Top 4 Takeaways from Dreamforce 2015 #DF15

A couple of weeks ago, along with more than 150,000 attendees, we were at Dreamforce in downtown San Francisco to learn from numerous amazing keynote speeches, educational sessions, and networking events.

Dreamforce

Salesforce, soon to be the 4th largest software company in the world in 2016 according to its CEO Marc Benioff, presented a mind-blowing event again with guests such as Satya Nadella, Jessica Alba, Susan Wojcicki, etc.

Surrounded by a ton of new technologies and insights over 3 days at Dreamforce, here are some of our biggest takeaways on digital marketing from the event:

The Marketing Cloud is Becoming More Intelligent & Predictive

According to Marc Benioff, the cloud computing market will be worth 270 billion dollars in 2020, so we looked forward to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud session where CEO, Scott McCorkle, kicked off the their keynote with a bunch of big brands on stage telling compelling stories of how personalization and predictive analytics were driving incredible results in engagement and ROI from their target audiences.

For companies like Mattel, Room & Board and AT&T navigating digital was becoming easier with cloud-based tools that helped create much more target experiences for consumers and yielded results like 22% rise in engagement for email campaigns and 600% rise in conversion rates for some companies.

Although obviously a showcase for the Salesforce toolset, the presentations were done very well and left us no doubt that driving results by combining on and offline campaigns was not only very possible but a must do for the modern brand

Internet of Things (IoT) is Totally a Thing

IoT was definitely one of the buzz phrases during the event. In a session with Robert Schmidt, Director at Deloitte Digital, the concept of Internet of Some Things was discussed and the speaker encouraged innovators to create the Internet of some things that are deliberately chosen and purposely deployed, instead of the internet of everything.

There were not only a lot of discussion on IoT in the sessions and keynotes, companies were also showcasing their latest innovations on the expo floor. Combined IoT tech Ardino and Rasberry Pi with Force.com Streaming API and web services, the Salesforce Studio at Deloitte Digital created a “smart” foosball table that can track player statistics and data near real-time and ultimately create a ranking and bracketing algorithm capable of pairing like-skilled players.

Foosball

We also saw a smart grill that is capable of connecting to other grills around the world and creating the very best tasting charbroiled food, and a commercial showerhead for hotels that measures water consumption and energy use giving hotel chains the ability to “nudge” customers to encourage them use less energy in exchange for discounts and other incentives.

The Customer Revolution is Here

The notion of and need for brands being customer-centric was emphasized by a lot of companies and speakers during the event. In his opening keynote, Marc Benioff, Founder and CEO of Salesforce, shared his insights on the future of the industry, highlighting the 5 most important changes that everyone should be paying attention to: the Cloud revolution, mobile revolution, data science revolution, IoT revolution, and most importantly, the so-called “customer revolution.”

Behind everything is a customer. Instead of thinking about the internet of things, we should start thinking about the internet of customers, he said. However, there’s still a huge gap between companies and customers, which is a huge opportunity for companies close and improve their results. According to Salesforce, 77% of customers are not engaged with companies at all, and staggeringly, less than 1% of customer data has truly been analyzed.

So we have a long way to go…

People and Culture are Top of Mind

Although it was a huge technology conference, there was a lot of talk on people and culture. The day 2 keynote was a fireside chat between Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, and Wired Magazine’s Jessi Hempel. The conversation covered Microsoft’s mission to empower people and organizations to be more productive and Nadella touched on the importance of partnership with other companies in this new digital era.

When the conversation swung towards culture, Nadella talked about wanting his employees to learn and grow throughout their roles and careers at the company, encouraging them to always make each day better than the last and have an evolving purpose.

As our first induction to a conference we have heard so much about, our week was busy but full of insight and inspiration. The sheer scale of the event is mind-blowing and we look forward to a return trip next year.

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Cheers,

@MelCarson – Founder of Delightful

@BiancaHu – Digital Marketing Specialist

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