DESelect
Helping Marketers Build Success on Top of Salesforce

The importance of a data-driven marketing strategy is not new, but it has become even more imperative than it was ever before. The reason? Long answer short: the COVID-19 pandemic. Changes in user behaviour that was anticipated to take years to transpire befell rapidly, within months. This forced modern marketers to take a hard look at a more sophisticated data-based marketing approach as opposed to going on with just their ‘gut instinct’ amidst the current tumultuous business landscape.

Fortunately, many marketers are now finding their Holy Grail in Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC). While SFMC has been leading the charge of data-first digital marketing since the turn of the 21st century, it hasn’t been until 2020 that Salesforce digital marketing automation and analytics became more pronounced among big- and small-scale companies alike. Created specifically to simplify datadriven marketing, SFMC allows marketers to integrate various data sources and define custom data models via one comprehensive platform. The only challenge: for tasks like segmentation, personalisation, and reporting, marketers need to have knowledge on writing SQL queries for filtering, enriching, or combining the data extensions in SFMC. And since SQL programming is niche expertise—which not many marketers are familiar with—the process of writing, testing, and debugging SQL queries remains a time-consuming task for marketers, if not userfriendly already.

Anthony Lamot, a marketing automation maven, explains: “From my experience, I have seen many marketers eventually becoming too dependent on programmers or external tech support to run database queries on SFMC to segment their customer or audience data. I wanted to change this status quo.” And he rightfully did so with his company, DESelect. The company cements its cornerstone by helping marketers mitigate tech dependency for using SFMC to its fullest potential. “At DESelect, we have developed a suite of plug-and-play and no-code marketing enablement solutions that extend the usability of data in Salesforce for novice and experienced marketers alike. Through this, we are aiming to create a favourable time for more advanced data-first marketing,” notes Lamot, Co-Founder and CEO of DESelect.

Crafting a New Reality for Data Marketers

At the core of DESelect’s marketing enablement solutions is an intuitive drag-and-drop segmentation solution for SFMC, DESelect Segment. Sometimes also referred to as the “Segment Studio for Marketing Cloud”, marketers can combine different data sources and apply filters to generate segments within SFMC. “Marketers can even go beyond simple segmentation of data and create engagement models or perform RFM (recency, frequency, and monetary spending patterns of consumers) analysis using DESelect Segment,” notes Lamot. As a result, DESelect marketers can double down on their data-driven marketing endeavours and create more engaging marketing campaigns.

Working alongside DESelect Segment is DESelect Search in SFMC. The usability of this application is as interesting as its conception story. As Lamot shares, the solution was an end-product of an all-night-long hackathon organised by DESelect. “The idea was to give back something worthwhile to the Salesforce marketing community,” remarks Lamot. Rightly so, DESelect Search is a free-of-charge Chrome extension that facilitates searches for content builder objects, data extensions, query activities, as well as data filters that are traditionally hard to find on SFMC. Its ease of use and functionality makes it an indispensable tool for any marketer. DESelect Search even has provisions to ‘pin’ the search results on top of the screen with a visual representation of folders and subfolders in which the data file can be efficiently stored. Marketers can thus easily access data extensions that are even 10 levels deep in the SFMC folder structure.

But DESelect’s innovative offering doesn’t end just here. In order to help marketers usher in the era of data-driven marketing even further, DESelect is gearing up for the release of a new application called DESelect Connect. “We have seen businesses struggle to get the right data. And that’s where our launch of DESelect Connect can change the usual narrative,” adds Lamot. It is a no-code data integration tool with dragand- drop features that allow marketers to easily integrate any third-party data source to SFMC via webhooks (API). “Then they can direct the data into DESelect Segment and create more detailed and accurate data-backed customer or audience segments,” states Lamot. Marketers can also use DESelect Connect to build advanced rules like email suppression management, to ensure more refined and personalised marketing—like not sending out marketing emails to customers who have recently lodged any complaints.

A Company Driven by Strong Entrepreneurial Spirit

What makes DESelect a cut above the rest is its strong organisational culture and entrepreneurial principles. Lamot shares that DESelect’s leadership ideologies are predominantly guided by the internet entrepreneur and Salesforce founder Marc Benioff’s book, Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change; and renowned American investor and hedge fund manager Ray Dalio’s book, Principles for Success.

Based on their ideologies, Lamot and his team have defined a set of five guiding principles when founding DESelect. The centrepiece of these five tenets is continuous innovation and improvement, which DESelect follows to the T. DESelect continually updates its solution suite with significant new upgrades by taking client feedback into strong consideration for each modification. “Even after we’ve sold a product, we set up calls with our clients to learn about their pain points and further marketing enablement requirements. This feedback serves as a constant source of our improvement,” underscores Lamot. Alongside, DESelect also excels in its customer support. The company constantly arms its clients with the necessary industry knowledge to embolden their marketing initiatives. “Although our solutions are intuitive enough for clients to use easily, we are always ready to take the first step forward in training them so that they can make the best use of our solution modules,” Lamot adds further.

To best explain how such a perfect blend of technology and human support empowers DESelect clients, Lamot offers the client success story of Alm. Brand, a national insurer in Denmark. Alm. Brand is one of the early adopters of SFMC in Europe. But to ensure more efficient use of SFMC, Alm. Brand sought help from DESelect. Now the marketers of Alm. Brand can develop the data themselves, as DESelect solved their biggest stumbling block—writing SQL queries every time they need marketing data from SFMC. “Notably, they’re now able to increase their efficiency by 50 percent when it comes to streamlining their marketing data,” adds Lamot.

With many similar success stories under its hood, DESelect is now looking at a multidimensional expansion. From the technological point of view, the company is planning to continue creating innovative and smart marketing enablement solutions that are simple, powerful, and easily accessible. On that note, DESelect is well on its way to creating a version of its free Quick Search app on Salesforce AppExchange. “We have seen many businesses having policies against using free Chrome extensions, due to security reasons,” explains the CEO. With this release, more businesses will be able to leverage the benefits of DESelect Search app. Together with that, from a geographical expansion perspective, DESelect is also looking forward to opening its new offices in the U.S. and Australia. “All in all, the time ahead looks favourable of DESelect, and we are going to take full advantage of it and create a frictionless future for the marketers. And when doing so, we have no place for complacency; because we believe in continuous improvement, and as such, we are never done improving our marketing enablement offering for the world,” concludes Lamot.