As the saying goes, the third time’s a charm. Having been to Dreamforce three times now, I’ve settled into a nice groove when it comes to planning and optimizing my time at the conference. As was the case during my trips in 2016 and 2017, Salesforce took over essentially the entire city of San Francisco: the Moscone Center, major hotels, restaurants, and bars. Nearly every Starbucks was packed with ambitious Salesforce junkies eager to get their fix.
During this year’s visit, I focused on sessions with tangible takeaways, things that I could bring back to my current role and that would have an impact on how we’re functioning commercially. That said, I attended 9 different sessions with an almost even split of improving day-to-day operations and planning for the future from an operations standpoint but also more broadly.
Below is a quick rundown of how I spent my time along with my key takeaways from Dreamforce ’18:
- Session: Make Meetings Innovative Again
- Session: The Rise of Revenue Ops: How Sales, Marketing, and Biz Ops Drive Growth
- SMB VIP Experience: Technology Enlightens Our World with Peter Schwarz (Salesforce’s SVP of Strategic Planning)
- Session: Cox Automotive Switches Gears for Sales Success Through SFDC Org Consolidation
- Session: No More Excuses: Today’s the Day You Learn Flow (watch it here)
- Session: Whose (Dead)line is it Anyway?
- Session: The Next 5 Years: Strategically Plan Your SFDC Roadmap
- Session: Goals vs Actuals: Track and Report Against KPI Targets for Any Object (watch it here)
- Session: Formulas for the Everyday Admin (watch it here)
- Vendor Meeting: InsightSquared
- Vendor Meeting: TaskRay
- Vendor Meeting: SalesLoft
Side note: Did you know that you can log back into your Dreamforce agenda to find copies of the presentations you attended along with the video (if that session was recorded)? You can even check out sessions you missed but that were high on your list — it’s almost as good as seeing it live. Learn something new every day, eh?
Improving Everyday Operations
One the most important aspects of attending Dreamforce is coming home with new ideas and insights that can be implemented in real life. While theories can be fun to discuss, every company wants to know that their investment was a worthwhile one, and that’s why I spent at least half my time in sessions with concrete takeaways.
Salesforce Skills
- Flow
- Introduction to flow terminology, data structure, and best practices
- Flow lets Salesforce admins automate processes without writing code or needing to hire a developer
- Potential use cases for your first flow:
- “Assign to Me” button for users to claim a lead (or case)
- Sales handoff process to verify correct details before looping in the implementation team
- Good resources for learning flow
- KPI Attainment Tracking
- Create a custom object and update records using a combination of Process Builder and flow to track targets vs actual performance
- Create reports and dashboards for real-time tracking, which is great for management and leadership
- Potential use cases:
- Quota attainment tracking for sales within Salesforce. This is something that has been lacking but combining these various features will allow us to build quota measurement right into Salesforce. This gives reps and leadership easy access to their progress, and it’s great for sales operations as well.
- Formulas for the Everyday Admin
- Overview of best practices when building formulas in SFDC
- Key formulas that solve basic problems almost every org will encounter:
- Converting dates to text
- Proper name capitalization
- Concatenating record details for improved reports
- Formula fields with images to highlight key info
- Trending formulas
- Power of One
- Our sales operations team is already doing some of the recommended practices, which was awesome to find out. Sessions like this are incredibly helpful since they let you see how other Salesforce admins think about data quality, user experience, and the like.
Daily Operations
- Improving Meetings
- The average employee attends 62 meetings per month, while the average executive spends 60% (!) of their time in meetings. All this costs $37B+ per year in wasted time and lost productivity.
- Oprah starts every one of her meetings with these 3 questions to keep them focused and on track:
- What is our intention for this meeting?
- What’s important?
- What matters?
- Salesforce’s approach to meeting and creative strategy:
- 3-step process:
- Discover (learn)
- Dare (go big and come up with your ultimate solutions)
- Do (take action)
- Use the “Impact Matrix” to list out potential solutions. Then identify where customer and/or employee impact are highest and level of effort is lowest. This is your sweet spot for making remarkable things happen!
- 3-step process:
Looking Ahead to the Future
Striking the right balance between the here and now and the future is also important the world around us evolves constantly. With that in mind, I wanted to be sure to take in some sessions on how to plan for upcoming changes, how the commercial operations role is evolving, and see what’s coming down the pike 5, 10, even 20 years from now.
Operations Planning and Evolution
- The Rise of Revenue Ops
- So many names! Sales ops. Revenue ops. Biz ops. Commercial ops. Whatever you call it, it’s on the rise!
- As companies adopt more and more technology, they’re beginning to realize they need someone to manage all their disparate systems. This will help them connect all those data points to see a clear, unified picture of their customers and prospects.
- Revenue ops is primed to handle this role and is thus becoming a more strategic player. We’re transitioning from a cost center to a revenue center in many companies.
- What doesn’t belong in the ops function?
- Revenue ops is not a junk drawer – projects and tasks should be focused on adding value to the organization and not on administrative to-dos
- No customer-facing activities
- Revenue ops can be the team that revamps processes for various departments across the organization and that breaks down silos between groups
- Tech Stack
- Be careful not to overwhelm users with too many tools – don’t force it
- Roadmap Planning
- Be strategic in your approach to planning your SFDC roadmap for the future
- In addition to considering structural factors (systems, strategies, processes, etc.), always keep the human factor (values, unwritten rules, behaviors, etc.) in mind as well. Technology often outpaces people’s adaptability and willingness to change. Sales ops/revenue ops must keep this in mind as they plan for future rollouts of new features and processes.
- To ensure projects are successful, revenue ops teams need to keep these disablers/enablers in mind:
What Will the Future Look Like?
I had the pleasure of attending an SMB breakfast talk with Salesforce’s Chief Future Officer, Peter Schwarz. He offered up a fascinating view of what’s to come. On the plus side, he was quite optimistic about technology’s potential impact on jobs and humans, which was refreshing. Hopefully he’s right on that one.
- General AI, like mapping the human brain, is still science fiction. This is incredibly difficult to do, which is why we’re seeing a big push of narrow AI, which is defined as machine intelligence applied to a narrow specialty, taking friction out of the everyday (think tools like Calendly, smart expense reports, etc.)
- Emergence of a new platform: Digital Assistance Platforms like Alexa
- These tools make your life easier so you don’t have to think about the basics (your calendar, the weather, shopping list, etc.)
- On data:
- Data is the new oil and we, as individuals, are giving it away for free!
- New data model has emerged:
- Data sources (you)
- Data brokers (organizations that collect and protect your data)
- Data users (companies pulling insights from the data)
- There’s a growing tension between personalization and trust
- On the future of work and life:
- Don’t worry — technology shifts, rather than diminishes, employment
- Job tasks will be automated, not entire occupations
- People skills are not easily replaced
- Most important life skill to have:
- Learn how to learn (and relearn)
Another Dreamforce in the books and another wonderful experience logged. As always, the event exceeded expectations. Rubbing elbows with Salesforce MVPs, absorbing tons of quality content, and of course, coming home with concrete ideas to implement definitely made the trip to SF worthwhile. Can’t wait until next year!
Did you get a chance to attend Dreamforce in 2018? If so, what was your favorite part? If not, how will you convince your company to make the investment next year?