Dreamforce 2023? Game-Changer or Same Ol'?

What did we see during Dreamforce 2023?

In a nutshell?

Enterprise-Wide, Scalable and Granular Experience, Across Customer Journeys and Beyond (that's a mouthful... so let's break it down)!

I believe we may have witnessed the dawn of a new era for traditional business functions and the technology underlying them. Specifically, of course, in the realm of customer relationship management.

In a single word?

Omni-Functionality

(Alright, maybe that's not a word, but bear with me.)

This potential shift could be a monumental transformation, more profound than all the new features and all the exhibitions and booths at the Moscone Center combined.

Historical Context: The Business Silos

Businesses have long been compartmentalized (for good reason). Teams like Sales and SalesOps, Marketing and MarketingOps, Support and Success, and so on... often work in isolation or in tight partnership with another related function while being silo'd, for all intents and purposes, from other less related, cross-functions.

This is to say, in most business cases, these teams have their own operations, their own data and their own concerns and incentives. There is often little consideration for the synergies potentially found in a more holistic and comprehensive approach to "Ops" and data sharing.

I don't say this as a major call-out or criticism of modern operations or enterprise data management. Instead, to highlight an incredible opportunity, were the difficulties of a synergistic approach removed or reduced significantly... What if?

What if, through data, even the data that might be found deep in the belly of multiple of these silo'd, functional databases, a business could effortlessly and instantly leverage not-so-obvious intelligence at scale, for any given customer or business situation?

What if this were possible without pre-built, hard-coded, algorithmic integration? And what if this could be accomplished without an army of analysts and implementors?

Data has become like water...

Water is essential for all life and also nature's most powerful punisher... It's becoming more and more clear that an enterprise which is unable to store and leverage data properly is an enterprise that is potentially experiencing nature's wrath, so to speak.

To be fair, we've had multiple generations of solutions to this issue... The "data issue", if you will?

We started with Business Intelligence analytics and papers for analysts to use manually. We moved on to BI tools and platforms with predictive capabilities. The advent of Cloud Operations and Compute certainly helped... Then, built on the infrastructure of Cloud, we enjoyed the advent of cross-functional solutions like Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), Data Management Platforms (DMPs), Master Data Managers (MDMs), Analytics Platforms, and so on...

Things have gotten pretty great, but in the latest era of Business Intelligence and Data Management, we are still in a rather algorithmic and difficult situation with cross-functional data. From gathering clean data, defining parameters for which data is important and which should be analyzed against which, to take action at scale for identified segments, etc... it is not optimal... Especially when thinking across the enterprise and entire customer journey.

Creatively analyzing and producing scalable impact using discovered patterns within the integrations of clean data is still challenging, even while all of these platforms help companies provide value... What Salesforce seems to have in store for us, according to Dreamforce 2023 may change the game here.

What I saw at DF23 is likely the combination, in some ways, of all of the above and beyond. It's predictive and generative, it's secure...it's beyond algorithmic and certainly beyond hard-coded... The Dreamforce key-note on "Data Cloud" on Day 3, in particular, highlighted the next step (which could be a massive leap), from business intelligence and data platforms, into impossibly scalable and granular (yes, both at once) business intelligence for every function in any business, all based on a specific business's own data.

For anyone interested in seeing why I am so focused on this Data Cloud check out an important trailhead module from last week - Data Cloud Powered Experiences

Example and Thought experiment:

Assuming your enterprise uses the many amazing data and analytics tools needed to provide modern and excellent customer experiences; your DMP tracks the attributes of the ads a customer skips, and the ones they don't... the ones they click, and ones that convert.

Your marketing platform tracks the context behind the headlines of the articles they read, how sub-headlines and article structure effects their completion rate of content consumption.

Your Product experience platform tracks role-specific adoption, events and engagement, beyond the obvious "active user", "login" and "click" metrics - or consumption rates and changes in trends over time...

Your account and success teams track subjective feedback about a customer's experience with your product or service while building relationships and gathering unstructured insights about their customers.

Your support team is responsible for helping solve problems reactively while tracking the sentiment of customers' interactions in CSAT scores, as well as identifying the trending issues with your customer's experience.

And so on...

And with all this granular data? Stored in separate, function specific data bases, tables, or some other synonym for a spreadsheet (in fact a lot of important data ends up in a spread sheet or two)...

A great marketing team then (for example) could leverage all this cross-platform/cross-functional data to stay active across a customer journey, right?

Deploying nuanced and dynamic campaigns based on all of the above factors and beyond... But, what about sales? What about in-product experiences? What about... Ok you catch the drift, right?

Tracking the data is not enough... Building hundreds of API integrations between disparate datasets (as described above), is not easy, cheap, or enough.

Building algorithmic models based on patterned thresholds and conditions is not enough... and the truth is... most data goes into a table to die once it hits the shelves, which means our utopian experience of a marketing (or any) team providing a truly dynamic customer journey at scale is not happening as often as you would think.

Dreamforce '23 seems to have indicated that this is all about to change

Extracting meaning from these disparate and very real data points is anything but easy, and in my experience... the potential gold mine under the surface is given-up on... lost because of the idea of "complexity" internally. The difficulty of connecting, analyzing and taking action at scale? It's impractical.

However, based on what we saw at Dreamforce '23, this complexity will be greatly reduced... as Salesforce has improved its already excellent integration capabilities with "Data Streams" and BATCH centralization of any amount of disparate data.

Connecting all of your data sources, across all functions of your enterprise to an intelligent AI called a Large Language Model (Like ChatGPT - LLM) that is specifically trained for your company, your principles, your style and your brand... enables the concurrent collection, analysis, and recommendation using extremely granular insights which would be impossible to identify otherwise... And it does this for every/any customer, across any/every potential touchpoint for your business and your customers.

Re-enter our thought experiment above - Without the hundreds of integrations, pre-planned algorithmic automations, and segment specific campaigns holding us back, engagement between your team and your customers (or in this case, your automated marketing campaigns to each customer) will be personalized at scale based on the true journey of each individual.

Support/Service will enjoy a "Co-Pilot" who can see the forest for the trees about any given customer or situation and make them brilliant without needing to also be a business analyst with access to hundreds of data points... Your Sellers will have important and precise recommendations to help them through their sales processes, completely dynamic and personalized to that seller and the people on the other side of the aisle... Your Marketing team will automatically generate content and send it at the right time, to the right people, one-to-one, instead of in a segment-based manner, and each message from your team will be specifically designed to suit the customer.

Developers enjoy an easier time making things work and architects can actually begin dreaming across the enterprise where applicable, instead of being stifled by silos.

The Implications and Possibilities

My takeaways from Dreamforce 2023 highlighted:

• The ease of creating cross-functional systems that will create scaled granularity will exert more pressure on businesses to use their data creatively, to cross boundaries of traditional functions (and data silos)...
• Broad functional and holistic business savvy overshadows niche expertise in technical roles for those designing and architecting enterprise solutions, where creativity is in many ways as good or better than deep analysis and expertise... AI far surpasses any expert in any of these areas.
• The power of Data Management Platforms and CDPs will become table stakes for internal enterprise data management, marketing, service, sales, and product experiences.
• Such systems, behind the "black box" nature of LLM functionality, will be secure, trusted, unbiased, and unique (when using Salesforce's tech).
• Enterprises that embrace holistic synergy will gain a competitive edge by treating each customer (no matter how many there may be), exactly as the company would treat them optimally, every time.

Conclusion: The birth of something new

Dreamforce 2023 and its many attractions was a bit overshadowed (in a good way) by the promises of Data Cloud (at least for me). It marked the beginning of the end for Silo'd-Ops and brought in the age of something holistic and synergistic, something customer-centric and scalable without impracticality... We might call it CustomerOps, and we might use it to bridge the many silo'd operations which sometimes hold modern companies back today.

What if we really could implement nuance across the customer journey and beyond? What do you think?

Follow for more -- Chef Matt