This year, Gartner recognized Salesforce as an industry leader in its Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs for Salesforce Marketing Cloud. While Marketing Cloud is a leading digital marketing solution for businesses, more can be done to promote it to Trailblazers and inspire them to learn Salesforce skills. That’s why the Salesforce Talent Alliance and the Central Europe Talent Ecosystem teams were excited to partner with Merkle, a key Salesforce consulting partner, to sponsor a university case study competition focused on Marketing Cloud. Students of the winning teams received merchandise and exam vouchers, which will hopefully be the beginning of their Salesforce career journey.
In October, Merkle delivered four seminars to 120 Czech and international students in the advanced marketing course at the Prague University of Economics and Business. The goal of this initiative was to introduce students to Salesforce technology and Merkle expertise, and to prompt fresh perspectives about the marketing industry.
Eight lecturers from Merkle participated in the seminars, which consisted of both a theoretical part–focused on major marketing concepts and how Salesforce Customer 360 differentiates itself from other platforms—and a Salesforce Marketing Cloud demo.
The students were also involved in a competition and tasked with a case study on building customer journey flows illustrating the abandoned cart process for a selected brand. Part of the case study involved describing the data and assets needed to support the customer journey.
Four winning teams were selected based on the complexity of the journey graphs, their creativity, presentation skills, and their use of data and assets. The students came away with a greater understanding of the core aspects and power of Marketing Cloud, not to mention the invaluable knowledge and experience gained on a real practice case.
Anastassia Šperková, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Services Team Leader at Merkle, lectured at two seminars. She was enthusiastic about working with students. “We [explained] our day-to-day work with examples of tasks that technical consultants deal with,” she said. “[The students] were fascinated by how businesses automate their marketing strategy, and that even a straightforward request can turn into a month of planning and then implementation. The students' ideas were amusing, considering that limited time was given. I personally liked that they were not afraid to challenge [our] opinions.”
Salesforce is excited about the future career of these students, and we hope to see them soon in the Salesforce ecosystem!
Interested in making an impact with the Salesforce Talent Alliance? Check out how we can work together here.
