Pro Tips Archives - Page 3 of 45

Emails & Forms, Pro Tips
November 5, 2025

The Ultimate Guide for Improving Your Email Deliverability

Abby Mosher

Poor deliverability and spam folder nightmares are every email marketer’s worst fear. One week, your open rates look great, and the next, half your audience vanishes into the spam abyss. The truth is, once deliverability issues start, fixing them can take time because your sender reputation is shaped by every aspect of your email strategy.

But don’t panic. This guide walks you through a proven deliverability recovery plan, complete with a real-world success story of how one company lifted its open rate from 3% to 55% in just six months after dealing with spam issues.

Metrics for Identifying Deliverability

Deliverability issues can sneak up on even the most experienced marketers. So how do you identify deliverability issues? The first clue is often in your engagement metrics.

Real-world example: After a large quarterly campaign, we noticed a sharp drop in performance. A send that normally had open rates around 45% suddenly dropped to 20%. We drilled into the data by email address domain and noticed that Gmail (which made up half the audience) was the culprit. A test send confirmed the problem – the emails were wrongfully going to spam.

Side note, we all know open rates are not an accurate representation of how many people are opening the email, but they still have a place in email reporting for benchmarking sends. They were critical for helping us catch this deliverability issue!

And so, our deliverability journey had begun. We started deliverability remediation in October 2024, and over the course of the next seven months, we closely monitored metrics like:

Open rates
Click rates
Unsubscribe rates
Spam complaint rate (from within Marketing Cloud Engagement and Google Postmaster – more on this later)

By comparing performance for all sends, then drilling down by domain, it was clear our issue was Gmail-specific. If you notice a similar pattern, start there.

A Brief Clarification

Email delivery is the technical look at whether your email was received by your recipient’s email server. This is best tracked by monitoring bounces.
Email deliverability is what happens once the email is delivered, whether it’s going to the inbox, spam, or promotions folder. This is best tracked by monitoring engagement metrics and sending your own test emails.

Real-world example: Despite the changes in open rate, the bounce rate remained above 99%. Just because you have great delivery doesn’t mean you have great deliverability.

Deliverability Remediation

Deliverability is determined by your sending domain’s setup, email authentication, and your email reputation. There is no size-fits-all approach to fixing your deliverability, so it’s important to build these things into your overall email marketing strategy. And if you find yourself with deliverability issues, here are some actionable steps you can take.

Authentication & Bulk Sending Requirements

In February 2024, Gmail released bulk sender guidelines for senders that send more than 5,000 messages per day to Gmail accounts. Around the same time, Yahoo made a similar announcement, and Microsoft followed suit in May of this year. The most important part of these changes includes:

Implementing SPF & DKIM
Publishing a DMARC policy
Keep your spam complaints below 0.1% and never go above 0.3%
Implement a list-unsubscribe header which supports one-click unsubscribe

The first step in your deliverability journey should be to check that these technical requirements are in place and working. A Google Postmaster account will confirm your authentication and show your spam complaint rate by day over the last 120 days. Email tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement will automatically add the one-click list unsubscribe to your header. To confirm this, send a test email to your Gmail address, view the header code, and search for “list-unsubscribe.”

An important note about Gmail spam complaints: Gmail does not share individual complaint data or use traditional feedback loops that send data back to email service providers. This means complaint rates in your email tool don’t include Gmail, which is why setting up a free Postmaster account is important!

IP Addresses & Blocklists

The other technical thing to check is your sending IP address. When it comes to emails, you are using one of the following:

Shared IP – Used by multiple senders from your email service provider for low-volume sending. The reputation of others using the IP address impacts your sends.
Dedicated IP address – Exclusively used by one sender that maintains and controls the sending reputation. This requires a consistent sending strategy at higher send volumes.

If you have deliverability issues, contact your email service provider support team, as they may be able to provide backend information. This is especially true if you are using a shared IP address, because it could mean another sender is hurting the IP reputation.

If you’re on a dedicated IP, you are responsible for maintaining the reputation. The first thing to check is whether your IP is on any blocklists. A tool like MX Toolbox can help with this. The other thing to check is your monthly send volume from that IP address. Salesforce recommends a minimum of 100,000 emails per month for a dedicated IP address up to a maximum of two million emails per day. It’s important to consistently meet this minimum threshold to keep your IP warm, otherwise you may start having reputation issues which can cause emails to go to spam.

Submit a Bulk Sender Form (for Gmail)

If you’ve made it through all these checks and are seeing issues in Gmail specifically, it’s time to submit a bulk sender form request for mitigation. Submitting this form allows you to outline your issue. Google will then temporarily disable some of their signals responsible for spam classification with the goal that once they put the signals back in place, you should be able to send without issues.

You can submit this form every two weeks through the duration of your deliverability issues, but it will only help if you meet all the bulk sender requirements already.

Review Your Campaigns

Deliverability isn’t just technical—it’s strategic. Poor content or data practices can hurt your reputation, too.

Content

While there is no exact list of words that will cause your email to go to spam, the words you choose matter. Words like “free,” “urgent,” and other time-sensitive or promotional words are common spammy words that may raise a red flag in providers like Gmail. If you’re using these words, can you reduce or remove them from your campaigns? You should also try to limit the amount of links in your email that go to a domain other than your own. And finally, make sure that your emails have an easy way to unsubscribe (and that your unsubscribe process is actually working!). Don’t try to hide your unsubscribe link – it’s much better for someone to unsubscribe than to mark you as spam!

Test tip:

Take one of your emails and copy it two times.
Remove content from your emails as follows:
1. In email 1, leave only text.
2. In email 2, leave only images.
3. In email 3, leave only links and buttons.
Send a test of each email, and see where the emails get delivered. For example, if the image version goes to your inbox, but the text version goes to spam, try changing your content and test again.

Data

Now it’s time to look at your data. Ask questions like:

Where are you getting your data from?
Are your recipients opting in to receive emails from you?
Are you sending the content that they signed up for?
When was the last time you cleaned your list? Think things like removing bad email addresses, unengaged contacts, duplicates, etc.
How many emails are you sending per month?
Is your sending quantity consistent?

Back to our example, this is where we started to see some issues. When looking at the send quantity by month, we noticed that there was a huge variation in send quantity month over month. In 2024, one month’s send volume was as low as 200,000, and in another month, it was over 2.1 million. Spam algorithms want you to be predictable and reliable as a sender, and this much variance was a red flag. We spent some time with our email send strategy and determined that we could spread out our largest campaign evenly over three months rather than doing the sending all in one week.

IP and Domain Re-warming

Once content and data is cleaned up, it might be helpful to “start fresh.”

Start with an Internal Send

The first goal is to show email service providers that people want to receive your emails. The next time you kick off a campaign, consider starting internally. Gather personal email addresses of colleagues and friends, and send the email to this list. Ask them to mark the email as “Not Spam” if the email shows up in their spam or junk folder, then have them open and click a link in the email. Start with 30-60 email addresses and repeat this process if needed.

Warming Process

Depending on the severity of the issue, another option to consider would be to act like you are warming a brand new IP address. This process involves sending to a small subset of the most engaged subscribers first, then gradually increasing the number of sends each day. This process can be slow and tedious, but that’s why it helps build credibility – spammers aren’t willing to do it!

Get Rid of Unengaged Contacts

It’s tempting to hang on to everyone in your list because of the fear that smaller lists = fewer conversions, but that’s not usually the case. If people aren’t engaging with the emails, they probably aren’t interested anymore, and continuing to send to them can hurt your send reputation.

In our example, we noticed a high percentage of contacts that hadn’t engaged in the last six months. We introduced a tiered engagement structure in our sends.

Start by sending to subscribers that were active in the last 90 days
If spam complaints stayed under 0.1% for three weeks, extend to engaged subscribers in the last 120 days.
Repeat the same monitoring, then extend to 150 days, and so on.
Don’t send to anyone who has received at least 3 emails and not engaged in the last 9 months.

The right engagement limits will vary by business, but we believe that this was one of the most important changes to fixing the deliverability issues in our example. We started this process of excluding unengaged contacts in March 2025, and by June, our open metrics were comparable to the same time the previous year.

Make Deliverability Part of Your Ongoing Strategy

Deliverability isn’t a one-time fix—it’s a long-term habit. As you’re thinking about your overall email marketing strategy, consider these things:

Instead of completely removing unengaged contacts, give them one more chance to engage. Create a re-engagement journey for people who haven’t been engaging with emails. Permanently unsubscribe or remove contacts that don’t respond.
Make sure your contacts are opted in to receive emails. Consider adding a double opt-in strategy if you don’t already have one, to ensure you’re only sending to people who want to hear from you. This is a legal requirement in some countries anyway.
Remove or suppress people who haven’t engaged in X months or years (whatever makes sense for your business).
Review your content to make sure it’s engaging AND what the subscriber signed up to receive.
Prompt subscribers to add your sending address to their contacts/address book.

The bottom line:

Deliverability recovery takes time, patience, and consistency—but it’s absolutely achievable. By focusing on technical setup, content quality, engagement, and data hygiene, you can rebuild trust with inbox providers and regain strong performance.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, take a deep breath, grab a coffee, and start working through these steps. And if you ever need an expert eye on your setup, reach out! We’re happy to help you get your emails back where they belong: in the inbox.

Pro Tips, Strategy
October 30, 2025

Aligning Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success for Seamless Handoffs

Christina Anderson

Clunky handoffs between marketing, sales, and customer success are one of the most common ways teams lose momentum, drop leads, and tank trust—costing you customers. Whether it’s a hot prospect that never makes it into a rep’s queue or a new customer who has to re-explain everything they shared in discovery, these gaps compound. Which is why aligning sales, marketing, and customer success for seamless handoffs is so critical to delivering the smooth journeys today’s buyers expect.

The Sercante team shared their insights about how to approach aligning across teams for efficient transitions in Part II, Stop Dropping the Baton: Fix Your Handoffs, of our series, Built to Buy Designing the B2B Journeys Your Buyers Actually Want. The highlights from the conversation are below. Watch the full episode to get all the details.

Part II Stop Dropping the Baton: Fix Your Handoffs
Watch Now
Speakers: Angelica Cabral Demand Gen Marketing Manager and Sara Hernandez Senior Director of Delivery

Clunky handoffs are stunting your growth

When a buyer is easily transitioned from one department to the next, it breaks down their trust in your business. This loss of trust ultimately hurts the longevity of their potential relationship with you, impacting customer lifetime value before it has a chance to grow.

Other statistics show the impact on revenue when the teams don’t have strong cross-team collaboration for smooth handoffs.

10%+ of annual revenue is lost due to poor cross-team alignment (Demandbase)
70%+ of leads are wasted because of delayed response times (Credofy)
It’s 5x cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire a new one (Forbes)—yet many teams fumble the transition from sales to customer success, weakening loyalty and shrinking lifetime value.

You have probably seen the above statistics before, so why does this matter now? In today’s modern era, buyer expectations are higher than ever. People don’t have the patience anymore to wait around to be followed up with, repeat themselves over and over, and if they feel like a company isn’t in sync with them, they’ll move on to the next option. 80% of buyers say that the customer experience is as important as the product itself (cropink.com, 2025), while 77% of buyers said that their last purchase was very complex or difficult (Gartner).

Therefore, creating stronger alignment and fixing your handoffs isn’t something that can be ignored.

Approaching alignment with a customer-first mindset

Approach these conversations through a customer-first lens. Think about it, if you were your buyer, what does the journey feel like today? What could be done to make it better? Answering these questions will help to focus your marketing, sales, and customer success teams around the same outcome: a seamless buying process. As you identify your areas of opportunity, write them down, and then soon you’ll be able to start digging into the customer lifecycle and the processes happening internally.

In Part I, Walk Your Funnel Like a Customer, of the series, the Sercante team shared their expertise on how to approach this exercise and then map your customer lifecycle to think about how you can define your stages, establish who owns what, improve data visibility, and create feedback loops.

Part I: Walk Your Funnel Like a Customer
Watch Now

Walk your funnel like a customer.
Take one of your latest customers and look at every touchpoint they had with you. How long did it take before they were followed up with? Were they waiting at all? At any point was the handoff clunky? Write it down and you’ll most likely find a few areas for improvement.

Map your stages and define ownership of each stage
Internally, what are all the stages of the customer lifecycle? Who’s responsible for what? What’s the entry and exit criteria for each stage? What happens during the transition? Make it clear.

Get the right data in front of the right people.
Visibility is everything. If customer success can’t see sales notes, or sales can’t see marketing engagement, your buyer is repeating themselves.

Build feedback loops into your process.
Alignment isn’t one and done. Create recurring meetings and shared reporting to stay in sync and fix issues before they grow.

Establishing this customer-first lens and starting to map your customer lifecycle helps to set your team up for success for the deep-dive alignment conversations throughout the different areas of the funnel.

From marketing to sales: clarify expectations with an SLA

There are several aspects that go into having strong cross-team collaboration across marketing and sales: accountability, trust, shared definitions, metrics, and reports. It can be overwhelming when looking at it as a whole. Therefore, one of the best ways to get started, as Angelica Cabral said, “Put it on paper.”

That’s where a Service Level Agreement (SLA) comes in. This doc helps teams define shared definitions, response expectations, and metrics for success. It doesn’t have to be fancy. But it does have to be clear.

Here are a few guiding questions to get started:

How do we define a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)? A Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)?
What triggers the lead handoff from marketing to sales?
What will marketing and sales do during the handoff?
What’s the expected response time from sales once a lead is handed off?
How many touches should sales make?
What metrics are both teams tracking (e.g., conversion rates, speed to lead)?
Where will shared reports live? How often will we review them?

You can use Sercante’s SLA planner to help organize all your thoughts and use that as a base for starting to build your roadmap.

Sercante's SLA Planner Guiding Questions

From sales to customer success: it’s a hand-hold

The customer lifespan doesn’t end at conversion. As a result, the collaboration between sales and customer success should act more “like a hand-hold” as Sara Hernandez put it, rather than a hand-off, to continue to grow the customer relationship.

To keep the experience connected, similar to the SLA exercise, the Sercante team shared the Post-Conversion Customer Alignment Guide that your teams can use to help approach the critical alignment conversations of how you’ll continue to coordinate in sync as the buyer converts.

Here are some guiding questions to get started:

What information needs to be shared from sales to customer success and vice versa?
What is the ideal timeframe to bring customer success into the loop?
Where should the deal context live (and how do we keep it updated)?
What KPIs are we tracking across sales and customer success (e.g., retention, upsell, NPS)?
How often are we meeting to review customer progress?

Having these conversations gives your team a starting point to understand where your gaps are, where you may already be aligned, and how you can start making improvements to deliver a better buyer experience.

Don’t stop at the planning phase

A word of caution to keep in mind is: after your teams have these alignment conversations and document everything, your alignment strategy then needs to be executed. According to the 2025 Trilliad Sustainable Growth Study, where 350+ senior B2B go-to-market leaders were interviewed, 1 in 3 admit that their alignment stops at the planning phase.

The 2025 Trilliad Sustainable Growth Study
The Integration Advantage: Sustainable B2B Growth Through Cross-Functional Alignment

Without actually executing your alignment strategy, change won’t happen, and your buyer will continue to feel clunky handoffs in the buying process.

Therefore, after you have your alignment strategy all set, take the next step and bring it into your technology, the systems that your go-to-market teams use every day, such as your CRM and marketing automation systems, to ensure that your SLA and Post-Conversion Alignment plans actually get put into practice for sustained alignment.

Seamless handoffs lead to scalable growth

At the end of the day, this isn’t just about process hygiene. It’s about the full experience your customer has with your brand and whether they choose to keep investing in that relationship.

By improving your internal handoffs, you can:

Deliver the buyer experience, your buyers actually want
Increase retention, loyalty, and customer lifetime value
Reduce lead leakage and missed opportunities
Strengthen cross-functional trust and accountability
And make it a whole lot easier to hit those revenue targets

Because when your teams are aligned, your buyer feels it. The experience is smoother. The trust is stronger. And the results? They start compounding.

To bring in an expert resource and a strategic partner to help put your alignment goals in motion and build scalable processes that deliver seamless customer experiences, reach out to the Sercante team. We’ve helped thousands of teams succeed and bridge the gap between vision and reality for buyer experiences that build real connections and drive lasting growth.

Community, Industry News, Pro Tips, Strategy
October 22, 2025

12 Statistics Every GTM Leader Should Pay Attention to for Sustainable Growth

Sarah Kloth

In today’s modern era, where customer expectations are rising, new technology is coming out every day, and data is living among disparate systems, the key to achieving sustainable growth is proving to be about how your teams, data, and technology are connected and coordinated across the customer lifecycle.

Why? Internal misalignment among people, processes, and technology creates leaky funnels, slows down pipeline, erodes customer trust, leads to churn, and decreases customer lifetime value. And when 80% of customers say that their experience is as important as the product itself (cropink.com, 2025), it’s clear that a negative customer journey will stunt your growth.

However, the challenge isn’t merely a “culture fix”. It takes strategic planning and coordinated execution to align your marketing, sales, and customer success teams across their processes, data, technology, and analytics through a customer-first lens.

To capture the state of this challenge, the 2025 Trilliad Sustainable Growth Study surveyed 350+ senior growth professionals and provides a playbook for how top performers structure teams, connect workflows, and measure what matters. Below are the 12 most critical statistics that should inform how you consider shaping your strategy for sustainable growth in today’s market.

Growth is challenging, but it’s easier for integrated teams

Let’s level set, growth isn’t easy. When asked to assess the current sentiment around growth, go-to-market (GTM) leaders expressed that it’s becoming more challenging, but the ones who did find it to be easier were the ones who had integrated or joint leadership among their GTM teams.

62% of leaders say growth is getting harder.
- This feeling is widespread, but the study shows the problem isn’t just external. The single greatest internal roadblock is the lack of coordination between Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success, cited by 44% of respondents. Confirming that alignment is a key determining factor of your growth.
Organizations with “Integrated Leadership” are 3x more likely to find growth easier.
- Integrated leadership means your Marketing, Sales, and CS functions are managed jointly around a single set of KPIs. Only 22% of organizations have adopted this high-performing model. If your leaders are held accountable to siloed metrics, rather than a shared goal, your teams will be driven toward optimizing in service of their own function, rather than in service of their customer, or to each other.

This is a mindset shift that needs to happen internally. Aligning around a shared vision of what the ideal customer experience should look like, around your revenue goals, and around the key metrics to be tracking to get there, becomes the north star that all three teams are marching toward to drive growth easier.

Each department may have its own alignment blind spots

Having cross-team alignment is critical to your growth, but a part of what might be standing in the way of getting aligned in the first place is that some teams may be feeling the disconnects more than others and therefore may not be seeing it as a priority.

54% of Sales teams reported that they feel coordination pain, while only 33% of Customer Success (CS) teams feel the same.
- This “pain gap” points directly to a process problem. The broken customer handoff occurs within your systems, and Sales, as the team closest to customer revenue expansion, is on the front line of that failure.
CS teams rate their organizational coordination significantly higher than other functions (8.33 vs. 7.36 for Sales).
- This finding suggests a potential cross-team collaboration blind spot. CS teams may be achieving high internal cohesion, but this often happens in isolation from broader GTM processes.

Marketing, sales, and customer success may all have their own internal thoughts on how well aligned they are cross-functionally, but this can lead to pain for the other departments, and worse, for your customer. Therefore, it’s critical when approaching alignment conversations to get all three teams in a room to think holistically about the customer experience and the shared metrics to track performance.

The customer isn’t thinking to themselves: Am I in a marketing experience, a sales, or a customer success experience? They just know that they’re having an experience with the brand as a whole. Therefore, if customers aren’t thinking about your organization in terms of siloed departments throughout their journey, you shouldn’t be either.

The alignment differentiator: going beyond planning

When it comes to aligning marketing, sales, and customer success, these teams may be strategically aligned, but the question is, are they actually executing it? The data shows that talking about alignment isn’t the same as doing it.

Only 27% of organizations say their teams are “fully integrated” across strategy, KPIs, planning, and execution, and 1 in 3 admit that their alignment stops at the planning phase.
- Meaning the other 70%+ have gaps in how they are making alignment happen in their organization. Getting all your growth teams in a room to talk holistically about the customer journey and align on shared metrics is critical, but then there needs to be the next step of actually acting on the alignment strategy. Bringing this alignment into the technology that your GTM teams use daily is critical to going beyond the planning phase and achieving sustained collaboration.
Twice as many high-performing organizations as opposed to struggling ones (48% vs. 23%) are actually acting on their alignment strategy.
- The key differentiator is action. High-performing organizations prioritize going beyond the planning phase and actively executing it. True integration is a unified process and a single source of truth built into your technology, not a recurring meeting.

Full customer journey data visibility is a must for seamless experiences

One of the ways to gauge your level of alignment is to approach the buying process through the eyes of your customer. If your customer is having to repeat themselves, waiting to be responded to, sharing their frustrations, or not being guided toward the best purchase, or their next best purchase, chances are there’s misalignment in your organization. A big piece of this is your data. Disconnected data prevents seamless experiences.

Only 12% of organizations rate their Customer Experience (CX) maturity as “Advanced.”
- When your data is living in different systems and no one has a complete view of the customer journey, it can seem impossible to have an advanced CX—and with customers now rating the experience to be just as important as the product itself, teams can’t afford anything less than an advanced experience.
High-growth organizations are 50% more likely to use data across the “full customer journey.”
- While 40% only use data for acquisition. The best teams are building their strategy around retention and expansion, not just new logos. To do this, marketing, sales, and customer success need visibility into the critical touchpoints happening throughout the entire customer journey.
  - How else is marketing supposed to know when to tee up a cross-sell campaign that triggers the customer to raise their hand and expand their relationship?
  - How else is sales and customer success supposed to know when an account is at risk and act proactively to ensure retention and reduce churn?

Sustainable growth requires moving past a “first-half” strategy to a truly “full journey” approach and this includes with your data how your technology is integrated to support this.

The path forward: aligning for sustainable growth

The data from the 2025 Trilliad Sustainable Growth Study confirms that alignment across marketing, sales, and customer success is critical to driving sustainable growth. However, this cannot stop at the planning phase, but needs to be executed in your technology and data strategy throughout the whole customer journey, not just at the acquisition stage.

Prioritizing aligning your people, processes, and technology will deliver a smoother customer experience, leading to stronger brand loyalty, increased retention, and ultimately growth for your business.

If you’d like support with aligning your marketing, sales, and customer success teams across your customer lifecycle, reach out to the Sercante team. Our experts will listen to understand your goals, discover your friction points, and help develop a strategy as well as set up scalable processes for successful execution inside your data, technology, and analytics.

Getting Started, Pro Tips, Strategy
October 13, 2025

The Ultimate Guide to Approaching Agentforce & Data Cloud

Heather Rinke

If you’re exploring Agentforce or Data Cloud, but feel unsure where to start—or how to ensure real outcomes—you’re not alone. In our recent webinar, “A No-Nonsense Guide to Launching Agentforce & Data Cloud,” we heard from marketing, RevOps pros, admins, and IT professionals across industries who are in the same boat.

The good news? You don’t need to launch a massive initiative to get started. But you do need a strategy. To help guide yours, I’ve shared the key concepts from the webinar where I spoke alongside Sercante’s VP of Growth & Alliances, Lauren Noonan, and Data Cloud Practice Director, Austin Frink, for our proven approach to creating a strategy for Agentforce & Data Cloud that sets you up for success.

A No-Nonsense Guide to Launching Agentforce and Data Cloud
Watch On Demand

Why having a strategy for Agentforce and Data Cloud is imperative

Implementing Agentforce or Data Cloud without a clearly defined strategy is like building a house without blueprints. According to RAND, over 80% of AI initiatives fail—not because the technology doesn’t work, but because teams skip over the foundational work of aligning their tools to real problems, realistic goals, and existing infrastructure.

What we’ve often experienced is that implementing these tools without a clear strategy often exposes existing challenges:

Data silos become more obvious.
Misaligned processes are harder to ignore.
Adoption falters because people don’t see the value.

When we’ve asked organizations about their vision or what they want to accomplish, we’ve heard many who say, “I want an agent” or “I want a unified profile.” While those are great aspirations, they are just starting points. A successful implementation requires more than a desire for automation or consolidated data. It requires a full vision of the why, the what, and the who.

Setting an impactful vision

Instead of focusing on the tool, focus on the challenge, the opportunity, and the people involved.

Ask yourself:

Why do we want an agent or a unified profile?
What business challenge are we solving?
What do we want the agent to actually do? / What will the data be used for?
How will the data or AI support better decisions?
Who will benefit, and how?

When considering these questions, be specific. If your starting point is, we want to have better segmentation or to deliver more personalized experiences, dig deeper. What would you like to segment by? Are there specific segments you’re focusing on for a business need? What part of the customer experience would you like to personalize more? Uncovering the more specific needs that lie within will help shape a more actionable vision.

Other questions you can consider for getting started to identify your use cases are:

Where are the friction points in your customer journey?
What repetitive tasks are your teams spending time on?
What segmentation or personalization capabilities are limited by your current data?

Use this framework to build your vision statement. Your vision should capture:

WHAT: The capabilities you’re adding
WHY: The impact those capabilities will have
WHO: The people in your organization who will benefit

This vision becomes your team’s north star. As you outline the use cases for Agentforce and Data Cloud, you will also need to define how they will impact the business.

Anchoring your Agentforce & Data Cloud use cases to business value

Lauren Noonan emphasized during the webinar, that this step is often missed, but it’s key to alignment. The use cases that drive meaningful business value are the ones that sustain momentum and stakeholder support.

To help frame your use cases in terms of the level of impact, consider impact levels such as the following:

High: Critical to strategic goals or revenue
Medium: Important contributor to organizational priorities
Low: Helpful improvements, but not game-changing

For example, one Agentforce use case that would be considered higher impact would be streamlining lead qualification and routing.

Use Case: AI-Powered Lead Qualification & Routing Agent
Scenario: Deploy an Agentforce assistant that engages with inbound demo requests, asks qualifying questions (budget, timeline, decision-maker status), and routes hot leads to the correct rep in real-time based on region, product, or account type.
Why It’s High Value:

Directly impacts pipeline acceleration and conversion rates
Reduces lead response time, which is closely tied to revenue performance
Supports strategic goals around improving sales velocity and rep productivity
Teams Impacted: Marketing Ops, Sales Development, Revenue Leadership, Prospects, Customers

Notice how the above framing points to impacts such as increased pipeline velocity and speed to lead which leads to higher conversion rates, all tied to revenue.

Medium to low-impact Agentforce use cases might include ones that result in internal efficiency gains, such as streamlining campaign brief creation or surfacing answers to FAQs faster using articles from your knowledge base. However, these lower-impact use cases are often a low-risk and lower level of effort to deploy, so they can be a great starting point as small efficiency gains do add up and free up your team’s time to focus on higher-impact initiatives. Continue to weigh this as you frame your roadmap of priorities.

The other detail to call out from the lead qualification and routing Agentforce example is that it outlined the people who would be impacted. Which is often overlooked, but absolutely necessary when creating your strategy.

Considering the level of impact on your people

Agentforce and Data Cloud aren’t just technical implementations—they’re changes to how people work. According to CIO Dive, 42% of businesses have scrapped most of their AI initiatives in the last year, where studies have shown that the teams that see success are ones that are customizing their use cases and prioritizing them according to their needs and impact. As Lauren shared in her previous article on how to create your AI roadmap, “your unique AI path is the only one that matters.”

You have a unique set of people at your organization with different skill levels, needs, and talents. Not considering a change management plan for how your Agentforce and Data Cloud rollout will be applied will often lead to low adoption rates, causing a low level of success and your initiative to fizzle out.

That’s why it’s so important to assess:

How will workflows shift?
What training or enablement will be needed?
How disruptive will this be to current roles?

Then classify the level of impact on your people:

High: Many roles and processes change significantly
Medium: Moderate impact with some changes to roles or responsibilities
Low: Minimal disruption to current workflows

Evaluating the level of business value alongside the level of impact on your people will help determine which use cases you might want to prioritize first based on the level of effort to deploy.

During the webinar, we showed the chart below as a visualization of the ideal intersection point, which is medium-to-high business impact and low-to-medium people impact, with a lower level of effort to deploy.

A chart that shows the business impact on the x-axis and the people impact on the y-axis with the level of of effort ranging from low to high above. On the chart, Customer Self-Help is plotted on the low to medium business impact level and medium people impact with a lower level of effort. Sales coaching/productivity is mapped at higher level of effort, business impact and people impact.

Take your considerations of the people impact a step further with this on-demand MarDreamin’ Session: Empowering Your People: Nailing Change Enablement for AI Rollouts by Director of Change Enablement at Sercante, Debra Engles.

The other aspect of your strategy that needs to be considered is the dependencies involved with deploying your use case for Agentforce and Data Cloud.

Understanding your dependencies

As Austin Frink and I emphasized in the webinar: implementation depends on more than just ideas. You need to understand the full picture of what it’ll take to make your use case a reality. That full picture includes the infrastructure that you have, including:

Technology: What do you already have? Where are the gaps?
Data: Do you have the right data sources? Are they integrated? Is the quality strong enough?
People & process: Who owns what? Where will the lift be felt most?

Dependencies aren’t necessarily roadblocks, but more factors that will help you to decide where you might want to start when it comes to implementing technology like Agentforce and Data Cloud.

The last piece to consider when defining your strategy is the metrics you’ll use to measure the impact of your Agentforce and Data Cloud initiative.

Defining your metrics for measurement

Your metrics will be used to help prove the business values that you defined earlier. For every use case, identify one or two key success metrics. Before you start your Agentforce and Data Cloud project, measure where you are right now to get a baseline, so that you can benchmark later on and compare your level of improvement.

Some ideas:

Customer satisfaction
Campaign performance
Churn rate

Ideas of metrics that could be associated with our Agentforce use case example of lead qualification and routing, would be speed to lead, conversion rate, and sales cycle time. If your use case will focus more on efficiency gains, consider the amount of time it takes your team to perform the task without the agent implemented, and then measure the hours of time that are saved as a result.

Pro tip: When bringing your strategy to stakeholders, share what your team will accomplish with the time gained back. This goes beyond just thinking through the metrics, and it will be key when articulating the full picture of the impact that implementing Agentforce and Data Cloud can have on your business.

Identifying a success metric is one part of it, you also want to make sure you have defined how that metric will be tracked and validated. For example, will it come from Salesforce, Data Cloud or an external system? Consider, are you capturing the fields that are needed for that metric today?

Also, don’t forget to capture a pre-project snapshot of your metric. Without a clean, documented baseline gathered before any implementation, you lose the ability to accurately show ROI.

Common misconception: you don’t need to start with a massive rollout

One of the most common misconceptions when teams are thinking about implementing Agentforce and Data Cloud is that it requires a massive rollout and overhaul. However, this is not the case.

You don’t have to ingest all your data to use Data Cloud. You don’t need to first implement Agentforce into every aspect of your business.

Start with:

1–2 use cases
Lower people impact
Medium-to-high business value

Clearly defining your use cases will inform you of the data that you’ll need, which will then point to the data sources required. The use case will then point to the agent that you’ll need and the teams or subsect of a department that will be impacted.

As the CMO of Mogli, Christina Scarmeas, shared during her conversation with us about how her team approached implementing Agentforce, “It’s okay to take a crawl, walk, run approach.”

Using AI and Agentforce to Make it Easier to Text on Salesforce
Watch On Demand

Which is why Sercante service offerings such as an Agentforce Quickstart or Data Cloud In-A-Box are so helpful for teams. They enable you to start small, accelerate time-to-value, and showcase the impact, to then scale the initiative to other areas of the business.

Let’s get started with your approach to Agentforce and Data Cloud

To recap, a successful approach to Agentforce and Data Cloud includes:

A clear, problem-driven vision
Use cases tied to real business value
Understanding the people impact
Mapping your technology and data dependencies
Identifying the metrics that will be used to measure impact

Having this all defined will help to serve as your team’s north star to guide a successful approach to Agentforce and Data Cloud.

Now I know how it can be overwhelming to think through all of this, especially with multiple department goals and initiatives, so if you’d like support with creating your Agentforce and Data Cloud strategy, reach out to the Sercante team. We’ll listen to understand your goals, challenges, and help bridge the gap between your vision and reality, for an impactful Agentforce and Data Cloud rollout.

Create Your Roadmap with the Experts
Contact Us

Pro Tips, Strategy
September 12, 2025

The Proven Approach to Create Your AI Roadmap for Meaningful Impact

Lauren Noonan

If you’re feeling overwhelmed with AI at your organization, you’re not alone. In fact, during our recent webinar, AI Roadmap: The Strategy to Drive Growth with AI, 85% of attendees said they were either leading or supporting AI initiatives at their organization. And 70% of them admitted they had more questions than answers. Therefore, we’re sharing our proven approach for creating an AI roadmap that results in meaningful impact, to be a guide for growth leaders who are navigating AI for their organizations.

Why an AI roadmap matters

Just like any other solution, implementing AI without a set strategy and a plan for how it will be used, the goal you’re after, the dependencies to consider, and enablement for your team, is only going to hold you back from maximizing its value. If anything, diving in without a strategy will most likely highlight your gaps in processes, data, and alignment.

According to RAND, 80% of AI projects fail due to a misalignment of the problem being solved, not having adequate data, or a lack of infrastructure and readiness. These causes for failure can be avoided if teams take the time up front to think through their strategy. As the CMO of Mogli, Christina Scarmeas, shared from her episode, Using AI & Agentforce to Make it Easier to Text on Salesforce (Watch here), “The biggest thing that we learned was it’s okay to take a crawl, walk, run approach…if you put that infrastructure together and actually have a team that’s dedicated to the strategy behind [AI], the results come fast.”

Therefore, when navigating AI and rolling it out in your organization, don’t skip the important step of defining your strategy and building your roadmap. When considering how to start thinking through your strategy for AI, use the steps below from our proven approach to get started.

The CMO of Mogli, Christina Scarmeas, quote "If you have a team that's dedicated to the strategy of AI, the results come fast."

And if you’re ready to take action to start creating your customized AI roadmap with the guidance from our experts, check out our AI Workshop: Building Your Roadmap for Real Impact.

The Proven Approach to Create Your AI Roadmap

When thinking through your strategy for how to get started with AI, you want to start with your use cases and the goals you want to accomplish. Then, using your use cases and goals as the foundation allows you to tie to the business value and consider the data needed, the dependencies, and the impact it will have on your people for change management, so your first step is to frame your vision.

Start with the vision

To get the ideas started, think about your team’s daily workflows. Where are the friction points in their day? What repetitive tasks are slowing people down? Where is your time being taken, or where are you missing opportunities? That can start to highlight a few efficiency gains you could get from implementing AI for internal use cases.

Most importantly, you also want to think about your customer journey. Where are the friction points for the customer? What transition points could be made more seamless if AI were used? Taking this customer-centric approach will then highlight use cases where AI could be deployed for externally facing engagements.

As you identify your use cases, start defining the goals you want to accomplish. For example, if you implement AI to assist with lead qualification, what is the desired result you want to come out of that? What is the problem being solved, and what will success look like?

Then combine everything into one vision statement. The vision statement should capture:

WHO: The people involved who will benefit from the implementation
WHAT: The capabilities that will be added to your organization
WHY: The impact that is expected as a result

Director, Marketing Innovation & Technology, Zebra Technologies, Johanna Lehner, quote "The use case is the most important to define. Everything else should follow and be aligned."

This is the most critical step, and leaders who have started down this path of approaching AI for their organization agree. The Director of Marketing Innovation & Technology at Zebra Technologies, Johanna Lehner, shared on her episode, Future-Proofing Technology Through Impact-Driven Use Cases (Watch here), that“The use case is the most important thing you want to define…so that you’re thinking about what that process looks like in order to meet that goal or accomplish that use case in the most efficient and effective way possible. I would say that’s the most important thing, everything else should follow and be aligned with those goals that you’re trying to accomplish with the tool.”

Your vision becomes your north star that guides your team through the rest of the AI roadmap process.

Anchor it to the business value

This is where we shift from “wouldn’t it be cool if…” to “here’s why it matters.” For every use case you consider, think about what value it would add to your organization. Does it drive revenue? Improve customer satisfaction? Shorten the sales cycle? Some use cases will be mission-critical, while others might be helpful but not game-changing. For each use case, frame if it would be a high, medium, or low level of value.

High: Critical to the organization’s strategic goals
Medium: Important and contributes to the organization’s goals
Low: Has a minimal direct impact on the organization’s strategic goals, financial performance, or overall operations

Framing the level of business value will help guide the team’s decision-making later when choosing which use cases to prioritize first. But, in addition to the level of business value, you also have to consider the level of impact on your people.

Evaluating the impact on your people

Let’s be clear: AI is a people thing. Yes, it’s tech. But adopting it requires real humans to shift how they work. That means you need to map the impact. Will an initiative completely overhaul someone’s role? Or just take a few manual tasks off their plate? The more disruption, the more intentional you need to be about change enablement. Low-impact projects might require just a little training. High-impact ones? Those need a communication plan, champions, and a solid support structure. Therefore, for each use case, you’ll also want to define the level of impact on your people.

High: Many roles are impacted, many processes will change, and roles will be redesigned
Medium: Some roles are impacted, some processes will change, and roles might change slightly
Low: Very few roles are impacted, minimal process changes, and no role restructuring will be needed

As you consider the level of business value and how your people will be affected by the AI solution implemented, this thought process will highlight the level of effort that would be required for rollout. This is where finding the ideal sweet spot comes in for all three when considering which use cases to prioritize first on your roadmap.

Finding your sweet spot

Every use case you explore should be evaluated based on three things: the value it delivers, the impact on your people, and the level of effort it will take to implement. Think of this like a chart where you’re looking for where the ideal points intersect. The sweet spot with medium to high business value, relatively low people disruption, and feasible to get off the ground. We’ve seen many organizations start with internal processes to get some efficiency gains as a starting proof of concept. However, these small efficiency wins are not to be overlooked as they add up to greater impact and make the customer experience feel that much more seamless. experience feel that much more seamless.

A chart visualizing the examples of two AI use cases: Sales Coaching/Productivity and Customer Self-Help and where they fall on the chart measuring Business Impact on the x-axis, People Impact on the y-axis, and also the Level of Effort at the top.

For example, Advanta Health partnered with Sercante to implement Agentforce to help scale their member services team and address the needs of their growing customer base. The solution surfaced answers to FAQs faster, using their Knowledge articles, assisting the service team, and cutting down on their handle time, while making responses more consistent across the board. As a result, members reaching out with inquiries experience a more streamlined engagement that gets them the answers to their questions faster.

Advanta Health Scaling Member Services with Agentforce Read Case Study

Therefore, when considering which use cases to start with first on your roadmap, use the “sweet spot” to guide you, and don’t underestimate the impact that can come from small efficiency gains.

Once you start to get an idea of the use cases you might want to start with, based on where they land among the level of business value, people impact, and effort to deploy, the other important piece you need to consider, which will impact your level of effort, is your dependencies.

Map your dependencies

This is the part of the roadmap where things can get messy if you don’t slow down and look under the hood. Before rolling out anything new, you need to assess what it’s going to take to support it. Do your systems talk to each other? Is your data accessible and clean? Do you have a governance structure in place? Do your people have time and capacity to manage the shift? These aren’t roadblocks—they’re flags that help you build smarter. Ignoring them can cause your AI project to fail.

Here are some starting questions to ask yourself to help identify your dependencies:

Technology

What technologies do you already have?
Do you have gaps in technology needs based on the use cases?
What will it take to close these gaps?

Data

What data will AI need access to?
Do you have data sources that are not integrated today?
Do you have data quality issues?

People

What teams/roles are impacted by these AI use cases?
What amount of time will AI unlock for these teams? What can they focus on instead?

As you think through the dependencies for each use case, this can help give you a clearer idea of the level of effort it would take and then better inform which use cases truly fall in the sweet spot.

Then last, but certainly not least, if you didn’t already think through the metrics you’ll use to measure success when defining your goals in the first step, this is where you’ll want to do that.

Define your success metrics

If you want to prove AI is working, you need to measure it. Tie every use case to a clear outcome. That might be lead conversion, campaign ROI, sales cycle length, or something else entirely. Pick metrics that matter to your business and are realistically measurable. And don’t wait until you’ve rolled something out to start tracking. Get benchmarks in place now so you can show progress early and often.

A final word of wisdom

The final and last piece of wisdom when thinking about your approach to AI is your unique AI path is the only one that matters. Now is not the time to be a copycat with AI. The chatter I keep hearing is, “What are other companies doing? What are their use cases? How quickly can we implement those use cases at our organization?” And frankly, it feels dangerous.

Why? Because the last decade has left every single company with a unique technological fingerprint. We all have our own way of working, our own internal processes, and a pile of tech debt and data quality issues to go along with it.

Thinking you can just copy someone else’s AI strategy is like trying to replicate a recipe with totally different ingredients. The output is destined to be different. The truth is, the successful path isn’t about looking outward. It’s about looking inward.

Therefore, when thinking through your AI strategy, don’t be so concerned about what everyone else is doing, focus on what will drive value for your customers and your business.

Getting started on your AI Roadmap

Creating an AI roadmap is about solving real problems in a way that supports your people, your business goals, and your vision. It is your guide to rolling out a successful AI solution that empowers your people to focus on the most important initiatives and deliver a seamless experience for your customers.
If you’re ready to dive in to start building your AI roadmap and would like an expert guide to take you through step by step, of defining your vision and use cases and creating your prioritized roadmap, reach out to the Sercante team. We’ve helped many organizations get on the right path to maximizing AI for their organization and driving meaningful business impact with our AI Roadmap offering.

Discover what's possible with the AI Roadmap

Community, Data Management, Industry News, Pro Tips
September 10, 2025

Salesforce Related Data Breaches: What you need to know

Heather Rinke

Several data breaches affecting a wide range of companies that use Salesforce have been reported in recent weeks. These incidents have impacted organizations across various sectors, including technology, retail, and insurance. The exposed data has varied by victim but has commonly included customer contact information, internal business records, and even sensitive data like API tokens and credentials.

Sercante clients can be assured that our systems have not been impacted by these recent attacks, however we want to make sure that Salesforce customers are aware of these incidents and are equipped to safeguard their instances.

How the Breaches Occurred

The recent breaches are not due to a vulnerability within the Salesforce Core platform itself. Instead, threat actors have used sophisticated social engineering and supply chain attacks to gain unauthorized access.

One common method has been targeted voice phishing (vishing) campaigns. In these attacks, bad actors impersonated legitimate employees or IT support staff to trick victims into downloading a malicious replica of Data Loader and granting access to their Salesforce environments.

In a recent and widespread campaign, attackers leveraged compromised OAuth tokens for a third-party application, Salesloft Drift. By exploiting the integration between the app and Salesforce, the threat actors were able to export large volumes of data and credentials from numerous corporate Salesforce instances in what is called a “supply-chain attack”. . The attackers were able to steal “digital keys,” or authentication tokens, from the Drift app. They then used these stolen keys to access and steal data and credentials like passwords, API keys, and access tokens for other services that could be used to compromise other systems integrated with Salesforce.

This highlights a critical risk: while the core platform may be secure, its connections to third-party apps can introduce vulnerabilities.

Risk to Salesforce Customers

The primary risk to Salesforce customers lies in the potential for stolen data to be used for further attacks. Customer contact information and other details can be weaponized in targeted and highly convincing phishing and social engineering campaigns to gain access to other corporate systems. The exposure of sensitive information like API tokens and credentials poses a significant threat, as it can be used to compromise connected systems, such as other cloud platforms or internal networks.

UPDATE: If you are a Drift customer – Salesloft has announced plans to shut down its Drift chatbot following their recent security breaches. This no doubt presents a challenge to your website engagement strategy. The Sercante team is well-versed in the various conversational platforms that integrate seamlessly with Salesforce and can help you navigate this transition.

Recommended Actions for Protection

While Salesforce has taken steps to restrict the use of “uninstalled connected apps”, customers should take steps to protect themselves from similar threats:

Reauthenticate Drift Connections: Salesloft Drift customers will need to reauthenticate their Salesforce integration with Drift. It’s also advised that any and all authentication tokens stored in or connected to the Drift platform should be considered potentially compromised and update them immediately.
Rotate all credentials and keys: Immediately change any passwords, API keys, and other access tokens that were stored in your Salesforce instance
Investigate your Salesforce account: Look for any unusual activity in your Salesforce login history, audit trails, and API access logs from early to mid-August 2025. Look for suspicious logins or data access patterns, particularly from the user account associated with the Drift integration.
Audit Third-Party Apps: Audit your connected apps to make sure they are secure, and make sure that all third-party apps connected to your Salesforce account have only the minimum permissions they need to do their job and revoke access for any app that is no longer in use.
Secure APIs and Integrations: When configuring new integrations, restrict API access by defining trusted IP ranges and ensuring that connected apps have the most restrictive scope possible.
Apply the Principle of Least Privilege: Limit user permissions to only what is necessary for their job role. Restrict administrative access and minimize the use of permissions like “Modify All Data.”
Be on high alert for phishing: Warn your employees to be extra cautious about any unexpected or unusual emails, phone calls, or messages. The attackers may use the stolen contact information to try and trick people into giving up more sensitive data.
Rinse & Repeat: Security isn’t a set it and forget it function. It takes constant and consistent vigilance to protect your systems and data.

While the core Salesforce platform is secure, recent data breaches are a reminder that a company’s security is only as strong as its weakest link, which is often a third-party app or a human being. To stay safe, you have to be proactive. By using strong security practices, enforcing strict access rules, and training your team, you can drastically improve your defenses. Ultimately, keeping your data safe is a team effort—you, Salesforce, and all of your employees have a role to play.

If you’d like a guide to help you navigate how to optimize data protection in your organization with Salesforce, reach out to the Sercante team. Our experts can be your guide for impactful next steps.