DESelect welcomes Denmark's Alm. Brand
Alm. Brand is a long-established financial services company, solely operating in Denmark. The 228-year-old company provides insurance, banking, and pension products across B2C and B2B channels.
Last year, our CEO Anthony met one of the company’s solutions architects at the Salesforce Connections event. We spent the past few months addressing the segmentation issues they faced and are proud to announce that Alm. Brand has joined our growing customer base.
During an interview with our CTO Jonathan, Alm. Brand explained how, after trying for years to find an alternative to writing SQL queries, their 20-person digital marketing department were able to transform their data segmentation process, leading to a 50% efficiency increase.
The video testimonial from Alm. Brand.
Big job for a huge customer-base
Kenni Dalby, Head of Digital Marketing & Sales, and Lasse Rindorf, Solutions Architect, talked to us about a few of the challenges faced by their team before discovering DESelect:
“We work in sales and retention across all digital touchpoints. Our purpose is to create value through the intelligent use of data and software. Uniquely, since all our products are made available through just one company, the team creates products and services that take care of Alm. Brands customers’ total economy. This is a lot of data.
We have the responsibility of communicating all services to every single customer, based on their brand engagement and financial situation.”
Too much time with SQL queries
Often, organizations using SFMC face the same technical complications and time inefficiencies surrounding SQL queries. Lasse explains this in more detail:
“The CRM department is split between solution architects and marketers. Previously, only the solution architects managed the data, using Query Studio in Marketing Cloud.
However, because the technicians’ time was split between maintenance and build of our platform, as well as data modeling, we were spending too much time with SQL queries. We did try to use SFMC Audience Builder, but it didn’t have the flexibility we needed.
As we had to free up some solutions architect resources to continue developing the platform, fixing this issue became our primary goal.”
Taking the plunge with DESelect
Always keen to learn of ways we can improve, we asked Kenni about their choice to work with DESelect. He explained:
“We asked around in our network, and DESelect had a really good reputation. In addition, our data marketing agency had a few clients already using the tool. That of course helped in our decision-making.
From the beginning of our conversations, we were impressed with the whole package — and the pricing — so after a short trial period, we were convinced. And here we are! It’s really great.”
Putting data marketers in the driving seat
When asked whether DESelect has helped Alm. Brand achieve their goal, Lasse added:
“Oh yeah, we’ve achieved our resource reduction goal tremendously, using DESelect.
SFMC challenges
Digging a little more into Alm. Brand’s previous frustrations, Kenni elaborated as follows:
“Since we started using Salesforce Marketing Cloud five years ago, the biggest challenge has been the fact that you must have good SQL knowledge in order to do anything when it comes to creating segments. We’ve tried to solve this so many times using different solutions, but we haven’t found anything that worked until now.
We tried Audience Builder… Actually, I’m not really sure whether Salesforce likes it themselves anymore! It was originally for the drag & drop solution, but then the problem was that the data was not in Marketing Cloud anymore. They actually take a sub-set out and move it to another platform. From there, you can do a drag & drop, and then re-enter it into Marketing Cloud.
Every time you need to change something within the data model, to add extra values, etc., you need Salesforce to get into that. Whereas with DESelect, it is our data. We can model it the way we want, then DESelect just sits on top. That’s a big difference that I see.
So we never really got any value out of using Audience Builder. This is way better for us.”
A positive commercial impact
In explaining the commercial impact of adopting DESelect, Kenni added:
“From a business perspective, DESelect is really great. Now, Lasse and his colleagues can all focus on optimizing our platform across Marketing Cloud and Episerver, where we wanted to do better integration work. He and the team are now freed up to do that.
Before, we spent too much time doing segmentation, which is a total waste of time for the technicians.
Also now the marketers, who have a far better sense of our customers, are able to manage the company’s marketing efforts from A to Z, which is really great.
It makes me very happy that this has happened, and it creates great value for our business as a whole.”
Adopting DESelect
Onboarding and after-sales service are key areas of attention for us, and we are always keen for feedback. Lasse shared his adoption experience:
“We had an excellent onboarding process. From my technical point of view, it was ‘plug & play’ from day one. It was excellent.
The challenge we’re working on now is to give the marketers a better understanding of our data model. We also want to customize the data model so it fits more into DESelect, and to a marketer’s mindset.”
Remembering his own perspective of the adoption process, Kenni added:
“I followed the implementation — if we could call it that? It’s just already there, right? I also followed the adoption from the sidelines, and I must admit that I was pretty skeptical at first… “
A message to all SFMC users
The best way for us to communicate DESelect’s benefits is via satisfied customers. When we asked Kenni whether he would recommend us, he said this:
“Of course we would recommend DESelect to everybody using SFMC, who are experiencing the same issues around segmentation. I know that everyone in my network using Marketing Cloud is having more or less the same issues.
It’s too difficult to do the segmentation work. So if you are having those problems, talk to DESelect. If it works for us, it will probably work for you. It might just be as effective for everybody else out there.
And it’s integrated, right? It’s just a part of Marketing Cloud. As soon as the implementation is done, it seems like it’s just there…”
Since DESelect apparently created a team of happy Danish technicians, we thought it only right to give the solutions architect the last word:
“I’m really positive. You guys should have sold it to us many years ago! But now we’re here, and I’m very happy about it.”
Indeed, we’re here now. And we’re immensely happy to have Alm. Brand join us on the marketing automation journey.
If you’d like to learn how DESelect can help your organization, check out this quick tour, or schedule a demo today.