1 ) Fourth Industrial Revolution
“This is the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We’re connected with our customers in new ways with amazing next generation technologies. It’s incredible what’s happening,” Marc Benioff said in his opening keynote.
Benioff expressed worry over the potential divides the influx of new technology brings to society. Begging the question of what technology is doing to us as a culture highlighted the importance of using technology as a force of good, which many of the session speakers focused on, namely Ashton Kutcher.
Leaders at Dreamforce made sure to emphasize how important it is to step back from our daily use of technology and think about how the many ways it affects us as a whole, whether it is good or bad.
2 ) Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Day two of Dreamforce was dedicated to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and featured 75 sessions involving Salesforce Einstein, which was launched in 2016. For those unfamiliar with Einstein, the Salesforce team describes it as “AI for CRM.” In a nutshell, it acts as an automated data scientist (hence the name) embedded into Salesforce.com.
Our Senior Salesforce Engineer, Brandon Barr, enjoyed attending the Dreamforce session “Custom Predictions for Every Business,” led by Ayori Selassie and Ceverly Strand. Selassie explained how Salesforce Einstein is “essentially a point and click tool that allows any administrator to build predictions with clicks not code.” If your company does not fit within one of the Salesforce models, the Einstein Prediction Builder gives admins the ability to create custom AI models depending on the business outcomes they’d like to predict.
3) Enabling Sales Fundamentals
Thousands of apps exist on the AppExchange, but that does not mean that each one will directly benefit your company. A large focus was put on getting back to the basics. LevelEleven CEO Bob Marsh said, “At Dreamforce 2017, there was a common theme around companies trying to use technology to enable good basic sales fundamentals, where in years past it felt as though people were evaluating and buying technology just because it was a cool new fad.”
Native to Salesforce, LevelEleven has grown through the explosion of sales technologies, but offers an entire sales management system by driving the behaviors that lead to closing more business. Rather than serving one specific function, LevelEleven motivates, manages and coaches sales teams toward higher levels of achievement. Given that each sales team operates with different needs, LevelEleven customers have the autonomy to choose the behaviors and metrics they want their team to focus on.
For more information about LevelEleven, click on our AppExchange listing.
