Abraham David Lloyd is a director at Salesforce. He is also the lead evangelist for the B2C Solution Architect program. Abraham encourages everyone to become an architect to expand their sphere of influence, practice their skills, and support the creation of new customer experiences.

Today, Abraham and I are talking about the B2C Solution Architect program. We also discuss solution architecture in general. Abraham shares about his earliest experiences with computers and programming in which he realized his skill for listening to and practicing empathy with people. Tune in to learn how empathy applies to his work at Salesforce and more.

Show Highlights:

  • Abraham’s time in the business of getting night clubs up and running.
  • His current role at Salesforce.
  • The 3 kinds of leadership Solution Architects practice.
  • The overlap between business and technology in solution architecture.
  • What the B2C Solution Architect certification covers and why it’s so essential.
  • How to create a seamless customer experience.
  • Why we should data model profiles as humans instead of modeling them as system-specific profiles. 
  • How to leverage solution architecture to augment your transactional experiences.
  • The importance of calculating your customers’ total lifetime values.
  • What Customer 360 Data Manager and Audience Manager do for both developers and architects.

Links:

  1. Abraham on Twitter: https://twitter.com/djb2c?lang=en
  2. Abraham on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abrahamlloyd/
  3. Credentials on Trailhead: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/credentials/
  4. Abraham on Github: https://www.github.com/b2csolutionarchitect

B2C Solution Architect Certification LinksBlogs and News

Trailhead Resources

Video Resources

Episode Transcript

Abraham David Lloyd:
One of the things that we like to say at Salesforce is, “Anyone can become an architect.” And with our cert I really believe that’s possible. If you’re an admin on our platform, understanding and taking our cert and becoming a solution architect is going to expand your sphere of influence. As well as the different ways that you get to practice your skills and help support the creation of new customer experiences.

Josh Birk:
That is Abraham David Lloyd, a director at Salesforce in the lead evangelists for the B2C solution architect program. I’m Josh Birk, your host for the Salesforce Developer Podcast. Here on the podcast, you’ll hear stories and insights from developers for developers. Today, we sit down and talk with Abraham about that program and B2C solution architecture in general. As usually we start with his early years, which were Abraham began not technically with computers, but in the business of helping nightclubs get up and running.

Abraham David Lloyd:
When I first started, I didn’t know programming. So, if I’m going to date myself think about email addresses are just now starting to show up on business cards. Okay?

Josh Birk:
Yes, yes.

Abraham David Lloyd:
So companies say, “Hey, I want a website. You look like you’re good at computers.” One of the things I used to do for the nightclubs I worked at is I would design the inventory system. So understanding your liquor costs is a key component of club’s success. You have to understand how much of your liquor is actually going to profit. We managed all this in a spreadsheet in Lotus 1, 2, 3. It was something that I had written. Programming, like I said, I was a programmer as a kid growing up so it was intuitive. One day I had a coworker say, “Hey, I worked for this company that does this thing, and you seem to know computers. Would you happen to know anything about how to create a webpage?” I was like, “Well, no, but”… you know, back then you would have to go to a bookstore and get a book.

Josh Birk:
Right.

Abraham David Lloyd:
Goodness, I remember my first interview, I did a website for the club that I worked at as a demo and had it on a floppy disk.

Josh Birk:
That’s awesome.

Abraham David Lloyd:
Brought it in and was like… But, then it’s like, well, “Hey, do you have something that you could view this on? Do you have a Mac or a PC?” You have to deal with all of the AV things. The AV things never go away.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. Oh gosh.

Abraham David Lloyd:
They never go away. One of the things I love about Salesforce is we place value, priority in practicing empathy. Right?

Josh Birk:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Abraham David Lloyd:
When we think and talk about how to speak with customers, how to represent customers, how to champion customers empathy is at the foundation of that. I found that I wasn’t the best programmer, but I could hear people and give them empathy, and practice empathy with them about the things that they wanted. Or why they wanted something, or why the process of trying to build what they wanted was frustrating for them.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
That’s just been something that I was doing it, but didn’t know it, so I didn’t do it well. But as I’ve gotten older and matured and gotten more experience, empathy is so critical. Especially today, when you think about how the world is.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. Totally. First of all too also, because I am delighted in the whole you had to go buy a book in order to learn how to build web pages.

Abraham David Lloyd:
Yeah, man.

Josh Birk:
I have in my basement, this just thick, long book and the title is escaping me. But something like How to Build Pages for the Worldwide Web.

Abraham David Lloyd:
Yes.

Josh Birk:
I bought it, I think like at a Barnes & Noble, like over 20, some years ago and the thing is invincible. It’s survived water damage, it’s survived… It’s the thing that when we’re moving I’m like, “Oh, of course it’s here.” [crosstalk 00:04:10] It’s like the cat that ran away, but it always comes back again. Like, “Yeah, we’re moving the book it’s coming with us. I don’t know what to tell you. The thing is apparently permanent in time.” I just don’t know.

Abraham David Lloyd:
Yeah. [crosstalk 00:04:19] Data models, right?

Josh Birk:
Right.

Abraham David Lloyd:
Waldenbooks. That’s where I used to go-

Josh Birk:
Waldenbooks! I think your right. I think it was a Walden… Oh my God. I think it might’ve been a Waldenbooks. Oh, that’s awesome.

Abraham David Lloyd:
We are tremendously dating ourselves now.

Josh Birk:
Totally. Okay. So let’s bring it back to present. Talking about that empathy and your current skills. How would you describe your current role at Salesforce?

Abraham David Lloyd:
Goodness. So this is a dream job for me. All right, I am blessed with the opportunity to be in service to the Architect Community within Salesforce, both internally with employees. As well as within partners and of course customers. I’m the lead evangelist for a new certification that was just announced this previous month at DreamTX, the B2C Solution Architect Certification. So this is a space I’ve probably spent the last three years of my career here at Salesforce in.

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Abraham David Lloyd:
It’s been a tremendous passion project of mine. I had originally started working in our services team when I got hired about four years ago. After a year working in that team, my manager Tasha Wilkins had recommended a role for me that was opening up within the customer success group, working with customers. Part of the challenge of the way that we were in service to customers was customers would come to us with scenarios, use cases basically, and say, “How would I do this? Or how do I do this?” Right?

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
It’s very advisory but the stories are… Again, thinking about empathy. Our customers are trying to get things done that they need to grow their business, and support their careers, and make their mortgage payments, and get their bonus. So that way they can go on vacation or pay for college.

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
Our focus was multi-cloud experiences, right?

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Abraham David Lloyd:
So you think about how Salesforce has grown as a company. We’ve gone from being one platform to upwards of five, six, seven, eight, depending on how you categorize products. So our focus was, “Hey, if you want to integrate these products, what’s the strategy? How would you do this? What data strategy do you need? How do you define what success looks like for a use case?” What we’ve done within the B2C Solution Architect Program is operationalized a portion of that.

Josh Birk:
I do love that framing it as actual empathy for them. Today, we’re talking about a couple of things like B2C commerce in architecture in general. Talk to me a little bit… and maybe that kind of is a good followup too. Talk to me specifically how would you describe the role of a solution architect to somebody?

Abraham David Lloyd:
So one of the things I love about our program and the investment that Salesforce has made in our program is that I feel like we really provide some clarity, right? The title solution architect, I feel like has been around over a decade. But it’s one of those titles that when you see it, it’s a little confusing. Like my wife, I love my wife, honey. I love you. But you know, there’s a cliche that like, well, my wife still says I’m in computers, right?

Josh Birk:
Yeah, yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
Because the title of solution architect, it just spans so wide. Right?

Josh Birk:
Right.

Abraham David Lloyd:
But that’s what I love. Honestly, that’s what I love about the role is that it’s so malleable and you can choose to practice solution architecture within your career as a developer, as a technologist, as a trusted advisor, as a program manager. When I think about solution architects they typically practice three kinds of leadership. There’s business leadership, there’s delivery leadership, and there’s technical leadership. That’s part of what we’ve distilled within our program. Really thinking about what the job role is. If you want to be an architect… I feel like today architect is too tightly, coupled to technologists.

Josh Birk:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Abraham David Lloyd:
Where it’s like, “Hey, I’m going to measure how good you are at architecture based on how good you are at technology.”

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
But when you think about the technology landscape today, it’s too complex. It’s too wide. It’s too deep. There’s too much to really that way. So as a solution architect, solution architects practice business leadership. So what that means is that they emphasize business value. They emphasize business value and customer experiences. So experiences need to be frictionless. They need to be seamless. They need to generate transactional value for the customer. They need to generate transactional value for the consumer. They need to be able to generate strategic business value as well.

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
All right-

Josh Birk:
Yeah. I think one of the things I’ve learned from talking to architects, which I guess actually it really did kind of surprise me the first time I kept seeing it. Talking about the business side of things, the number of technical architects were solution architects who are also MBAs, and they have that deep understanding of the business. Like you yourself were setting up nightclubs, right? You were involved in business even before you were involved in technology. How common is that with either a deep leading to business, or an overlap between the business and the technology?

Abraham David Lloyd:
I feel like it’s more common now. I feel like it’s trending to be a requirement or table stakes, right?

Josh Birk:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Abraham David Lloyd:
One of the best pieces of advice I got in my career early is the difference between business value and technical value, right?

Josh Birk:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Abraham David Lloyd:
How technical value, business value is what drives decisions, not technical value and-

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Abraham David Lloyd:
… really kind of honing in on that. I feel like that’s one of the things that we do really well at Salesforce is we do create language and vernacular that make it easier to talk about business value. I feel like to your point about architects, that have MBAs. Traditionally architects have come from understanding technology, but often that’s in a silo, right?

Josh Birk:
Right, right.

Abraham David Lloyd:
That’s solely constrained based on the technology that you work with and the use cases that you’ve delivered.

Josh Birk:
Right.

Abraham David Lloyd:
So you’re really deep in technology, but you’re not deep in understanding the business needs. So this is why we emphasize this within the program in the way that we talk about solution architects today.

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
I think it’s critical because if you can’t describe, or if you can’t articulate or measure what it is the customers need today, how do you know what to build?

Josh Birk:
Right. Something I kept hearing was… I’m trying remember the exact phrase somebody used. But like, to “Knowingly implement something that was inferior, because you know, the costs of doing the superior version is simply not worth the outcome to the customer.”

Abraham David Lloyd:
Completely.

Josh Birk:
Yeah, yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
Completely. I think this gets to one of the other leaderships, the other types of leadership that solution architects practice. This is delivery leadership. The ability to make those trade-offs or measure the inputs that lead to those kinds of decisions. Where you can then clearly articulate, “Hey, ideally, we would do this but because of whatever the constraints are, your timeline, your opportunity window, we’re going to make a choice to do it this way. Here’s the debt that we’re going to create. We’re going to be mindful of that, but understand that is… its part of the cost of getting you to be successful.”

Josh Birk:
Right. Right. That was the phrase I think it was “Intentional debt”. Because me as a developer, all technical debt sounds bad. But when you take it one layer above there may be that fraction of the debt that’s actually in a way kind of useful to you.

Abraham David Lloyd:
I am working on a side project right now for our program. I am struggling with myself over wanting to maintain 100% test coverage so that is exactly what… Right?

Josh Birk:
Yes, yes. Exactly.

Abraham David Lloyd:
That is exactly it. I was like, “I will sleep two hours less, let me just keep my three-digit test coverage in place. I’ll sleep much better knowing that it’s a 100.”

Josh Birk:
Exactly. Okay. So let’s bring it back to the program a little bit more. Lets, give the elevator pitch for the B2C Architecture Certification, what does it cover? I think you touched on this a little bit, but why did Salesforce feel like this had to be implemented?

Abraham David Lloyd:
Well, all right. So this is great. When I think about our value proposition at Salesforce. We are a digital platform. The world’s leading digital platform where customers can create frictionless experiences for their consumers in less time, with the broadest capabilities. To generate value for their organization faster, quicker, and better than any place else. So in order to do that, you have to have an understanding of the different platforms that Salesforce has, the different products, what those features are, how these features work together, what the underlying data strategy is for customer data, as well as engagement data, and how to orchestrate and to leverage all this to produce the outcomes that you are seeking. So this is what our program does. Our program enables partners and customers seeking to enter a path or a career journey as an architect, to be able to do those things. One of the pieces of the language that I love when we talk about customer experiences is we talk about seamless customer experiences, or frictionless customer experiences. Now, this is hard.

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
It’s easy to connect things, but it’s really hard to make things seamless and elegant.

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
Because you have to understand the data strategy, you have to understand the constraints of each platform, as well as the approach or different approaches to take to create that seamless experience. So within our program, these are the things that we teach and emphasize and focus primarily on how to do that with three core products, B2C Commerce, a Marketing Cloud, as well as the Salesforce Platform. But then also how to leverage the supporting products like Customer 360 Data Manager, MuleSoft Connectors. As well as Heroku, and some of the Single Source of Truth products now, 360 Audiences, Identity Privacy Center, and such.

Josh Birk:
Yes. I did actually have a follow-up question. It’s asking about how many different clouds can we get into a single solution? I think you just listed at least 99% of them, so.

Abraham David Lloyd:
Well-

Josh Birk:
Thank you for that.

Abraham David Lloyd:
I feel like this is one of the challenges, but it’s also one of the tremendous opportunities for companies with our platform is that we have a crazy collection of capabilities that you can leverage. Whether you’re a small business or whether you’re a Fortune 100 company.

Josh Birk:
Yeah, yeah. Totally agree. I do also feel like that commerce has kind of… The Salesforce platform has this too. I’ve run into developers who simply have never become acquainted with features because their job never gave them an excuse to try to leverage them. I feel like commerce development, and I guess architecture as well has a kind of a unique thing in that it’s something that you don’t learn until you have to, but once you have to, you’re probably up against a very complicated and difficult solution. Do you have advice around that? Or does the training around the certification kind of helped that gap?

Abraham David Lloyd:
So I have both. All right? So let me-

Josh Birk:
Okay.

Abraham David Lloyd:
So let me start with the training around the certification.

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
If you’re a partner, what we have is a Curriculum and Partner Learning Camp. Tony Vaughn I’m looking at you. Tony leads, Partner Learning Camp Center of Excellence Team.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Abraham David Lloyd:
So we partnered with his team to develop a 26 course curriculum that’s available for partners today. They can go to the partner community and Partner Learning Camp, and look up our curriculum, B2C Solution Architect. One of the things that we’ve done with our curriculum is made it very… given it a lot of optionality. By that I mean, if you think about consultants today it’s exactly the scenario you described. Right?

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
Where it’s not that I’ve a linear learning path on how to grow my career. It’s that I have to react to the needs of what my client requires, or what my firm requires me to do in order to sustain new business. So it’s very much the, “Hey, or do you know how to implement Salesforce chat or lightning scheduler? Or how to integrate with Einstein Analytics or Tableau CRM?” I should say. And “No, I don’t.” “But okay. Well, we have a meeting on Wednesday where we need to have a point of view on this. So do your work, but also figure out a way to bone up on this because I need you to be on this call.”

Josh Birk:
Right. Go study up on this. Yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
Right.

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
So within our curriculum, our curriculum is very use case based where if you want to learn how to implement marketing journeys, or if you want to learn how to implement abandoned cart between B2C commerce and marketing cloud.

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
Or you want to learn how to implement Salesforce Chat, or leverage the MuleSoft connectors, or build a Single Source of Truth, we have independent courses on each of these topics-

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Abraham David Lloyd:
… that provide the product introduction, explain constraints, inform you with a data strategy, as well as explain “Here’s what a foundational phased approach would be to implementation.”

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Abraham David Lloyd:
So that within ideally one to three hours, you can at least have an informed conversation that’s authentic with the customer, but there’s also a longer tail learning journey that you can take as you go down the implementation or planning path to understand more about what’s actually involved in making it real.

Josh Birk:
Nice. Nice. I think from both the developer and architect point of view, it is kind of this weird chasing the opportunity versus the opportunity coming after you sort of thing. I had back in my consulting days, I had a customer who was I think, to this day by favorite group of people I’ve ever worked with. Because first of all, they would basically ring up Model, and be like, “We just want to borrow Josh for like three days.” I would just be able to just take three days, go sit in their offices.

Josh Birk:
Then all they really wanted to do was like brainstorm. I swear to gosh, every time it was the craziest idea. It’s just like, “You guys bring me the weirdest thing that you’re trying to develop.” I’m like, “I would never have had like the ability to have that challenge.” So it’s great that we’re able to present those things to it. So it sounds like your kind of offering an a la carte solution that can be pieced together depending on how complex you want your knowledge to be, kind of thing. Does that sound about right?

Abraham David Lloyd:
Definitely. One of the underpinnings or consistent threads in our program as well, is this data strategy, right?

Josh Birk:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Abraham David Lloyd:
So when we think about customer data and we think about different systems, I want to get to one of the… I think that it was the pre-question to this topic. Where it’s hard to make time to learn new technologies especially, in a pinch. As a result, I feel like we tend to look at everything similarly. So if I’m a B2C commerce developer, I’m developing largely in JavaScript. Which means that lightning web components are going to make sense to me, but I’m probably not going to choose to look at declarative technologies as a Salesforce platform. I’m probably going to rely on Apex because I might know Java or C-Sharp and or Go, when a type language makes more sense, or it feels more intuitive. A part of what we try to do with our program as well is create awareness, the other technologies that are available. Create a point of view that’s, “Listen solutions on our platform, don’t need to be pro-code.” Right?

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Abraham David Lloyd:
You want to write code, but you want to write just enough code to empower the other users of the platform to be able to leverage that declaratively. So this is where we introduce things like external services, or flow, and how you could… look write a little evocable Apex instead of throwing everything in a trigger. I feel like the advances that the platforms made declaratively, over the past year really make it much easier to embrace that.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. Yeah, totally. So let’s talk a little bit more specifics. This is something I think you told me previously, you’re personally passionate about. You just touched on data modeling around customer profiles. One of the things is as I was kind of reviewing the material you gave me that I found just almost fascinating, was this distinction between modeling somebody as like a system specific profile versus… I just love this phrase, “Modeling them as a human”. Talk to me a little bit about how that data modeling works and what are some of the… like the advantages of making that distinction.

Abraham David Lloyd:
All right. So I really appreciate you asking this question. I’m smiling right now. World, if there’s one thing I want you to get from our podcast, it’s what I’m about to share with you. All right? So, when we think about these multi-cloud use cases we think about seamless experiences, they all hinge on two things. The first is being able to identify your customer in their journey, regardless of where they are in their journey. What that means is regardless of what platform they’re in. If I respond to a social ad, that social ad is coming typically from marketing cloud, right?

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
I respond to it. That takes me to B2C commerce, right?

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
Then if I complete a purchase, or if I’m in the middle of shopping and I initiate a chat with customer service, that chat is now owned in service cloud. So here we have one seamless experience that is leveraging three different platforms. We need the ability to identify who the customer is with consistency, and access their engagement data so that we can be in service to them. This is the whole point about seamless and frictionless. This is so that as a customer service agent I want to understand, “Hey, so what pages have you viewed on the storefront? What is it in your cart? What products have you viewed” And maybe be able to generate recommendations, or maybe interact with your shopping cart and say, “Here’s a coupon, thank you for your time and patience” Right?

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
Within marketing, I want to understand what segments do you belong to? “Are you a VIP, or are you a new user? Have you registered or signed up for any of our campaigns?” Then I want to be able to leverage that, all of that within B2C commerce because then I can personalize the shopping experience. So this is at the journey level, right?

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
This is how we generate transactional business value. This is how we get customers to convert. Customers are happy because they get the product they want with an experience that they love. Our customers are happy because they’re able to grow their business. They’re able to do this through automation, minimizing the amount of manual intervention that’s involved. Now, the other component, understanding who your customer is as a human. Josh, let me ask you a question.

Josh Birk:
Yes.

Abraham David Lloyd:
How many phones do you have?

Josh Birk:
I am literally staring at two right now.

Abraham David Lloyd:
All right. How many email addresses do you have?

Josh Birk:
Oh, three main ones and probably 10 that use alternate alias.

Abraham David Lloyd:
All right. So this paints my other point. So when we think about identifying customers within their journey, it’s typically through a single profile or a single contact point. It might be an email address, a phone number, a combination of the two, a user ID. When we talk about identifying your customers as a human being, though, it’s across all of their contact points. Right?

Josh Birk:
Right.

Abraham David Lloyd:
It’s like all the accounts that you use, all the anonymous orders that you place, all the registered orders that you place. If one of the key KPIs for an organization is total lifetime value, right?

Josh Birk:
Okay.

Abraham David Lloyd:
Most companies struggle to calculate this because in order to generate this number, this metric, you need to be able to roll up all of the interactions and engagement that a customer has produced across all of their profiles. You can’t just do this off of, let’s say a customer ID or an email address. Like a company household share email addresses, one of the very valid but example use cases is, “You know what? My father is Abraham Lloyd, and he moved in with me and he’s sharing my email address. So now he’s buying things and I’m buying things.”

Josh Birk:
Right.

Abraham David Lloyd:
How do you tell who’s what. Right?

Josh Birk:
Right.

Abraham David Lloyd:
So this is where Customer 360 Data Manager, 360 Audiences, these products, they really tried to build the view of the human so that you can then leverage this to augment your transactional experiences.

Josh Birk:
Let me fall back a little bit. That metric, you mentioned, total lifetime value, what exactly is that measuring?

Abraham David Lloyd:
So super, super simply, how valuable are you as a customer for the lifetime of our relationship? I was looking at my Amazon account and last month we got 70 packages. It completely blew my mind. It made me think, “Wow, what is my total lifetime value with Amazon?” My mother-in-law was advocating that I sign up for an Amazon credit card because they have like a great cash back thing or something like that. It just made me think about it. So think about, I want to understand how much a given customer has spent with me. Right?

Josh Birk:
Yeah. Gotcha.

Abraham David Lloyd:
Now, Amazon makes it easy because in order to buy, you need to register and have an account.

Josh Birk:
Right.

Abraham David Lloyd:
But in e-commerce probably 70% of all orders are placed through guest checkout, like 70% to 80% depending on who the retailer is you placed through guest checkout. So, if you don’t have an ID that you can attach your order to, then how do you aggregate, and accrue, and calculate total lifetime value in a trustworthy way? This is super strategic because if your total lifetime value is one of the things that’ll inform what your segmentation strategy is. This will help you say like, “All right, so you’re a new customer, you’re a VIP, you’re a repeat customer. You’re an infrequent repeat customer”, and such. That segmentation strategy then informs ad spend, that then informs the experiences that customers are put in. Each of those experiences need to be able to convert. So if your segmentation is not right, then it will be disproportionate, right?

Josh Birk:
Yeah, yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
In some cases it’ll be wrong. You’ll be putting customers in experiences that aren’t really suited for them. So they’re not going to convert, then as a result the ROI in that experience hurts.

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
At the end of the day, it just creates waste. If you can calculate total lifetime value correctly, everything else really begins to fall in place.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense to me, partially because back in my former life as a front end e-commerce developer, I can’t even tell you how many meetings I was at work where cart aversion was the key thing we were trying to chase down.

Abraham David Lloyd:
Yes.

Josh Birk:
Why did this person put 15 things into their cart and then walked away for three months? Kind of thing. So, so that’s really interesting. Let’s talk a little bit more about Customer 360 Data Manager and Audience Manager. Give me the elevator specifically for those two projects and what do they do and what would they do for both developers and architects?

Abraham David Lloyd:
So to build these frictionless experiences, you need to be able to do the two things that I said, you have to be able to identify a customer consistently within their journey. You can do that today with our data strategy. Then you also need to be able to identify who your customer is as a human being. What this does is it requires resolution that is machine learning driven, where you can define rules that say, “Hey, I want to be able to match on this criteria, but I also want the system to also do all this other fuzzy magic”… for lack of a better way of describing it. “… to give me a global profile that represents this customer. But also gives me visibility into all the different data sources that this data came from.”

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Abraham David Lloyd:
As data changes, or as I get more data, I want to be able to curate that profile and mature it. So that way I can always have what I believe to be trustworthy data.

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
So Customer 360 Data Manager is what does that today for the Salesforce platform?

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Abraham David Lloyd:
I’m a huge fan. This is one of the things that’s really exciting about this product is that it’s a $0 skew. So if you’re a customer that let’s say has multiple Salesforce orgs-

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
So the here’s a great example. I need to know who all of my contacts or personal accounts are across these three orgs. What I want is I want to pull all the cases from those three orgs and make them available in one org. But I don’t want to copy data, I just want the data to be accessible through federation.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Abraham David Lloyd:
I want to just build a custom lightened web component, or a custom app that displays this data. Data Manager empowers that through its resolution engine, which can build those global profiles as well as through data federation service, which allows you to register multiple data sources, and then access data across those data sources. You can also integrate with Customer 360 Data Manager. They have some very exciting capabilities that I can speak about if I #safeharbor, but I’m going to save those for the product team-

Josh Birk:
Okay.

Abraham David Lloyd:
… to do. All right?

Josh Birk:
Sounds like a wise plan. So if people are hearing this, if they’re interested, they want to learn more about the cert, maybe take the cert, where can they go?

Abraham David Lloyd:
All right. So guess what? We have a page for this.

Josh Birk:
Excellent.

Abraham David Lloyd:
So if you go to a trailhead.salesforce.com/credentials, what you’ll see is the collection of roles or career roles that we support. One of those roles is the Salesforce Architect. If you click on the Salesforce Architect and scroll down, you’ll get an overview of the different architecture journeys.

Josh Birk:
Yes.

Abraham David Lloyd:
Now Salesforce as a company, we have the Certified Technical Architect, the Application Architect, System Architect. We also have B2C Commerce Architect. Well, we just introduced the B2C Solution Architect as well. So from the Architect Credential Section, if you click on B2C Solution Architect, it provides you insight into the prerequisites. There’s a learning journey trail mix. There is also a study guide that we provide, that’s similar to all the other credential study guides that we provide. So this is a great place. If you want to learn more, if you want to learn about the prerequisites, and you want to see what the study guide looks like, this is exactly where you should go.

Josh Birk:
And that’s our show. Now, before we go, I did ask after Abraham’s favorite non-technical hobby, and I am just going to warn you. This is a really cute one.

Abraham David Lloyd:
Oh man. So this changes over time.

Josh Birk:
Okay.

Abraham David Lloyd:
But I have a four year old daughter.

Josh Birk:
Awesome.

Abraham David Lloyd:
So I have a four year old daughter and I have a 19 year old son.

Josh Birk:
Okay.

Abraham David Lloyd:
What I really loved to do with her is play Scooby-Doo.

Josh Birk:
Oh!

Abraham David Lloyd:
So for Christmas, we got her Scooby-Doo and the Gang figures. So for my son, it was Star Wars, right?

Josh Birk:
Gotcha.

Abraham David Lloyd:
It was Star Wars and transformers.

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
She has Scooby-Doo. So she’s got the mystery machine and there’s Frank, and Shaggy and everybody. Look I work a lot. I love what I do.

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Abraham David Lloyd:
But if I want to unwind, I play Scooby-Doo with my daughter.

Josh Birk:
With your four year old.

Abraham David Lloyd:
Yeah. She has me talk the Gang. So, you know, “Zoinks!”

Josh Birk:
Oh my gosh. I think that might be the most adorable answer to that question that I’ve ever got. I want to thank Abraham for the great conversation and information. Of course, as always, I want to thank you for listening. Now, if you want to learn more about this show, head on over to developer.salesforce.com/podcast, where you can hear old episodes, see the show notes and have links to your favorite podcasts service. I’ll talk to you next week.

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