Principal Solution Engineer - Data Cloud / AI Consumption Lead

Location: UK, London office flex

About Salesforce Data Cloud

Salesforce Data Cloud has been recognized as a leader in Gartner’s inaugural Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) in 2024. This prestigious recognition underscores the platform’s excellence in managing and activating customer data across the Salesforce ecosystem and beyond. The Data Cloud’s consumption model offers unparalleled flexibility and scalability, enabling businesses to pay only for the resources they use and easily adapt to evolving needs. As a core component of the Salesforce ecosystem, the Data Cloud seamlessly integrates with our AI, CRM, and trust-based solutions, driving significant business value and ensuring that organizations can fully leverage their data. This strategic focus on Data Cloud is pivotal to our vision for the future, empowering businesses to harness the power of data for transformative outcomes. Leveraging advanced technologies like zero-copy data integration, predictive and generative AI, Salesforce Data Cloud is set to revolutionize customer engagement across sales, service, marketing, and the entire customer lifecycle.

Role Description

Delivering customer success with Data + AI + CRM + Trust is the unique value proposition for Salesforce and the Customer 360 Platform. The Consumption Lead, Data Cloud, demonstrates deep business, industry, and product knowledge to partner with customers, guiding them to accelerate Data Cloud consumption and return on investment with Salesforce. This role combines technical and commercial responsibilities. You will drive growth in your assigned customers and use cases by leading stakeholders, managing executive relationships, and creating and implementing consumption plans. Additionally, you will act as the post-sale technical lead for Data Cloud, leveraging your expertise and technical credibility to engage and communicate effectively at all levels within an organization. You will be responsible for developing and implementing technology strategies and providing architectural guidance to ensure Data Cloud integrates seamlessly with customers’ existing systems. You will build and nurture positive relationships to help customers progress on their Data Cloud consumption journey, ensuring the platform delivers value. The Consumption Lead, Data Cloud, works directly with customers that can vary in their market segment, size, solution complexity, and life cycle, all depending on the customer’s needs. You are a constant learner. You are curious, empathetic and have a strong bias for action. This is an IC (individual contributor) role.

Your Impact

As a trusted advisor you will successfully influence customer outcomes and accelerate Data Cloud consumption. You will:

• Work across multiple selling teams and internal stakeholders, creating clarity from chaos.
• Drive onboarding, enablement, success, go-live, and healthy consumption of Data Cloud workloads.
• Leverage account teams, services, customer success, education, and support resources to build and manage tasks beyond your scope of activities or expertise.
• Create, own, and execute a point-of-view on how key use cases can be accelerated into production.
• Navigate Data Cloud Product and Engineering teams for new product innovations, pilot programs, and upgrade needs.
• Provide internal and external updates on KPIs related to usage and customer health, covering important risks, product adoption, and use case progression.
• Develop mutual success plans with customers.
• Help ensure customer success by increasing focus and technical accountability to our most complex customers who need guidance to accelerate usage on Data Cloud workloads.

Primary Responsibilities

• Develop an understanding and knowledge of customer’s Salesforce Data Cloud implementation and evangelize the capabilities of Data Cloud.
• Engage with strategic customers to understand their goals, assess their capabilities, and provide recommendations to help them accelerate consumption to achieve their business and technology objectives.
• Have a passion for operational excellence that drives scalable consumption, ACV growth, and customer success.
• Skilled at guiding impactful discovery conversations to unveil nuanced client needs and identify creative solutions through customization.
• Guide a customer on org strategy, governance, and change management standard processes based on customer needs.
• Demonstrate hands-on Data Cloud product knowledge by applying platform features and functions to customer business priorities and roadmap.
• Proactively identify risks to the customer achieving their stated business goals and work with the account team to build a risk mitigation plan.
• Produce and implement a comprehensive adoption path showing the current state, target future state with timeline, and an underlying enablement Plan.
• Deliver value and innovation to a customer’s business by understanding our customers’ key business challenges and potential for growth.
• Build and cultivate executive-level relationships with the customer’s IT and business executive leadership, sponsors, and decision makers to solidify our partnership and dedication to the customer business and IT sponsors & collaborator.
• Working with the account team and Salesforce Execs, effectively network within accounts from the Executive-Level down, in order to help customers work towards their goals.
• When appropriate, recommend additional Salesforce services and advisory experts needed to drive success.
• Proactively communicate technical product changes, degradations, outages, end of life, and other relevant updates.
• Collaborate with Salesforce product teams to deeply understand Salesforce solutions and roadmap, and advocate for key features needed for success across the Industry/Territory via Voice of the Customer feedback.
• Collaborate with our sales and field engineering teams to accelerate the adoption and growth of the Salesforce Data Cloud platform in your accounts.

Minimum Requirements

Your demonstrated impact includes:

• Significant experience in customer-facing solutioning for Data, Analytics, AI, and CRM.
• Technical Expertise: Full-stack technical qualifications (CRM, Data Architecture, AI/ML) and experience managing technical relationships with C-Level executives.
• Communication Skills: Ability to drive effective conversations at the C-level, facilitate difficult discussions, and handle objections adeptly.
• Trusted Advisor: Proven success as a trusted advisor, understanding customer motivations and needs to drive business value, and experience integrating complex data architectures.
• Customer Success: Experience driving customer success in large, complex selling organizations.
• Industry Knowledge: Deep understanding of industry-specific use cases, data architectures, and integration patterns.
• Influence and Leadership: Persuasive verbal, written, presentation, and interpersonal communication skills that influence change in large organizations.
• Technological Awareness: Staying up-to-date with emerging marketing, data-related, and AI technologies.
• Proactive Attitude: A self-starting attitude with the ability to handle tasks independently while collaborating remotely with customers and colleagues.
• Data Ethics and Privacy: Commitment to data ethics and privacy, ensuring customer solutions adhere to relevant regulations and best practices in data security and privacy.
• Product Development: Hands-on experience building 0-1 products at startups or large companies.
• Facilitation Skills: Excellent workshopping and whiteboarding skills.
• Degree or equivalent relevant experience required.

Experience will be evaluated based on the Values & Behaviors for the role (e.g. extracurricular leadership roles, military experience, volunteer roles, work experience, etc.). As a deep subject matter expert, you will have a rare set of technical proficiencies, including:

• Salesforce Smart: Deep, technical knowledge of the Salesforce platform (Salesforce Admin and Advanced Admin level certifications, hands-on experience with Salesforce Clouds).
• Deep understanding of Martech Stack with hands on experience with Salesforce Marketing Cloud or similar products.
• Data Architecture & Tools: modern cloud data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, Big Query, RedShift), data analytics tools (Tableau, Looker, Power BI), data programming models (DataFrames, pandas), and AI (Python, R, Jupyter Notebooks, data wrangling, machine learning).

NOTE: This is an office-flexible role. The expectation is to be in-office 3 days a week when local to an office.