On the first day of Dreamforce there were around 1000 sessions, which included talks by business leaders, scientists and so on.
On 6th there was a keynote on SMB, an industry specific talk. What was interesting about the session was that there was something for everyone no matter what your company size is. Keith Block, Chairman, President and COO of Salesforce gave keynote on financial services. There were few CEOs who talked about their company success stories.
“Be a Customer Trailblazer” with Marc Benioff & Special Guests
The highlight of the keynote by Marc Benioff, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce, was some amazing customer stories that he shared.
The keynote of Marc Benioff started off with high energy words, “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.” That’s something he thinks we should work on, like, gender equality, equal pay, and child education. All these were based on the 1-1-1 model where salesforce contribute 1% of their time, equity and product for non-profit organization. He thinks the main purpose of this Dreamforce is to learn how to get connected to customers in a whole new way. We can have a single view of a customer now with Salesforce and built intimacy with customers. Adidas says their sale has increased drastically after having Salesforce for their e-commerce requirements.
Salesforce gives you new technology like chatter, wave analytics and Salesforce1 declaratively without need of codes. Now we are on the road of artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning. With salesforce Einstein AI in the salesforce platform, now the number one CRM is also the smartest one. He thinks the best way to grow your business fast is using Salesforce Lightning, as its power to help your company’s growth is incredible.
The 5 transformations of enterprise software is:
- Intelligence has been built into everything we built. Einstein is there to help you all with it.
- For speed we have Lightning
- Have to be more productive to stay on the game. With Quip we are more productive
- We have to have business running on our mobile phone, for that there is Mobility which Salesforce1 offers
- Finally everything should be connected.
In addition to these, we have more innovations like commerce cloud and live message system. Every messaging app is a user interface for salesforce. In case of salesforce1 when you create an app, you can have your name and your brand when you put it on a play store, which is a new cool feature.
The co-founder of Salesforce, Parker Harris joined Marc Benioff in the keynote to talk about the inspiration behind creating Einstein. Artificial intelligence is all around us already, like online shopping, sites predicting the items we need, getting Uber cab, facial recognition in face book and so on. To make the smartest CRM, Parker and Marc added AI with customer data and salesforce platform. So how it works is, first get all the data, the account, contact, opportunity data, emails, social and IOT data. Then give it to algorithms like natural language process, machine and deep learning and predictive analysis which makes Einstein layer of salesforce platform. This makes Einstein everyone’s data scientist. We use AI to change the way we work, to make your business smarter, guide your sales and to assist your service. In sales cloud, it guide you in predictive lead scoring and opportunity insights, and in service cloud it helps you to guide the chat to correct representative.
Data scientist Shubha Nabar showed a demo on new Salesforce. Einstein has access to the CRM data (account, contact, lead, and opportunity), calendar and email. Observing data and patterns, one can make future prediction.
Einstein allows us to focus on important leads by showing some lead scores as well indicates how likely it is to change depending on the customer. To study on lead data, it will go through various data like email to identify the competitors, and recommend the next step to be taken. One great feature here is in writing email to the leads. By clicking on send email button Einstein crafts an email with the topic of discussion and finds a good day for meeting from calendar.
It is possible to configure Einstein for sales professionals, sales leaders, service agents and marketing managers. Einstein in action is smart, easy and helps everyone to be a data scientist.
Alex Dayon showed how Schneider Electric has implemented Einstein to grow their business. Einstein helps them close their deals faster by giving few predictions. It looks at the data and gives information on current opportunities, conversion rate and proposes ways by which you can increase this rate.
There was also a note on how Salesforce changed Fitbit Company.
The highlight of the event was:
Dream Pitch – a competition for all those start-ups who build their business on salesforce platform. The winner got to be part of the incubator which is a place to build their company.
As part of giving back, Salesforce has got together with the Red organisation to “fight AIDS for good”. There was a session on the same.
Chat show
Sara Varni, SVP of Marketing, Sales Cloud, Salesforce, hosted a talk with Bruce Richardson, Tiffani Bova and Robert Desisto. The first topic of their discussion was on Salesforce Einstein, on how Cramer’s cloud, one of the new features included can be beneficial to a sales person. This new feature, helps to anticipate customer’s next action or analyse a feedback by the customer. Thus, a salesperson can react smartly by offering a better service.
One of the concerns among Sales personnel is if Einstein replace their jobs. To that Bova replied, “With Einstein in Salesforce, productivity will definitely increase. You can do lot more job with fewer people or the same number of employees. There are lot of possibilities that company can look into.
Another feature in Salesforce that has helped to increase productivity, usability and configurability for the sales representatives is Lightning. With this feature installed, no data is lost when the system restarts.
Salesforce acquired Quip recently and the topic of discussion that followed was on the same. All three speakers sounded equally excited about the features of Quip. Desisto thinks it is a great tool, as it is customer-friendly. Quip allows customers to send their feedback through call or text message.
Amazing, inspiring and fun! That’s what they feel about Dreamforce.
