Dreamforce Recap: Future of Tech & Its Inter-department Impact

When I arrived at the airport and headed north towards campus, I immediately see the beckoning blue lights of the Salesforce Tower. It calls us hoooommeee!

(I had fun joking about that all week as it is literally the tallest tower in San Francisco right now.)

You can look up the big takeaways or road maps of Dreamforce yourself, so I decided to put together information based on the major messages about technology, work, and how roles like ours and people like us fit into the future.

Sustainable Development Goals

The Opening Keynote kicked off with many announcements: Einstein voice, AWS, Microsoft…all that you can find on the Dreamforce website. A major part of the keynote, however, focused on the Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations (2015) for the world by 2030.

Reduced inequalities, female engagement and representation in the workforce, climate action and water conservation, and access to quality education and workforce development were the key ones that Salesforce focused on.

I’m a marketer, so I know these can sometimes be flashy initiatives for us to “feel good.” I can tell you, though, that throughout the week I witnessed each of the six that Salesforce focuses on lived out in my experience at the show. It feels good to be a part of that… and it feels good, at least to me, to go home and work with this software and know they deliver on their initiatives.

Future of Work: Opportunities In The Ecosystem

Expanding upon the line many of us have heard that for every $1 spent by a customer on Salesforce products, it generates $4 of potential revenue for the greater ecosystem. Marc Benioff shared a slide showing that there are 1.2 Admins for every admin job opening, 0.8 developers for every developer opening. The ratio keeps shrinking as you climb the role hierarchy to technical architect. It proves there is enormous potential for growth and mobility in this space.

History & Trends of the CIO

I really enjoyed a presentation by Pulse Q&A on insights from 5,000 CIOs. As part of this presentation, they laid out the history of the CIO role compared with how tech has developed over the years.

When it all started back with mainframe, all was equal. Through core applications and then after Y2K, it all went crazy. The importance skyrocketed as technology became a part of our work lives, yet, the differentiation came to a halt. Then in 2010, both zoomed to the bottom and all was equal again. This time, it was due to cost cutting in both technology investments and the CIO’s importance and salary.

In 2020, they predict a resurgence — yay for us! — as top management recognizes that it’s not only the CEO and CFO who know the business…it’s also the person in the dark room building the tools to run the business every day.

Customer 360 & The Merging Of Department Lines

I saw this topic come up in almost every presentation I attended…there’s a merging of departments going on. I think the best way to describe it is with an example of a typical customer experience:

I needed help the other day with an order I had placed. I accidentally picked a white and gold dress when I thought it was a black and blue dress. I chose to message the company on Facebook and tell them I ordered the wrong color before the item shipped. The chat agent helped me and my order arrives next week.

The question becomes, who helped me?

• Was that marketing person because I used social media?
• Was it the sales team because I was purchasing a product?
• Or, was it service because the sale was technically already made?

More and more, the answer we’re getting is “it doesn’t matter.”

That leads us to the idea that Service is becoming a product and everyone is responsible for selling it.

Because of this, companies are starting to recognize service as having more potential than just a cost center. This is a stat from Deloitte, that 79% of respondents claimed field services were driving new business models. I’ve spoken with service leaders at manufacturing companies and I’d say this is true…technicians are serving as almost an inside sales team. The technology they use, then, needs to support that. I think that is where, as Salesforce professionals, you will see projects coming from related to these tools and the visibility to make data cross functional.

Communities Push To App Space

Salesforce seems to be inching up the supply chain and now encroaching on your CMS systems. The roadmap for communities includes a headless CMS so admins can create web pages, landing pages, and content based pages to expand their community. It’ll also allow you to assign audience criteria, so then you can show specific content to specific demographics — as a marketer this is an amazing tool!

They’re branding it all as “Content As A Service,” and trying to convince us to think about our IP at our businesses as another product (see a trend here?).

To add to this, Salesforce plans to release mobile app courtesy licenses and mobile publisher playgrounds in Summer ’20 to “try before you buy.” Mobile publisher is the ability to take your community and push it into a custom branded app.

I’ve looked at this for projects in the past as I’ve wanted to create a private business app, but the cost was prohibitive and involved another separate CMS system. That would mean at least three CMS’ — Salesforce, my website CMS, and my app CMS. What marketer do you know needs yet another CMS system to manage?!

What I love about this initiative is I can take any Salesforce data, the benefits of Community Cloud, and now the added CMS content, and push it all into my own app and manage it in one place instead of three.

Yo Yo Ma, Professional Advice For Us All

Dreamforce does more than just blast attendees with the newest tech and trends, it also seeks to inspire. This is arguably the most fun part of attending.

Yo Yo Ma was my most played artist of 2019 according to my Spotify Year In Review, so when I heard he was presenting at Dreamforce, I had to attend this session.

This line he spoke really stood out to me:

“It takes me seven seconds to walk from the stage wings to my seat on stage. Within those seven seconds, the audience will have already decided if they’re going to have a good night or not.”

I found this very inspiring first because of the fact he knew it took him seven seconds to walk across the stage. That is a professional. It makes me think about ways that I can take control of my work and execute in such a precise, professional manner; where I know even the smallest details that matter.

Dreamforce is an incredible experience — no matter if you’re focused on sessions, networking, swag, or advancing your skillset. This year I left excited about the future of technology with the forecast for these roles, the blending of departments, data, and tools to better serve customers, and a dose of inspiration to send me home with.

What were your big takeaways? Have you implemented anything you’ve learned so far this year?