Salesforce Genie (aka Marketing Cloud CDP) is the next big thing – and our MarTech consultants are here to help the ecosystem get up to scratch! Following on from the post on Marketing Cloud Personalization exam tips, we were thrilled when Toly Cernii shared his advice on passing the CDP exam in this blog post.
The (Salesforce) Genie
It’s been a while since I’ve been this excited about a Salesforce product! You can tell Salesforce is betting the house on it. It’s exciting to ride the shockwave of a “Cambrian Explosion”!
Genie, also known as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform (CDP for short), solves a problem that I’ve seen customers try to solve time and time again: stale data, duplicate records, data fragmented across silos.Clean data is really, really, hard! Especially when you’ve got terabytes of it!
The surprising approach that Salesforce took is not to create a “golden record”, but to constantly harmonise and unify customer profiles.
CDP glues data together, calculates insights, segments customers, and pushes actionable data to other systems. Voila, micro-personalisation at scale!
Where to prepare
The best thing about the cert is that you get access to a trial CDP org (educational purposes only). It’s quite a treat, since Salesforce is paying Amazon as CDP sits on top of Amazon Web Services. You won’t find any dev environments on Trailhead – only videos simulations and screenshots.
Tinkering with the trial CDP org is really the place to build a mental model. My suggestion would be to jump straight into the hands-on exercises in the Partner Learning Camp (PLC) curriculum. The Quip instructions are really step-by-step and with just a bit of background you can figure out the rest. After you have a mental map, it’s easy to build on it through theory lessons and reading documentation.
Certification tips
Here are my top tips to prepare for the CDP exam:
It’s a new product and a new exam (as of 2022). Don’t waste time with non-SF resources!
Start your orientation with the First Call Deck/Webinar (Genie Partner Pocket Guide).
Go hands-on: in each PLC lesson, do the exercises first.
Go through the other PLC sections.
Take notes as you go. I should have used actual paper to doodle and draw a mind map. I took screenshots of questions that I got wrong, reviewed them, and found relevant documentation.
Read the documentation. Skim all sections, as PLC doesn’t cover everything you need. Remember limits and refresh schedules, they’re a big part of the exam. Also Data Subject Rights.
Go through the PLC curriculum a second time, focusing on the review quizzes (you can find the recently completed courses on the PLC learner dashboard).
I had a readiness check with our MarTech Lead, Sanuil Ali, to confirm that I had covered functional (why, what, when?) and the technical lenses (where, who, how?). On to the exam…
Avoid disaster! And get the perfect score
This exam was hosted in Examity, rather than the usual WebAssessor that I was used to from other Salesforce certs. I lost momentum when I finished the PLC curriculum, as I discovered that I couldn’t sit the exam! My name in my Examity profile needed correcting and Salesforce’s support team weren’t able to fix it in time. Make sure you triple-check your details are correct well in advance. It’s also worth noting that accessing Examity is only through the PLC. And remember to record your own results at the end of the exam, as Examity can’t access them independently.
Otherwise, it’s mostly the usual Salesforce Cert. You can mark questions for review. Some answer options you can easily rule out, while other answer options try to trick you. Familiar stuff. I got 72% of the 50 questions correctly and passed the exam. I hope the tips here will help you get a perfect score.
If you’d like to join our MarTech practice, we’re growing our team now. Find out more about the company on our careers page.
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