There was no line to pick up my backpack, and I waited less than five minutes for lunch. It’s amazing how much planning must go into an event of this scale, and the Salesforce team executed it perfectly.
Keynote Takeaways
Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, kicked off Dreamforce with many exciting announcements during his keynote. He covered how Salesforce is expanding around the globe, not just through its technology but also through the company’s mission to change the world for good.
He discussed an interesting concept – the fourth industrial revolution, which is shaking up not just company policies and strategies but also how customers react to them. Benioff expressed confidence that the Salesforce community of customers, analysts, architects, developers, and admins could navigate this change and channel it for more success in the future.
To help customers make Salesforce an even bigger force within their organizations, Salesforce is now offering custom-branded Trailhead options tailored to your company’s needs.
His Google partnership announcement was the big surprise of the day. Personally, I’m excited about two tech giants to be working together to engage more customers and empower more businesses! New integrations with Google are coming for customers, and I can’t wait to help put them in place for my clients.
Navigating San Francisco
After the keynote, I jumped back into my day one schedule. I signed up for so many sessions, and unfortunately, none of them were near each other. I had an aggressive schedule taking me all over the city but ended up only missing one session. Tip for next year: map out my schedule and routes beforehand!
Many sessions were standing room only and included great content about a variety of topics, including Einstein, Lightning, and TalkIQ. Amazing stuff.
Marketing Lodge Sessions
The Marketing Lodge was packed! While waiting in line for my Journey Builder session to begin I heard a great presentation on how to stay out of “email jail” by Julia Peavy from Return Path. She shared some great tips on how to engage your lists, connect with active subscribers, build suppression lists, and more!
Building Journeys in Salesforce
The Journey Builder session was standing room only. The speaker highlighted that a successful journey is not about a marketing campaign or a website; all customer interactions make up the Journey. I learned more about not only the journey that happens within Salesforce but also about the external portion of the customer journey.
As a Salesforce-certified Marketing Cloud Email Specialist, I know how to build successful Journeys, but it’s helpful to see a more holistic picture of the full journey beyond the technical implementation piece.
Map Anything in Salesforce
I then hustled over to see Map Anything in action. The functionality can calculate the best route for field service or sales depending on the accounts they intend to see for the day and automatically logs the interaction for the rep once the call is over. Emergency service call? No problem. Just tell Map Anything that, and it will re-route your day based on severity.
I am also a Salesforce Certified Field Specialist Consultant, and while I know how to set up service calls, Map Anything takes this to the next level with visualization and fleet analytics.
TalkIQ
Afterward, I jogged over to see how Peloton uses TalkIQ to analyze calls and identify keywords and phrases to predict how future calls with the same words will end. The technology can even analyze intent in a conversation.
I am also a Salesforce Certified Service Cloud Consultant and know all about Service Cloud, but this IQ serves as a great functionality addition. Imagine the learning and coaching for your team to know how to steer a customer conversation based on certain words within it.
Mobile-first Experience Design
Of course, I was excited to attend both sessions led by my team members at Soliant Consulting. The mobile-first design session led by Amit Parker and Caspar Harmer was packed.
They stressed how, for some reason, mobile is still often the after-thought of design. Amit discussed how our team has flipped this mindset and developed a mobile-design first, pursuing the majority of users. We then apply this mobile styling to the desktop version.
Both UIs are user-friendly and similar, allowing sales reps to spend their time selling. They no longer have to invest time learning how to find and enter information into Salesforce. Amit and Caspar fielded some great questions and sparked interesting conversations afterward. I know they were excited to share our best practices with such a great audience!
Lightning Architecture for Beginners
My team’s second session served as an introduction to Lightning architecture, a pretty popular topic, considering Salesforce is recommending Lightning over Classic these days. Team members Damien Phillippi and Taylor Kingsbury explained how the Lightning component-based architecture is very different than the typical Apex/VF MVC architecture and requires developers to transition their styles and best practices.
They had a great time sharing the basics of developing, architecting, and understanding basic Lightning components and answered some great questions during their session.
On to Day Two
Day one ended up being a 17-hour day, and I’m completely exhausted. I ended up skipping the 25-plus first-night parties in favor of sleep. Don’t worry, I’ll have my fun tomorrow after I’ve rested up. You can’t miss out on the Salesforce parties, after all!
I’ve picked up so many great tips just today, and Dreamforce has already been worth the trip and investment. I can’t wait to start implementing new Marketing Cloud tips for clients when I get back to work.
I am looking forward to many Lightning sessions tomorrow (particularly on one covering how to replace Java buttons with Lightning), some Einstein sessions (I can’t miss the Einstein keynote!), and another on Person Accounts. As I work with so many B2C customers and Person Accounts have come so far, I can’t wait to pick up more tips!
If you have any questions about the sessions I’ve shared insights on, please drop a comment below or contact my team directly. I’m happy to share what I’ve learned with you and help you use the tips to improve your Salesforce org and strategy!
