Creating a B2B data model

This use case demonstrates how you can use Braze data tools to create an effective and efficient B2B data model that helps you target, trigger, personalize, and send messages to your business users.

Before we get into how you can set up your B2B data model, let’s go over several concepts and terms you should know.

There are four primary B2B objects that you need to execute B2B campaigns.

Within Braze, these four objects are combined and reduced into two objects: user profiles and business objects.

Step 1: Create your business objects in Braze

Business objects are any non-user centric dataset. In a B2B context, these include your account and opportunity data, and any other pertinent non-user centric dataset that your company tracks.

There are two methods to create and manage your business objects in Braze, catalogs and connected sources.

Option 1: Use catalogs for accounts and opportunities

Catalogs are data tables that are hosted and managed in Braze. While account and opportunity data originates from your sales CRM system of choice, you would be duplicating these in Braze to be used for marketing purposes: account-based segmentation, account-based marketing, lead management, and more.

For this option, we recommend creating one catalog for your accounts and one for your opportunities, and updating them frequently by sending Braze updates through our catalogs API or catalogs Cloud Data Ingestion (CDI). When creating these catalogs, make sure the id (first column) of your catalog matches the id in your sales CRM system.

Map over your CRM fields

The tables below include a few examples of fields you can map over from your CRM’s account and opportunity objects.

• account catalog
• opportunity catalog

Option 2: Use connected sources for accounts and opportunities

Connected sources are data tables that are hosted by you in your own data warehouse and queried by Braze CDI segments. Unlike catalogs, instead of duplicating your business objects (accounts and opportunities) in Braze, you’d be keeping them in your data warehouse and using your warehouse as the source of truth.

To set up connected sources, refer to Integrating connected sources.

Step 2: Relate your business objects to user profiles

User profiles are the primary object in Braze, which power the majority of your demographic segmentation, triggering and personalization. User profiles include default user data collected by our SDK and other sources, including custom data, which takes the form of either attributes (demographic data), events (behavioral data) or purchases (transactional data).

Step 2.1: Map sales CRM IDs to Braze

First, make sure Braze and your CRM of choice have a common identifier to share data to. We suggest using the following table to map your sales CRM ID fields back to the Braze user object. The table below has Salesforce as the CRM system, but this can be done with any CRM.

Braze object: User

After you have your IDs in sync, you need to relate your Braze user profiles with your business objects.

Step 2.2: Create a relationship between user profiles and your business objects

Option 1: When using catalogs for business objects

Now that your opportunity and account details are accounted for as Braze catalogs, you need to create a relationship between those catalogs and the user profiles you want to send messages to. Currently, this requires two steps:

1. Include the account (such as account_id (string)), opportunity ID (such as opportunity_ids (array)), or both on the user profile as attributes.
2. Log an event (such as account_linked) that includes the account ID as an event property.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
{
  "attributes" : [
    {
      "external_id" : "user1",
      "accountId" : "001J7000004K7AF",
      "opportunityIds" : [
"0064J000004EU59",
"0064J000004EU5G"
]
    }
  ],
  "events" : [
    {
      "external_id" : "user1",
      "name" : "account_linked",
      "time" : "2013-07-16T19:20:45+01:00",
      "properties": {
        "account_id": "001J7000004K7AF"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Option 2: When using connected sources

One of your connected source’s tables should include a user_id that matches the external_user_id set in Braze for your users. The user profile setup above uses your lead and contact_ids as your external_id, so you should ensure your lead/contact tables include these IDs.

In addition to ensuring the IDs match, we recommend writing basic account-level data such as account_id, opportunity_id, and even common firmographic attributes such as industry to the user profiles for efficient segmentation and personalization.