Didn’t make the Salesforce World Tour 2016? Let’s recap on some of the main takeaways in advance of the 2017 event!
The event took place last June in London and saw 15,000 delegates attend the largest Salesforce event of its kind outside of San Francisco, enjoying speaker sessions, breakouts and even a silent disco!
Salesforce Strategic VP, Peter Coffee, talked about the cloud as being the ‘new normal’, while Sir Chris Hoy, the Olympic medallist, talked about the importance of persisting in the face of defeat. He explained the need to have a clear and ambitious goal, before breaking it down into daily micro steps – applying his cycling legend to the art of business.
Andy Lawson (SVP UKI Enterprise Business Unit & UK MD Salesforce) discussed how the UK was leading the way in digital transformation with the Salesforce Platform and Polly Sumner (Chief Adoption Officer Salesforce) talked about the ability of Salesforce to provide long term customer innovation, making the sales cycle less and the ‘stickiness’ more.
Mark Bloom, (Senior Strategy Director Salesforce), talked about how customer experience was now the prime brand differentiator – and warned that just a single poor experience could destroy the relationship that a customer had with a brand. Erinn Leahey, (Regional VP Salesforce) then talked about how customers simply didn’t care any more about individual departments within a company and simply want to know that a company is listening to them and understands them – something that is particularly key to large, global companies with multiple departments and locations, who may tend to look internally and think in terms of organisational structure rather than customer experience.
Tim Clarke, the Salesforce Marketing Director, spoke about the need to give everyone their own data access in order to improve individual performance. He said that the right data was needed at the right time in order to make good quality decisions. For us Brian Goldfarb (SVP Salesforce) was of great interest as he talked about the changing world of app development. He explained that the next generation of apps would be created by individuals who were not actually developers by profession, putting the power of technology more and more at the finger tips of the business.
Vax were there, the consumer cleaning products brand to talk about how the implementation of Salesforce transformed their business. Carole Edwards spoke about the 13 legacy systems that used to have the company’s agents in tears and explained that the implementation of Salesforce and resulting data clarity had provided an immediate 30pc upswing in sales. The UK government were represented by Ed Vaizey MP, who was there to talk about digital adoption in the UK, explaining that the UK had the biggest number of ‘Unicorn’ companies in Europe. These are companies with a $1 billion valuation or more – Maybe one day we will be up there!
Feedback from delegates was good, from twitter to Facebook many did the obligatory whoop whoops and found the day exciting and very informative. They loved the diversity of the event, and the broad choice of speakers, guests, hosts and case studies put forward. Not least a surprise appearance from a beautiful Aston Martin DB11 was the highlight for many! Twitter was awash with partners shouting about their latest and greatest as well as the the delegates sharing their day in pictures and excerpts about value exchanges from the day. Many were about personalising customer experiences, and the fact that design thinking needed to become a corporate mindset – something we talk about a lot at Silver Softworks!
Key takeaway from 2016 – Tomorrow’s staff have to have skills and abilities in empathy, curiosity, and contrarian thinking, as well as the world’s number one CRM to make sure they keep leading the way.
Watch out for our 2017 report – Going to be a good one!
If you were at the event too, get in touch and let us know what your biggest takeaway was.