SAP Marketing Cloud: Customer - Sales Employee Linkage

[former_member558862]

First some background information: Generally, we integrate the customers via the contact API into the system. The data is coming from the SAP Commerce Cloud (via SCPI). So far, we only have the customers in the system. We were planning to load the sales responsibles just as the customers via the contact API into the system. However, we would set some flag (custom field IsSalesEmployee) in order to differ usual customers and internal sales employees.

If possible, I would then have two separated segmentation profiles for those contact groups:

• Customers (segmentation profile filter IsSalesEmployee = '')
• Sales Employees (segmentation profile filter IsSalesEmployee = 'X')

This way, the selection would always be correctly prefiltered (instead of setting the IsSalesEmployee each time in the segmentation).

We would like to send emails to the sales employee contacts as well (internal stuff).

Furthermore, we would like to link the responsible sales employee contact for each customer (e.g. if possible via custom business object). One sales employee can be responsible for multiple customers.

One additional and important requirement is to have the responsible sales employee of the customer in the email personalization of the customers. This would mean that when sending emails to the customers, we would like to have some "signature" from the according sales employee like:

Your responsible sales employee,
John Doe
+49 152 XXX XXX
*Picture of sales employee*

This means that we would need to have the following information of the sales employee available as personalization attribute when designing the customer content:

• Name of the responsible sales employee
• Phone number of the responsible sales employee
• Picture URL of the responsible sales employee

I would be thankful about any suggestions on how to set this up the best way!

Best regards
Christian

[former_member226]

Hi,

If it is a B2B use case then why don't you use "Account Team" feature of the SMC that allows you to have a linkage to an existing employee with the Account. In case you wouldn't need any extension field.

In case it is a B2C case then you could think of using Custom Business Object (CBO). In this CBO you need to store Sales Employee Data along with Contact ID Origin & ID. Now you can extend this CBO with the existing segmentation models based on your need. Further, you can explose the CBO as OData to push the data from an external system or just use BADIs to fill/create the CBO instance at the time of IC save.

[SCHNEIDERT]

Hi Christian,

I agree with the other guys.

How are your sales employees stored in Commerce Cloud? And based on which criteria do you plan to assign them to your customers?

As far as I can see, for the replication from CC to MC in the iFlow "Replicate-Customer-from-SAP-Commerce-Cloud-to-SAP-Marketing-Cloud" the API_MKT_CONTACT_SRV OData Service is used by default. So I think it should work as mentioned by Saurabh and you could use the /AccountTeamMembers EntitySet. Maybe you could elaborate a little bit more how your final process should look like.

Kind Regards

Tobias

[JEFODB]

Hi Chirstian,

In my opinion it would be better to go back one step. Where will the sales employee data be coming from. Is it not possible to fill up the standard account team of the customer? In that case it would be possible out of the box to use those attributes (See screenshot) 2021-04-12-18h02-13.png

[former_member558862]

Hey jefodb,

the data is coming from the SAP Commerce Cloud integration. The sales employees should be stored as contact just as the customers since we will have some internal newsletter as well which should be sent to the sales employees of our customer.

Which segmentation profile (or object) do you use in that screenshot?

BR

[JEFODB]

Hi Christian,

The screenshot I'm displaying is inside the content studio. When you add texts you can insert attributes for personalization. More information on how to add personalization can be found here: Create a Personalized 'Email Lite'

[former_member558862]

Hi saurabhkabra2009,

I tried to setup the B2C case. Therefore, I first created the CBO:

Via "Marketing Extensibility" app I activated name and picture URL for segmentation as well:

I tried some CSV upload and used a contact ID origin and contact ID of an existing customer. So I added a name and a picture URL (of a sales representative) to the customer. However, I would like to have an actual link to the sales representative (= another contact) additionally. I could also add the picture URL as custom field to the contacts. But how could I then customize the link between two contacts?

Furthermore, the fields did not become available for personalization automatically. Do I need to activate this somehow?

Thanks for the assistance.

[former_member226]

Hi,

From my experience, you will not be able to "link"(to navigate) from Contact to Sales Employee or vice versa using CBO based approach because, this approach do not define any "real" relationship between them. Rather it is more of data modeling. Hence you can just store the data for segmentation this way or display the field value as plain text on UI

Yes, in order to see these values in the personalization attributes, you need to at first add those CBO fields and make them visible in the segmentation model associated with the email content. Once done then you can to the content studio and click the gear icon and enable the field as shown:

setting.png --> For segmentation profile assignment to the content

[former_member558862]

Hey schneidert saurabhkabra2009 jefodb,

I did some update on my question with so that you (hopefully) get a better understanding what I want to achieve. Would be great if you could give me some proporal on that! 🙂

BR
Christian

[former_member226]

Hello chackbusch,

From the updated question, I would still keep the answer as given in my first reply because what you are trying is actually feasible in both B2B as well as B2C use cases. In the case of B2B, it is all OOTB(using API mentioned by Tobias in his Answer) whereas in B2C you really have to create a CBO, manage the linkage of IC with CBO data, and finally enable the CBO for the segmentation model.