Spotlight on Carly Plewa: The Power of the Sitecore & Salesforce Relationship

Today, customers expect a personalized experience across every interaction with a brand. With the rapid advancement of digital customer engagement joint with a pandemic-driven charge to digital, it’s no secret that the combination of the two technology giants Sitecore and Salesforce have aided many of the world’s top companies meet their customers’ wider digital experience needs. We sat down with Carly Plewa, the new Salesforce Alliances Director EMEA at Sitecore, to talk about the power and the value of the Sitecore and Salesforce relationship. A big part of Carly’s role is managing that relationship with Salesforce as well as being an advocate of how the Sitecore and Salesforce relationship can drive connected experiences to new levels for brands.   

Completing the customer lifecycle

How do we ensure consistency across the entirety of the customer lifecycle? For Carly, there is an unparalleled power when combining Sitecore's digital experience platform with Salesforce to achieve a complete 360-degree customer view. The combination of Sitecore’s Experience Platform and Content Hub with Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud, allows businesses to get a single source of truth of their customers. From the very beginning, when a customer first interacts with a brand to the final outcome of their journey, companies can create frictionless multichannel experiences and personalize these at scale.   However, it’s not just about the customer-facing experience, the partnership comes into play from an operational perspective as well. A key message Carly reiterates is that the combination of Sitecore and Salesforce covers the whole spectrum of customer experience, from content to commerce.   

Personalization comes down to the quality of data

How do we best leverage data to drive that personalization? The connectors between Sitecore and Salesforce allow for data to be exchanged seamlessly. Carly also communicates regularly with the Salesforce product teams, building roadmaps together of future releases, looking into ways Sitecore can connect into the Salesforce stack, and aligning those together to ensure that the customer lifecycle is completed across all the different tools leveraged.  What other challenges can the integration of Sitecore and Salesforce solve? The challenge of blending the digital and physical customer experience. In the Middle East, for example, malls are still hugely popular, but there’s seems to be a false understanding that the physical customer experience is separate from the digital customer experience. Rather, customers look for connected experiences where the physical and digital coexist in the same customer journey.   

The importance of a digital experience partner

A crucial part of Carly’s strategy is working closely with partners and driving awareness around partnerships as a critical role in creating real customer value. The key ingredient to making the partnership work is collaborating early on and aligning on the messaging around working together and the vision we put forward to customers on how we will solve their challenges. It’s also about educating customers on how well Sitecore and Salesforce technologies work together. Learn more about how Sitecore + Salesforce can help curate connected experiences across all channels here: https://bit.ly/3rS6QM5