Well, I find it interesting though because it’s interesting just to understand a bit better the history of marketing. I think even, as a digital marketer, as a technical marketer, just recently, I was reading The Boron Letters. I don’t know if you’ve heard about that, but it’s all about direct postal mail kind of curious because they’re doing all these systems these days, but do you think there’s still a place for postal mail in today’s marketing?

MG: Maybe maybe more so now because who’s expecting to get something through the post. So if it’s about attention on getting attention, then maybe that’s a channel you should incorporate. And, and the fun thing is now you can, I don’t think maybe that’s maybe also good, for Marketing Cloud for Journey Builder as an activity. There are postal services that also have API in the page is where you can in your automated campaigns, you can send a, postal message. So cards so then you can even send, the picture and the text you have to merge in. And then that will go out. I would be amazed if, I would get that. Yeah.

AL: Yeah, that would be great. I mean so much, I can comment on this one. But so for one, we are talking actually with a Swiss insurance company, that still wants to use our product, to segment their data, and the output is meant to go to direct mails. On the other hand, I’ve actually been toying with this idea of doing a direct mail campaign for our own company. So, I’m glad to hear that, you know, someone like you said like, yeah, that could work. So someone’s already backing me up for this idea.

MG: That’s that’s just one. Maybe, if you were to ask my kids that’s a weird thing. I saw an envelope yesterday lying in the kitchen for my eldest son. He’s 18, and it was from our tax service, and he’s getting money back, from the IRS, the tax he’s getting a refund, but he just didn’t notice. He’s not waiting for me. So, we put it on the counter that he’s just not looking at it. So there’s maybe you have to test and probably people will make more responsive, to direct mail than the young ones.

AL: Well, is always know your audience, right?

MG: And test. Yeah.

AL: So, you have an extensive background in both marketing and tech. So I suppose you feel pretty at home with SFMC right now?

MG: Yeah. It’s a sweet spot for me. Yeah.

AL: I can imagine now aside Marketing Cloud, you also became a certified Salesforce application architect. Can you explain to our viewers what that means?

MG: Okay. Well, you probably know, the circlification for Marketing Cloud, a developer consultant and I, that’s, the basic if you want to level up.

Then, the other side is Salesforce. Maybe hard to imagine from a marketing system. But the first, there was Salesforce Service Cloud and Sales Cloud… already since I believe since 99. So that was first CRM or yeah a funnel and Contact Management System, in the market as a Cloud solution, which was weird because back in that time usually if you wanted to have functionality or program, you have to install something on computer… but they were the first cloud-based. I think so, that was nice. But you also have certifications, for that. And that platform is if you think Marketing Cloud is complex, that platform is as is more complex and they have kind of a… double way of how you approach your certification. The the top level, the top dogs, in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, as are certified technical architects and I think they’re 250. Wow. They really know everything about the platform. And you have two way you have two streams, to achieve that level. One is application architect and that’s more on the functional side of the system. So I know the features… and the data structure. And there’s also systems architect. And that’s more, the development process… and programming side, of Salesforce. If you have both those architect extent, you can apply for sure technical architect and it’s not only the knowledge you need to have them but also extensive experience. So, I’m on one side of that pyramids, I’m now application but I have to be way more technical, to either apply to be able to apply for cetytechnical architect. And that’s not in my scope for now. I’m really helping do, the functional on the business side, of things. And as an application architect, it’s really… it broadens how you look at a solution. So it’s usually easy to say, okay, this, there’s a feature for this and I start using it. But as an architect, you also have the view of how the back end of the system works and how it the governor limits, of the system. And maybe on longterm strategy on your application development. 

AL: So, you mentioned it gives you a different view on how the whole thing works, how it should work, longterm back end, where there’s some like takeaways or things that surprised you as you did this.

MG: Yeah. In, in relation… to Marketing Clouds, it really surprised me that if you deviate and that’s probably also a normal, in Salesforce, if you deviate, from the standards then for the long term is something can work. For example, if you connect the Marketing Cloud connector and you’ve I did some of things with accounts and contacts or person accounts, then it could not function the way, you would expect it, to do. And that’s I think also kind of on architects work cause I love to work in also integration and it’s a very important one then for us that’s kind of surprise me. And for me a whole new domain was also a, to get my PD-1 (platform developer one) in which I had to learn Apex and I did a little bit of programming but usually that’s not people are in for, but, that was really again really hard me but also really useful because now I’m able, to make a quick demos and do the more accounts of or understand what the developers, I work with, are actually doing the…

AL: You can challenge them too.

MG: Yeah, they take me more serious.

AL:  one of us one of us.

MG: No, that will never happen.

AL: But, but so what I think you said about staying close to standards is something that’s maybe a bit counter intuitive, but I’ve experienced this too in previous projects where I mean on the one hand, the power of Salesforce is that it’s just so customizable of course, but especially the like if you go that route over time, you’re gonna miss out on releases that affect standard functionality, for instance.

MG: Yeah. And… that’s important, to take into account. And it also goes if you stay just within a service part, it’s the same way if you deviate or sometimes there’s functionality that you can use that may fit 90 percent of your use case. And there are companies that say, then well, we wanted it to fit 100 percent. So we kind of that functionality ourselves. If you do that, then future updates of that functionality won’t be for you. And that’s a shame. So, yeah, that’s I think the downside, of a system that serves the general purpose. So I think, yeah.

AL: So something entirely different in your intro, you also refer to a bit of an unusual business you run on the site. I think the English translation is “pigs in a blanket” is, is that right?

MG: Yeah, pigs in a blanket.

AL: Can you tell us a bit more about that?

MG: Yeah. I usually find there’s… work shouldn’t be… everything, in your life. There should be more that’s, that is for you. And for me, I’m really occupied usually with my work. So I really need it to find an additional activity besides sports… that’s what’s that I go to produce to empty my mouth. And I baking… making things for hours and kneading with my hands and, that was something, that I picked up at. I like to cook, sometimes I cook at other restaurants. And at one time I was the patissier. So, the person who makes the desserts and the bread, in the kitchen, I was at a Michelin Star restaurant. I was there for one day working with one of those guys and the, that really… started my love, for baking bread and fixing plans. Was that’s a very traditional thing in the province I come from and I’m not living there anymore. So I decided to make that for myself. Yeah, it’s, and that’s but that turned out to be a lot of people that were missing that, that’s the work. And I started baking that in a professional way. So we now do, I think between two and five thousand deliveries a week 

We’re fully eCommerce. So, we don’t have a shop, we deliver it at home. And for me, this is also kind of a playground, to do all the kind of marketing things, my customers maybe want some to love for all kinds of reasons and usually the new features or Facebook for example, or Google. I like to play around with that. And so this way I know what’s happening also, in that place and bakery. Yeah.

AL: And having tried them, I would recommend them by the way. For listeners who are like in the Benelux area who can order it. I don’t think is shipped to the U.S.. So our viewers there may be a bit disappointed, but.

Yeah, that’s too bad. We’ll put the link in the description.

AL: Yeah, sure. We will do that for sure. Let’s go back to Marketing Cloud for a moment though because I mean, aside all the things that you already mentioned, you’re also running the Salesforce Marketing Cloud user group in the Netherlands. So what is that all about?

MG: Well, that started, I think three years ago… at that time, there was no, the user base wasn’t that big in the Netherlands. There was hardly any documentation, or things online where you could share knowledge, with people. So I thought, well… I’d like to have a beer, some one every once in a while the people who are users. So I started writing down. I didn’t done that for a year. I just make a note of all the companies that we’re using Marketing Cloud and which over works at Salesforce or… which I found online and I invited them for, but I turned out in the first section to be already 40-ish people. I don’t know if you were there, for the first section I did.

AL: I’ve been to one or two of them but they were pretty big already, I think.

MG: Okay. Yeah. And that’s… nowadays, we serve around, yeah, between 30 and 60 people per person… and we started out, we still want that to do. But because of the COVID that’s a bit different, but usually the format is that, we start, we have foods. We always have, nice foods and one or two speakers and discussion and, you know, of course here afterwards and, the fun thing here is it’s very social group people come to talk to, to their peers. Lots of them are consultants from agencies, developers also end clients. I think that’s one third… and that’s all mixes and manuals and can talk Salesforce and all kinds of other things. Yeah. And currently, it’s because of COVID, it’s different. We, we, I’m really hesitant, to do a live session.

AL: I was gonna ask, yeah, how’s it been?

MG: Yeah. For me, I always had on my room to record sessions. So that’s one thing we do now we, we’re doing. So. We just had… our third online session and yeah, we just do the first few times we organize that through BlueJeans. And I must say it’s different… because the social part is less, it’s more on the content. What we also see is that there are less people… really attending. So we have really high numbers registering. So 60 plus also from abroad. So that’s nice. So we get a more a wider audience. So that also means you can have more niche topics… because you get, we’ll get the audience anyways. And what we also see is that, the attendance like attendance in the end is also lower. And then the show rate, is higher than what we’re what we used to.

AL: But, I guess it’s a lower threshold to attend. Of course, they don’t have to.

MG: Yeah. I, and not because we didn’t arrange for foods or you don’t have to really be embarrassed that so go up. But what we do see because we publish… the recordings I do they make up for this is 10 a little bit more even than so that’s and that’s also a long bit of content. So, yeah, I’d like to have more people like because that’s good for discussion but they eventually watch it anyway which was a kind of a surprise. Yeah, because I don’t know, I see with you because there’s a lot of sessions you can attend. You miss probably as well. Show as well. Probably, do you watch the recording afterwards?

AL: I have so many recordings bookmarked. It’s yeah. But, but I do have to say that the sessions that you guys are hosting are really good and you have, very catchy headlines. So I do usually register and I try to watch a recording. And if I don’t watch it myself, I distribute it in, you know, in the company here. So.

AL: Yeah. The, the headlines that comes from last year I attended Salesforce Dreamforce and the was community group leaders session they organized for all the group leaders worldwide and someone got a prize for the most catchy headline. So I was like that’s for next year. I want to have that.

AL: And, do you have any other thing on you mentioned a road map? Do do you have other things on your user group roadmap? So to speak?

MG: Yeah. For me, I think one of the next session will be on careers. So a lot of people entering the job market at the moment. I also hear from… other freelancers that… would like to make a little bit. Every freelancer does a lot of different jobs. And it’s oftentimes hard to be very specific in what you do and to be recognized in, okay, you need to dispersion for this type of job. And in the past it mobile marketing, online marketing, develop mobile apps, as a consultant, it business intelligence. So I couldn’t explain anyone, on what I did and, I think a lot of freelancers have the same… have the same feeling and I think a lot of professionals in the market as well. So, this, yeah, this gives it also a bit, of a recognizable profile, to people. And I think concession on career planning and then educating yourself, on Salesforce. And so Marketing Cloud… that’s what I like to have a session on. And usually what I do now is… very often I people ask me and I do one on one session, but that also takes a lot of a lot of time. And maybe that, this I can record the session and then it’s scale like and just send them the link to be in this is the link.

AL: Is that an E-learning, right?

MG: Yeah.

AL: Well, actually since you brought up like Marketing Cloud career planning, is there some piece of advice you would have for people who just start out with SFMC?

MG: Yeah. The, the, of course, to get certified that’s the way to start, the basic is always the e-mail specialist which is especially if you have an e-mail marketing background is fairly easy. And, but if you really want also to do inventions and implementations and consultant, is a must that’s, on the knowledge site… a user group attending a user group that’s important, especially mine, of course. But there are other groups and that’s the good thing about that everything is online. Now there are the user groups that do really good sessions. So, London as and Melbourne is, very good. And there, lots more so that’s important. And there are a couple of… web blocks that write, yeah, how to do things in social marketing client, HowToSFMC, you probably already got that. What I would suggest is to, to follow all those authors of those web locks on Twitter. Because Salesforce has a very active Twitter community. I stopped using Twitter up until I started to specializing in Salesforce. But yeah, I follow their… all the authors but also Salesforce MVPs. So that those are the people that have demonstrated a lot of skills and they are also very so people. So they are very easy to reach out to and they are really willing to help you with, any questions you have. And then for marketing out, you can just search for MVP, and Marketing Clouds. And then, you probably have a list of 10, 20. I don’t know people who, you can add, who also publish it regularly. Yeah.

AL: Absolutely. Yeah.

MG: How did that start for you?

AL: Yeah. The Marketing Cloud experience. Actually, I came from the Pardot side. I mean, originally, my first CRM project was even Veeva so, the pharma vertical build on top of force.com. And then over the years it Sales Cloud service, cloud for com projects, apps from AppExchange, and then eventually Pardot. And I really like marketing automation. And so it’s only like sort of naturally that some point you’ve done a few Pardot projects and then Marketing Cloud pops up but you realize very quickly it’s an entirely different beast. And yeah, that’s how that started really and then doing Marketing Cloud projects. Along the way, we figured out like segmentation is something that probably we could provide something for and voila: DESelect.

MG: That was really something that’s missing. Yeah, but, it didn’t improve my SQL skills up until you came in.

Pardot, I deal with Hubspot, but I’ve never worked with Pardot before. So I’m really also looking forward to doing a project in the future, with part because it’s kind of a different, yeah, different game, in the Marketing Cloud aspect. So.

AL: Absolutely. I mean, and the way, you know, now, it’s been two or three years since I even touched the product. I’m sure, I see release pop-ups all the time. So I’m sure, a lot of new capabilities have been added. But when it all started, it was a lot of it was out of the box. The main thing with part was understanding just like with Marketing Cloud, how the connector works with. And in the case of part, it’s almost like an extension of Sales Cloud. The way it works. Now, it’s more geared towards B2B marketing. Yeah, not completely true. You can use it B2C that’s more of a positioning statement than anything else. But having said that it is usually used for B2B, linked to Sales Cloud. And so, it’s really about understanding how are my leads gonna go to Sales Cloud? How will that link to a lead or to a contact? Because for instance, if someone’s already known as a contact in Sales Cloud and that person submits a form, that information may be updated on the contact record and it would not generate a new lead. So you have to rethink your lead management processes.

MG: Which are complex enough already.

AL: Well, I, you know, I can show you the templates that I used to use after I figured it out like one one or two projects in, I found this like structure. It worked pretty well and was even completely manageable with things like Process Builder. And so, it was still drag and drop configuration that was fine.

MG: Nice. Yeah.

AL: I mean, we can take that offline…. 

Actually, you know, given your extensive experience, I would be interested to learn what Marketing Cloud project that you were the most excited about?

MG: I think that was the beginning of… my work at a retail operation that has their stores and on the website and through partners… they usually have access stock. And see here there’s a stock sale and in Marketing Cloud they use for their e-mail marketing, they have Service Cloud and that’s their customer base. So that’s, the customer 360 exists there that’s the master database. And so their service operation uses us, to handle their customer service base. But for the stock sales, okay, they usually have… especially the rent with a limited number of people that can, that cannot be in the out shops now nowadays work as well. But for the structure, you need to register for specific time slots in those stores. And we built a campaign of Market Cloud application where people could register also do some follow up, with the Journey Builder emails… and also reminding people that they needed, to attend a couple of hours before. Also, we did the registration, at the venue so people could bring their QR codes and we scan the Marketing Cloud, can generate QR codes. That was one of the things I learned. But the fun thing about that project was that for the non-Marketing Cloud set people involved in that project. So we have people managing the venue capacity for it all… customers just needed also to see who registered and who didn’t of people who wanted to unregister or take a fence or so. The whole management on that part, we would do, in service plans. And we’ve created this special management app and extended our service operations as well. So people could also with them mobiles could manage, that, those processes, that were there even up until, yeah, senior management that had dashboards, on their mobile.

AL: From mobile, you said, yeah, they could manage it, leave in that way.

MG: Yeah. But I could also see how many people registered that day for example. And that usually management usually was used to call every hour renewing. So, and that’s a funny thing because then you really use the platform on it’s on its full stream. Yeah, that’s because, yeah, you have to service, and Marketing Cloud and use the integrations, that they offer. And that’s really nice.

AL: All right. Well, aside from success stories, I’m also convinced personally that, we can learn a lot from each other’s failures for sure. And I’m sure many other viewers would agree. So if you don’t mind me asking, could you share, your biggest or one of your biggest fails with us? And of course, how did you, how did you manage that?

MG: Usually, the fields are in… features not functioning as you expect, in a Marketing Cloud and us then having mitigated that, the risk of trying out new things. And one of the things that happened fairly recently is that we started the contact deletion process. I have a lot of so plans have been notified. They exceeded, their, the amount of contacts you have been in the marketing plan. 

AL: Yeah, that sounds familiar.

MG: Yeah. And they repression us to reduce, that number since I think two years there’s a process called contact deletion that would literally delete some on the subscriber ID, go through the entire… Marketing Cloud work to delete every instance, of a, of that subscriber ID, in the, in the system. So really powerful. And if done well, it will reduce your contact account. What, what they also did is offer a data extract on people without the channel address. And so I’m making this part to a technical store. But we started that deletion process and delete it far more than we expected. Well, what I’ll learn from that is that, we did test but we didn’t account for every scenario. So we showed more effort, in the thinking of the testing parts and also… these kinds of things we need to do, in maintenance, we know. So, we were always up and running and I hadn’t planned any maintenance times and that’s well that’s kind of a way of working. We, we, now, you know, need to accommodate more before we do these kinds of structural change. Yeah, that gave me a lot of… that bad nights but luckily because we have our data all in service side. So there wasn’t yeah, it’s just refreshed in the end. And then…

AL: I was gonna ask ,like, could you retrieve it because that should not even be possible?

MG: Yeah, for Marketing Cloud is really a slave system for us. It’s not, so you can delete anything. Yeah, we have to, the sync process is running and it will just really enter the system. But some people got kicked out of, so that’s not a good thing.

AL: Right? This actually ties a little bit into what I was gonna ask next, which is what did you wish you knew about Marketing Cloud as a platform when you just started out?

MG: What I wish a couple of things… you can do implementations if you don’t have, the experience. So also in selecting, a… partner… I have a ton of experience in implementing all kinds of… e-mail marketing assistants, a CRM systems and well, and then usually, I’ll give me the documentation and I read up on the ad, do some testing and then I’ll manage Marketing Cloud. You can take so many dies a decision that will come back to haunt you, in the later stage. That is that it’s that’s not funny. So you need always to have someone by your side that is experienced, in, that process. And one thing, to name that back in the day, it wasn’t really documented very well. But you can have an e-mail address as a context. I believe that’s not a wise thing to, especially, in a situation where you have Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud connected. And those are, the stupid things you…

AL: Because it would duplicate your number of contacts, I suppose.

MG: Yeah, that too. But if, for example, yeah, there’s it doesn’t sync the data back for example, to serve ones. One of you wanted to see on a context, which emails did you receive? And, or she in our case, mostly what was clicked, for example, what was opened? And if you use to contact ID, as a or an e-mail address as a contact ID, that sync process doesn’t work. And that wasn’t documented properly at the time. Now it’s really set in the documentation. Yeah. So yeah, I got that’s maybe a go back to the day. I got my consultant certification by just reading all the help files. So there was no Trailheads, no, nothing, no trial environment and just had a production environment, the clients. So that’s yeah, it came a long way that was four years ago. 

AL: Yeah, that must have been tricky. Yeah. And, and at least you had the production environment. I know people who had to get certified without even having access to Marketing Cloud the first place.

MG: Yeah, that’s I don’t think that’s very wise.

AL: Right. Well, I think that’s great advice aside that you have any closing thoughts that you would like to share with our audience.

MG: Yeah. I think that’s more generic depends on also, on your role. But, in my role, I usually have a lot of contact with people who are responsible for the CRM and the campaigns that are running, on the Marketing Cloud platform. And what you see is that, they have very run a very operational business but do not concern themselves a lot with improvements. And that has a couple of reasons. They don’t do strategic planning. So… they run the campaigns and they worry about that. It does the campaign go out in time but they don’t plan for all the lifetime campaigns. What can we improve? And which campaigns do we need to focus on? And usually I introduce them to… you know, prioritization method called, the by score is potential impact of the modification, think about, what you can improve and how to prioritize that to make kind of a program, a road map on how to bring your marketing, to the next level. And also what goes end on. And there is, I think beyond the clearing. So a lot of marketers are reporting on open clicks. Those are the metrics, they do and maybe they report on sales. They track that, in their, in the website reporting tools in Google Analytics, for example. But… the effects, you have, with your marketing usually extend just the direct sale resulting from that, you know, for users, for example, we also have store visits. And then if you look at, if you just look at engagement statistics of emails that’s not enough, you need to have other, we use, yeah, very old fashioned method call to RFM (recently frequency monetary value) to segment your audience and see how the value of development is.

AL: It’s it’s old, but I would say it’s tested and proven. I think many companies still do use it.

MG: Yeah, yeah. This is a good thing, but there are more and more methods. And one other thing, that I see is lots of marketers that may also bigger companies really rely on their agencies… to serve them on the marketing plat platform. And they do not have knowledge of their own on certain SMS platform. So they know it can send mails and you can automate certain things. But by increasing your own knowledge, you’re a better composite part also for you, for your agencies, you can steer them towards new features for example, or you can challenge them, on certain things. You, you become a better marketer, if you actually also know the tech side of and the optional side of the system you’re working with.

AL: Completely agree with that. Yeah, that’s great stuff and tons of great advice out there. I feel like we could continue there, but our time is up for today. So I really wanna thank you so much for being on the series.

MG: Okay. Well, nice to talk to you. Thank you.