Flying in to NYC for Salesforce World Tour on December 8 was definitely worth it for me. I got to reunite with relatives in New York that I had not seen since before the pandemic, catch up with friends and coworkers in person, and, of course, learn about some game-changing developments in Salesforce.
Priceless experience
Salesforce events bring people together to honor achievements and explain the features and benefits of new offerings. That’s why Salesforce doesn’t limit itself to hosting one single, large, annual event.
In addition to Dreamforce, Salesforce also holds several, smaller events throughout the year in cities around the globe, including Tokyo, London, Amsterdam, Melbourne, as well as major cities in the U.S. like New York and Chicago, for its World Tour. Aside from location, another draw for attendees is the affordable cost with no charge for admission.
“It’s really about bringing the magic to areas where we have a high concentration of customers,” Rob Garf, VP and GM, Retail at Salesforce noted in an interview with Martech.
Bringing the magic means carrying over similar speakers and topics that were presented in this year’s Dreamforce. While some of those presentations can be viewed in a recorded version, delivering them to new locations on the World Tour allows more people to experience the excitement of the live experience.
It also allows the attendees in different cities to participate in the Golden Hoodie award, which recognizes Trailblazers for having inspired others and giving back to the community. The attendees at World Tour NYC got to witness Micheal Drzewiecki don his during the keynote address.
The keynote address and other sessions at the NYC brought home the customer-centric direction that Salesforce is mapping out for the company. That came across in three highlights of the event: identifying the definitive habits, the explanation of the Genie Customer Data Cloud, and a major improvement for DevOps Center becoming GA.
All about the customer
Taking their cue from Stephen Covey’s famous book, during the NYC keynote, Marc Benioff and Sarah Franklin presented the concept of 7 habits as applied to a customer company:
The 7 Habits of a Customer Company
- Build a customer 360.
- Create a single source of truth.
- See and understand your customers.
- Maximize time to value.
- Do impact things as a team.
- Save time. Save money. Grow revenue.
- Be a trailblazer.
Salesforce is really serious about being customer focused. This is something the company is promoting for itself, as well as all those who use its platform.
The genie is out
To really be customer-centric you need a perfect view of your customer, which calls for a customer data platform (CDP). What Salesforce has developed is a boosted CDP that makes it easier for businesses to gain actionable insight from their customer data.
The newest addition to the Salesforce lineup of products is the Genie Customer Data Cloud. It makes it possible to pull in data from multiple sources and house it in one location where it is accessible and enables visualization through Tableau for real-time, actionable insights at scale.
Though it had been featured at Dreamforce, I gained a much better understanding of what it was about at this more intimate event that allowed me to be in direct contact with the speakers.
Change without Change Sets
Salesforce has just released its own devops tool, which puts it in direct competition with a number of established platforms. The development had been in beta for a while and just became Generally Available on December 9.
Now it’s possible to manage and release Salesforce changes without having to go through Change Sets. I sat in a session with a principal technical architect involved who explained how it works. It’s a great tool, and I look forward to using it.
As I noted, the Salesforce World Tour is definitely worth the trip. But if you either couldn’t make it over in person or had to miss sessions while networking at the event, you can still catch some of the content on Salesforce+.
Learn more about Sibusiso “Siso” by reading Siso Ntuli: Salesforce Legend and Community Leader
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