A B2B SaaS platform providing AI-assisted mineral discovery for exploration companies worldwide had recently migrated its marketing operations from HubSpot to Salesforce. In an industry historically driven by geology, fieldwork, and long investment cycles, this company’s platform applies AI to geological datasets to help exploration companies identify high-probability mineral targets faster and with greater capital efficiency.
By 2025, the company had reached a pivotal growth stage. With a global customer base spanning exploration firms, public mining companies, and institutional stakeholders, marketing shifted from being a brand function to a primary revenue function.
They had recently completed a CRM migration from HubSpot to Salesforce CRM and adopted Marketing Cloud to support structured nurture journeys and campaign execution. The ambition was clear: elevate marketing from campaign-based execution to automated, intelligence-driven engagement.
The move was intended to streamline marketing execution, but it quickly revealed gaps in how audiences were managed, segmented, and activated across systems.
Campaign automation and audience engagement were core to the Salesforce and Marketing Cloud setup, but subscriber status, segmentation logic, and campaign execution remained fragmented. Every nurture sequence or one-off email required manual reconciliation. As campaign frequency increased, it became critical to ensure subscriber status would be updated in near real time and consistently reflected across systems to support compliant, scalable automation. Centralizing segmentation and subscription logic became foundational to making Marketing Cloud work as intended.
Fragmented Segmentation Created Operational Friction
After migrating their CRM from HubSpot to Salesforce and primarily using Marketing Cloud, segmentation logic was no longer centralized or clear. Audience definitions, subscription status, and campaign execution were spread across multiple systems, creating gaps in data refresh, validation, and activation.
The marketing team relied on manual reconciliation before every campaign:
- Verifying opt-in/opt-out status
- Cross-checking engagement criteria
- Exporting or rebuilding lists
- Validating subscription statuses before send
As nurture sequences increased in frequency (sometimes daily) the margin for error narrowed. Sending to unsubscribed contacts was not merely inefficient; it introduced compliance risk and eroded trust with a highly sophisticated B2B audience.
The marketing team wanted automation. What they had was dependency on manual governance.
This was not a tooling issue. It was a data-state problem.
Building a Scalable Segmentation and Activation Model
The goal started to become clearer. They needed a scalable segmentation and activation framework that could:
- Automatically compute dynamic states such as Subscribed, Unsubscribed, and Recently Engaged
- Refresh segments with minimal latency
- Ensure consent status was reflected before each campaign send
- Support both recurring nurture journeys and ad hoc executive communications (requiring a framework where audience logic was centrally defined and consistently applied at the point of activation)
- Eliminate manual reconciliation steps
From an operational perspective, the goal was operational reliability and risk reduction. From a technical perspective, it was architectural clarity: defining a single, governed system of audience truth without overengineering the stack.
Success meant moving from static lists to computed states.
Narrowing the Scope for Maximum Impact
Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud) emerged as the natural solution for unifying segmentation and subscriber data. While the initial assumption was that broad data unification or analytics-heavy approaches might be required, a closer assessment revealed that a narrower focus would deliver the most value.
Segmentation and subscription governance were the core priorities. The company did not need complex identity resolution, cross-system deduplication, or heavy data ingestion. What was essential was accurate, timely computation of audience states and reliable propagation of subscription updates.
By narrowing the use case to segmentation and activation (rather than full-scale unification), we accelerated delivery, reduced implementation risk, and aligned the architecture precisely with business needs.
Operationalizing Segmentation and Campaign Activation
Lane Four designed a marketing segmentation and activation framework with Data 360 at its core. Salesforce objects, including Contacts, Accounts, Opportunities, Campaigns, and Campaign Members, were ingested using Standard Data Model Objects (DMOs). This created a centralized, queryable layer where subscriber signals and engagement data could be computed consistently and accurately across systems.
Within Data 360, audience definitions were formalized and automated. States such as Subscribed, Unsubscribed, and Recent Engagement were calculated using defined logic and refresh cadence instead of manual intervention. Segments were connected to Marketing Cloud through Segment-Triggered Flows, enabling direct campaign activation. An hourly subscription-status sync ensured recent subscription changes were reflected in near real time, maintaining governance and eliminating reconciliation work.
The framework supported both recurring nurture campaigns and one-off sends, giving marketing teams flexibility while reducing operational overhead. Campaign execution shifted from list preparation to audience strategy, backed by a continuously refreshed, governed segmentation layer.
From Manual Work to Reliable Marketing Operations
The impact was most visible not in dashboards, but in how marketing work actually got done.
Before:
- Manual list reconciliation before every send
- Uncertainty around subscription accuracy
- Elevated compliance exposure
- Operational bottlenecks
After:
- Hourly recalculated consent state across systems
- Automated, governed audience generation
- Reduced manual overhead
- Increased confidence in campaign compliance
- Faster time-to-launch for nurture programs
The most important change being that marketing behaviour changed. The team moved from asking, “Is this list safe to send?” to asking, “What audience strategy drives revenue?”
The system now enforces governance by design; not by checklist.
Segmentation-First Entry to Data 360
Many organizations treat Data 360 as synonymous with enterprise-wide identity unification or advanced analytics. That is often a costly misconception.
For high-growth B2B SaaS companies like this one, segmentation and consent governance alone provided both the strategic justification and the most pragmatic entry point into the Data 360 investment conversation. They show that meaningful business impact can be achieved without full-scale identity unification or heavy analytics.
Using:
- Standard DMOs
- Deterministic segmentation logic
- Segment-Triggered Flows
- Near real-time consent recalculation
…this organization established a scalable marketing operating model without unnecessary architectural weight. In this case, segmentation-first delivery created measurable operational impact, strengthened compliance posture, and built a foundation for future expansion into deeper data intelligence.
This approach now created a strong foundation for future marketing initiatives. If you’re thinking about how segmentation-first strategies could improve your marketing operations, or whether you need help defining the narrowest, highest-impact problem Data 360 could solve for your org, let’s chat.