Enterprise Marketing Transformation

A healthcare organization undertaking a broader modernization initiative selected Salesforce Marketing Cloud Advanced/Next (MCA) as the future-state platform for member engagement, journey orchestration, and claims-based marketing activation.

The implementation was part of a larger enterprise transformation involving Salesforce Health Cloud, Salesforce Data Cloud (Data 360), Databricks, and the retirement of Iterable. The initiative required building a new cross-cloud marketing operating model while maintaining aggressive migration timelines tied to contractual obligations and member engagement goals.

Despite these pressures, the expectation remained that MCA would launch on schedule and support the organization’s long-term modernization strategy.

Design and lead the implementation of a scalable, future-state marketing ecosystem capable of:

• Supporting claims-based and behavioral member targeting
• Integrating Salesforce Data 360, Salesforce Healthcloud and Databricks to provide one view of a Member
• Enabling event-triggered and data-driven targeting to improve member engagement
• Maintaining aggressive migration and contract sunset timelines

As the implementation progressed, it became clear that Marketing Cloud Advanced was still maturing as an enterprise platform.

Critical delivery blockers emerged during email and journey development, including:

• Inconsistent Handlebars support and conditional logic limitations
• Data Graph fragility issues impacting personalization
• Vague and non-actionable build errors requiring Salesforce Support mitigation
• Instability within core email and journey development workflows
• Engagement data instability requiring a patch release from Salesforce

At different times, these issues fully blocked active journey development during the program’s critical path phase and threatened the organization’s ability to sunset Iterable before renewal, which would have triggered an additional $150K contract extension.

The program also faced competing enterprise priorities and resource constraints across parallel transformation initiatives. Maintaining delivery momentum required sustained executive alignment, careful resource coordination, and significant technical adaptation.

Becky served as Program Lead and Business Owner for the MCA implementation. She operated as the central coordination layer between all impacted stakeholders and technical teams. She was the ultimate sign off on all data and system architecture decisions.

As technical blockers escalated, Becky drove direct engagement with Salesforce Account Executives, Product, and Engineering teams to resolve both known platform limitations and newly discovered defects. This included reworking implementation strategy multiple times to preserve delivery timelines.

As the program’s accountable business decision maker, she maintained alignment between long-term architecture goals and short-term delivery pressure. As risk mounted, Becky ensured complex technical platform limitations were translated into the operational business risk they posed. This included maintaining clear stakeholder communications through competing priorities.

Rather than allowing platform instability to derail delivery, Becky continuously adapted the implementation approach while preserving the integrity of the future-state architecture.

To maintain the original migration timeline and avoid extending the Iterable contract, the implementation strategy was restructured three separate times during delivery.

This included:

• Moving to a just-in-time build approach
• Implementing a phased release strategy
• Bringing in an additional developer to accelerate throughput
• Reprioritizing critical functionality to better align with resource capacity and systems limitation

Despite platform immaturity, competing organizational priorities, and repeated delivery obstacles, the project migrated 1 million monthly email sends on time. All five subsequent phased releases also delivered on time, maintaining a 99%+ deliverability rate throughout the project.

The project avoided a $150K Iterable contract extension while establishing the foundational governance and operational structure required for long-term healthcare marketing modernization.