Salesforce Marketing Cloud consulting for accounts already running
Most Marketing Cloud trouble is not in the email. It is in the data arriving from Salesforce and the consent rules around it. We support both sides, because we work on both.
Four things Marketing Cloud teams ask us for
Rarely a fresh account. Usually one that works, mostly, and that nobody fully understands any more.
Support for a running account
We provided Marketing Cloud support month after month for about a year and a half.
The CRM connection
Marketing Cloud is only as good as the Salesforce data it receives. We check what syncs, how often, and whether the fields marketing filters on are actually filled in.
Consent and suppression
Unsubscribes and do-not-contact flags have to flow both ways between Salesforce and Marketing Cloud. A send to someone who opted out is the mistake that costs most.
Getting data out, too
Large pulls of email and engagement data for reporting or another system, run in batches so nothing times out and nothing is counted twice.
Five checks on any Marketing Cloud account
- Which Salesforce objects and fields sync, and how often
- Whether opt-outs reach both systems
- Automations that run but send nothing
- Data extensions nobody can explain
- Who has access, and whether they still should
Eighteen months of Marketing Cloud support
From 2023 into 2024 we provided Marketing Cloud support to one client on a recurring basis, invoiced month by month for about a year and a half, alongside migration and build work on the same client's core Salesforce org. Working on both meant we could trace a problem to Marketing Cloud or to the CRM data behind it.
Support also means saying when something should be switched off. Journeys outlive the campaigns they were built for, and old automations keep running against data extensions nobody refreshes. Part of every review is a plain list of what is still running, what it sends, and whether anyone would miss it if it stopped. Fewer moving parts make every later change cheaper and safer.
On a running account, the requests are rarely dramatic. A new welcome series, a change to who counts as an active customer, an automation that ran overnight and sent nothing, a data extension somebody built for one campaign that three journeys now depend on. Each one is small. Left alone, they pile into an account nobody wants to touch, which is how teams end up paying for features they have stopped using.
Consent deserves its own sentence. An opt-out recorded in Salesforce has to stop Marketing Cloud sends, and an unsubscribe in Marketing Cloud has to show in Salesforce so sales does not email the same person by hand. We test that path in both directions before changing anything else, because it is the one mistake a customer will remember.
The link between the two clouds is Marketing Cloud Connect, and Salesforce's own Marketing Cloud overview describes the product range. If your CRM data needs fixing before marketing can trust it, start with a data cleanup or migration; if you want the core org looked after too, see managed services.
What people ask about Marketing Cloud
What does a Salesforce Marketing Cloud consultant do?
Sets up and looks after the parts of Marketing Cloud a marketing team relies on: the connection to Salesforce CRM, data extensions and segments, email builds, journeys and automations, and the consent rules around all of it. On a running account, most of the job is support: changing what exists, fixing what broke, and keeping the data feeding it clean.
What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
Salesforce's set of marketing products for sending email, SMS and other messages, building multi-step customer journeys, and measuring the results. It is sold and run separately from the core Salesforce CRM, and the two are linked with Marketing Cloud Connect, which Salesforce documents in its help pages.
Is Salesforce Marketing Cloud a CRM?
No. The CRM is Sales Cloud or Service Cloud, where your accounts, contacts and opportunities live. Marketing Cloud is the messaging side. It uses CRM data to decide who gets what, which is why most Marketing Cloud problems turn out to be data problems in the CRM.
Other Salesforce work
Tell us what your Marketing Cloud is getting wrong
Wrong audience, a journey that stopped, opt-outs you do not trust. Describe the symptom and we will tell you where we would look first.