Dreamforce, the annual Salesforce.com conference, is generally regarded by many as the event for sales and marketing professionals in the CRM space. Salesforce.com’s CEO, Mark Benioff, uses it to set the stage for emerging market themes in the coming year, showcase top companies using Salesforce.com and introduce product updates.
The rest of us attend this event for education, to assess new and complementary technology, and to network with industry peers. If you were one of the unfortunate few that couldn’t attend, here are some takeaways to help you better understand the state of Salesforce.com as it relates to your CRM efforts and investments:
1. The SFDC Ecosystem is stronger than ever.
Salesforce’s portfolio is sprawling – they are so much more than ‘just CRM’ – and even apart from their Sales, Service, and Marketing Clouds, it’s sometimes difficult to see where SFDC ends and their partners begin. Some of this has been good news to Salesforce.com clients. Instead of trying to be everything to everyone (though it sometimes feels like they do everything), SFDC really has clear lines of delineation. This allows SFDC to focus more time and effort on core business and functions and also benefits the partner ecosystem, where companies that are far more nimble and aggressive can rise up and fill a market void in order to deliver value to Salesforce.com’s clients.
2. IT Departments are gaining some of their power back.
Remember when SaaS took a big chunk out of the IT department’s swagger? IT is starting to see resurgence in their ability to work with SaaS vendors and is getting back into the position where they are now actually empowered by the new platform with tools like Salesforce1.* But a word of caution: This doesn’t mean your IT group can start, or should start, writing apps for you. Especially if those apps already exist on the AppExchange. For them to write and support homegrown applications through the long haul means your projects will then have to compete for IT resources. This could greatly diminish your ability to add enhancements, functionality and change them to match your new sales and marketing initiatives.
3. It’s a big SFDC universe; we can’t expect every SFDC rep to know all they do – and what they don’t do.
Given how rapidly both SFDC and the AppExchange evolve, it’s borderline unfair to expect any rep to know the various ins and outs of what they can provide. I’ve been in their position before, with a global, billion-dollar company that had a huge product line; with 30% turnover and the extreme pressures that go along with a highly competitive, professional sales environment, it’s impossible to create that ‘Robo-Rep’. It’s important to work together when evaluating how best to expand your Salesforce.com install: as a customer, the goal isn’t always stretching the limits of the CRM system but rather finding those best plug-ins that achieve quick ROI. Sales reps can play a big role in helping you find and evaluate their best partners.
*I actually heard someone giving a Salesforce1 presentation on the floor of Dreamforce say, “Now almost anyone can write their own app!” Oh the HORROR! Plan now for every IT department managing Salesforce.com to evaluate every single project and respond first with, “We could just write that…” We might as well welcome back leg warmers and ‘double-popped’ Izod shirt collars when that happens, because the old gridlock is about to return. Here’s hoping you are lucky enough to work with IT professionals that know your business, understand that they don’t have the bandwidth to try to compete with everything on the AppExchange, and are willing to forgo the politics and actually help you with your projects!
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