170,000 people in San Francisco and 15 million people worldwide tuned into hear Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, give his keynote ‘Be a Customer Trailblazer’ at Dreamforce last week. If you haven’t watched yet, the full video of the SFDC Dreamforce Keynote 2016 is here. I wanted to share some of the big thoughts and trends if you have not had a chance to see it.
Marc started off his speech with the following quote:
Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile
Einstein
Salesforce is truly a unique company. Helping others is not something they embody through their work and helping companies be successful but they go the extra step and really make an effort with their equality and philanthropy work working closely with non-profits and NGOs. There was a fantastic video about the (RED) non-profit which has been credited with saving 20M lives from HIV/AIDs with a great quote ‘Its not about charity its about justice’.
A few key announcements from the SFDC Dreamforce Keynote 2016:
- A new product called Quip was announced. Quip allows people to collaboratively work and edit documents together. To try Quip click here
- Salesforce Live message includes conversation as a platform including integrated messenger services
- Commerce Cloud is already the number one commerce platform
- Salesforce1 is now ‘My Salesforce1’ can now be branded with your logo and put in the App Store for sale
- Increased targeting and segmentation using Krux
- Preferred communication channels and send time optimisation through Einstein
Early in the keynote there was a lot of talk about Einstein and the new artificial intelligence functionality. For consumers, artificial intelligence is everywhere and used by Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and products you use every day.
Einstein works to capture data, learn and connect. Its SMART. EASY. EVERYWHERE. As it was succinctly put, ‘now everyone has a data scientist in their organisation.’ The neat things is that Saslesforce has built all of this functionality native to their platform.
Predictive lead scoring, case routing, opportunity intelligence are all possible now.
The demo example (about 35min into the video here) was VERY cool. Once example showed that Einstein learned who the competitors for a deal were, found a tweet and suggested an action based on it with a deal in the pipeline.
Einstein also surfaces other predictive factors such as industry, behaviour and then suggests an email with a suggested meeting time based on my calendar.
It takes the guess work out of prioritisation and can route leads based on this prioritisation.
It looks like setting up Einstein is just as easy as using it. Multiple sources are configured and added and actions are taken based on a simple process builder flow. It really does look easy to use and was really exciting.
Salesforce also showed the Giving Back solution by Accenture which is something to implement a fast community cloud through Lightning. They are more then templates, they are solutions. There are questions and exports and a community and Einstein will even recommend answers. You can setup a popup shop and Einstein will recommend bundles.
There was an excellent case study from Schneider Electric whose vision is to provide energy as a basic human right to people around the world. To them, the SFDC Customer platform is a key part of realising that dream and the demo was really impressive. The predictive analyt
ics for opportunities with an improved win rate was very nice. Then you can just click through to those opportunities and there are clues with possible issues – those opportunities without a C-level contact are less likely to close, for instance.
There was also an excellent case study with Fitbit around customer journeys and artificial intelligence.
I’m always incredibly inspired learning how Salesforce is working to empower their customers. Every new massive SFDC release there’s a small part of me feels like I might be out of a job soon. The amount of analysis and data that is available automatically now is so exciting. I’m really passionate about bringing best practices and tuning best technology to businesses to allow sales to best focus their efforts on selling. For more help in taking advantage of the next generation of SFDC functionality, please get in touch with Sales Ops Help!