The great reunion

There is a first for everything, and so was my trip to Dreamforce 2022. I have heard about this great conference throughout my years in the IT-Industry, and finally, I got to go. While just around 1/3 of the size of previous years, it was still big, loud and an end-to-end Salesforce experience. I felt like I lived in Trailhead for three days filled with sessions, product demos, parties and many people with the same question: how can Salesforce support my business?

Genie, The Rabbit

As always, there are big announcements at tech vendors’ events and here is no different. The biggest here was Genie. Salesforce describes it as a real-time platform that helps you across marketing, sales and service. My non-technical understanding is that it is a data platform working across all the products, enabling better real-time and automated decisions – but I am still learning. As a Strategy Consultant with a nag for how technology supports the business, I am naturally very excited as to how this gets to work as the importance of business units collaborating is more critical than ever – both to create a top-of-the-line customer experience and to create internal efficiencies.

People make it happen

One of the most fantastic elements of experiencing these top-level events is the customer stories: how the technology supports the short, middle and long-term goals of companies across industries. The net outcome is that the people make it happen, and technology has a supporting role. As one Salesforce client said (slightly paraphrased): “While the technology is great, it is the people in the organisation that made the change happen. If you don’t change processes and behaviour, you will never get the full value.”

Often, however, we see quick starts on tech implementation, but the investment in the people and processes lacking which, unfortunately, risks lowering the tech utilisation. This is nothing new but still valid and even more relevant in today’s economic environment.

Get your strategies in place

In marketing, a solid chunk of the total budget goes towards marketing technology. According to Gartner, that is not changing significantly. One of my takeaways from this conference is to look at the different strategies. Now I call it marketing strategy as it includes all key marketing elements as a subject. In organisations, you might have a customer strategy, loyalty strategy, product strategy, go-to-marketing strategy etc. There might already be opportunities going into 2023 where you can take advantage of existing technology. You are much more to the point about what you need to supplement what you have to gain market share or reduce your cost.

Happy trails.