Persona assignments in Salesforce

Why use predictions for persona assignments?

Ah personalization, the holy grail of growth teams everywhere. Too bad it’s so difficult to do well.

The best way to personalize email is the simplest: organize your customers into personas, then produce straightforward variations of your email content for each persona. This way, you can have both copy and creative perfectly aligned with the interests of each persona so that your customers feel like you get them.

Faraday makes discovering your brand's bespoke personas intuitive & easy, and delivering them to any channel in your stack a breeze.

With persona assignment predictions in Salesforce, you'll give your team the ability to personalize engagement to perfection through insights from AI-generated personas.

Follow the steps below to get your persona assignments predictions into your Salesforce account.


In this guide, we'll show you how to:

  • Organize your customer data into cohorts
  • Describe prediction models for personas with persona sets
  • Deploy persona assignments predictions to Salesforce using Pipelines

Getting started with persona assignments in Salesforce

Make sure you have a Faraday account (signup is free!) and that it's not in test mode.

Requirements for this persona assignments recipe

You'll need the following cohorts available in your Faraday account:

Screenshot of the cohorts listing that includes Customers

Building predictions for persona assignments in Salesforce

Now you'll create the prediction objective(s) necessary to complete this use case with Faraday.

Getting started with Salesforce personalization

Persona sets use machine learning to organize people into unique, coherent subgroups (called personas) that you can use to personalize your outreach.

Creating a persona set for your Customers

Let's make a persona set that organizes your customers into personas.

  • In the navigation sidebar, choose Persona sets. Screenshot of the persona sets list
  • Click the New persona set button.
  • Fill out the form:
    • For Choose a cohort, pick the cohort that best represents your customers.
    • Leave the advanced settings at their defaults.
    • Enter a memorable name, like "Customers". Screenshot of the new persona set form, filled out
  • Click the Save persona set button.

Faraday will do some magic in the background, so you can proceed with the rest of the instructions. When your persona set is done building, you'll get an email, and you can review your personas.

Screenshot of the persona sets listing that includes Customers

Using Pipelines to deploy predictions to your stack

Now you'll configure the pipeline that deploys your predictions to salesforce.

Create your pipeline for persona assignments in Salesforce

  • In the navigation sidebar, choose Pipelines. Screenshot of the pipelines list
  • Click the New Pipeline button.
  • Fill out the form:
    • For Payload, choose the following:
      • Persona set: Customers
    • For Population to include, choose the following:
      • A cohort representing your customers
    • Enter a memorable name, like "Persona assignments in Salesforce". Screenshot of the new pipeline form, filled out
  • Click the Save pipeline button.

Your pipeline will start building in the background. You can proceed immediately with the next set of instructions.

Deploying your pipeline to Salesforce

CSV

  • In the Deployment area, find the CSV module and click Add. Screenshot of the ready pipeline with no targets yet
  • Fill out the popup:
    • Choose the Identified option.

    • Choose Human friendly column headers.

  • Click the Next button. Screenshot of the new target form, filled out
  • Expand the Structure section of Advanced Settings
    • From the dropdown, select the salesforce preset. Screenshot of the second page of the new target form, filled out
  • Click the Finish button.
  • Click the Test deployment button and confirm the results meet your expectations. Screenshot of a target after hitting its test button the first time Faraday will finish building your pipeline in the background. When it's done, you'll get an email—return to the pipeline and click the Enable pipeline button to activate it.

How to use your persona assignments predictions in Salesforce

With your pipeline deployed, it's time to plug your personas into Salesforce. Follow the steps below to see each Salesforce contact enriched with their unique persona.

Creating a Salesforce Contact Field

First, we're going to create a Salesforce Contact Field for our personas so that we can assign them to our contacts appropriately.

  1. Navigate to the Fields & Relationships tab under Contact in Salesforce Object Manager.
  2. Click New in the upper right to create a new field.
  3. Select the text bubble, as Faraday personas are plain text, then click next.
  4. Name the field something unique like "Persona" and add the required character length maximum. As Faraday's personas can be descriptive, we recommend a longer maximum like 100 characters.

Image of Salesforce new custom field

  1. Click next, then choose the appropriate permissions required per your company's guidelines for which Salesforce users can view the Personas field–then click next again.
  2. Finally, choose which page layouts you'd like the persona field to display on. We recommend including any layout that is used by your team. Click save to finish creating the custom field.

Importing your personas CSV into Salesforce

Now that the custom field for persona is created, let's upload the CSV output from your pipeline.

  1. In your Faraday pipeline, click the Download CSV button under the deployment to download your persona assignments as a CSV.
  2. Navigate to Salesforce's Data Import Wizard and select Accounts and Contacts, as we're going to be assigning your personas to your known contacts for this recipe.
  3. Select Update existing records, and ensure you're matching records by Email.

Image of Salesforce update existing records selection

  1. Select CSV in the right pane, choose the CSV you just downloaded from your deployment, then click next.
  2. In the mapping step, map your contact fields appropriately, and select the persona contact field you created to map to the row for the persona name. See the bottom row's "Glamorous Grandma Gloria" example below.

Image of Salesforce import mapping data

Mapping the raw persona ID column isn't necessary, but you can do so by creating a new contact field for it by following the steps at the top of this section.

  1. Click next and review your mappings.
  2. Click start import to begin the import. When the import is complete, your contact cards will be populated with your Faraday personas, and you're ready to kick off personalized campaigns.

🔒 It's a best practice to permanently delete any file that contains personally identifiable information (PII) after use. Any deployment from Faraday that is unhashed contains PII, and should be deleted after uploading it to your destination for security purposes.