Top 6 Takeaways From Dreamforce 2020 Keynote

Salesforce Dreamforce to You 2020 came to all of us remotely from San Francisco. The compelling keynote address from Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce, made it clear that businesses need to invest more in technology and evolve at an even faster pace. And of course, Salesforce will be at the forefront of it, making their cloud offerings even better. 

The Dreamforce to You 2020 keynote talked about Salesforce’s high-profile partnerships and acquisitions. But that was not all. Marc Benioff discussed where the brand is headed in 2021 and here are the key takeaways:

The Slack Acquisition

The whopping $27.7 billion Slack acquisition was on everyone’s mind, and we were looking forward to understanding what it meant for End-to-End Digital Transformation in 2021.

During the initial minutes of the Dreamforce 2020 keynote, Slack’s CEO, Butterfield, discussed his views on the acquisition and mentioned that Slack is looking forward to bringing data integration and management to the business's social part. 

With the combination of Salesforce and Slack, companies will be able to connect their employees, partners, and customers with each other and leverage their existing apps and workflows for the same. 

Slack’s conversational and decision-making feature complements Salesforce’s robust application systems and together, they are expected to change the way people work forever. 

It all makes sense on a macro level, and it is all speculative at this point, whether Slack will integrate with Salesforce products. But what we can expect from Salesforce is that the company will be on its way to creating end-to-end solutions that will place them ahead or at par with other cloud service providers.

Building on the Digital Imperative

The year 2020 accelerated the digital transformation for both B2C and B2B organizations. In fact, if you do not have a digital business today, you don’t have a business at all. Retailers across the globe have migrated to ecommerce and are now selling their products across multiple platforms.

This paradigm shift has been instrumental in preserving many businesses during the challenging year, and many brick-and-mortar retailers are on track to recovery with an ecommerce presence as we speak. 

We can expect that Salesforce will continue to digitize customer experience and extend the same to sales and support functions. By the end of 2021, voice and video calling will drive customer engagement along with the support tools initially offered by Salesforce.

Digital HQ 

With the Covid-19 pandemic having run rampant last year, the world welcomed several remote working models. Slack’s acquisition can be looked upon as the ‘future of work’ and pave the way for the digital HQ.

Salesforce's COO, Bret Taylor, duly noted that we are in the digital age and can work anywhere in the world and that we are in the future right now!

Einstein Automate 

Dreamforce 2020 also introduced Einstein Automate, an end-to-end workflow automation solution. Since its launch in 2016, Salesforce has doubled down its investment in AI development. 

Einstein Automate is built on the tools that were announced earlier in 2020; these include Einstein Call Coaching and Einstein Meetings. The platform's idea is to simplify data integration and management while still optimally leveraging data analytics for enhanced customer experience.

Increasing Direct Customer Engagement

Leading luxury brand Bentley pivoted to a B2C sales model swiftly when the pandemic knocked on our doors. They introduced the brand to a digital customer base and implemented Salesforce products to drive growth.

Bentley, as Dreamforce 2020 mentioned it, is an ideal case study when it comes to moving into digital-first customer engagement. It all begins with data consolidation and effective management. Bentley’s partnership with Salesforce gave their sales reps and marketing teams the much-needed data to elevate customer experience.

In a nutshell, personalized and optimized customer experience solutions will drive businesses in 2021.

Salesforce Hyperforce

Another innovation that was discussed briefly during the Dreamforce 2020 keynote was Salesforce Hyperforce. It is Salesforce’s reimagining of the architecture across all platforms.

With Hyperforce, customers will be able to access data in a more flexible and efficient manner. It will allow companies to deploy their resources in the public cloud swiftly and reduce the processing time to mere days.

The focus words for Hyperforce were agility, scalability, and security. 

There is no denying that more Salesforce customers are working remotely, and Hyperforce is set to provide secure and reliable access from anywhere. 

Wrapping Up

To build sustainable business growth models and create an optimal digital experience in 2021, it is necessary to integrate customer data across applications. The aforementioned Salesforce solutions will play a critical role in improving sales and service calls significantly. 

Do you have any thoughts on moving toward a fully digital customer experience 2021? Let us know in the comments. To know more about Salesforce development solutions, get in touch with our experts here. 

Have a great 2021, and we will be watching for all the new updates so that you don’t have to.