Definition
In Salesforce Data Cloud (formerly CDP) or Marketing Cloud, a unified profile representing an individual contact or customer, consolidating identity data from multiple sources into a single actionable record.
Real-World Example
a platform engineer at NovaScale uses People to enhance the organization's Salesforce footprint with additional functionality. By leveraging People, the team avoids building a custom solution from scratch, saving months of development time while gaining enterprise-grade features out of the box.
Why People Matters
In Salesforce Data Cloud (formerly CDP) or Marketing Cloud, People is a unified profile representing an individual contact or customer, consolidating identity data from multiple sources into a single actionable record. The People profile is the result of identity resolution: matching and merging records from CRM, marketing platforms, e-commerce systems, and other sources into one canonical representation per real-world person.
Unified people profiles are foundational to customer data platforms because the unified profile is what enables consistent personalization, accurate analytics, and coherent customer experience across channels. Without unification, every system has a partial view of the person; with it, decisions can be made on complete information. Mature CDP deployments treat people profile design carefully, with thoughtful matching rules and identity keys to ensure profiles are accurate and complete.
How Organizations Use People
- •Apex Analytics — Uses unified people profiles in Data Cloud to drive personalization across web, email, and in-app experiences.
- •MarketPulse — Built personalization workflows on people profiles, with each customer's preferences and history available regardless of channel.
- •SilverLine Corp — Treats unified people profiles as the foundation of their omnichannel customer experience strategy.