Top 5 insights at Dreamforce for Sales

I'll be at Dreamforce in San Francisco and I'm looking forward to attending the biggest annual tech conference globally and hearing from sales leaders across the planet about how winning results are being achieved by the best run businesses on the planet.

Everyone needs to adapt and transform to better serve customers, empower staff, and create fair returns for shareholders. We know that social, mobile, cloud, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) are all changing the world. Innovators are applying these technologies to solve business problems and create new levels of insight and engagement. Amidst the tsunami of options, the big questions are where do you invest and what do you prioritise?

Technology is changing sales faster than at any other time in human history.

Dreamforce started in 2003 with around 1,000 attendees and is the 'must attend' conference for leaders seeking to make the right decisions on customer-centric enterprise transformation. There will be close to 200,000 people attending this year which makes Dreamforce the world’s biggest tech event, attracting some of the best minds on the planet. The best businesses are leveraging technologies to blend human creativity and engagement with machine automation to go to the next level. Here are the 5 things I'll be paying special attention to while I'm there:

1: Customer experience is becoming the biggest point of difference, and also the catalyst that finally brings sales, marketing, service, support, finance and management together to transform the enterprise and revolutionise culture as organisation seek to be truly customer centric.

2: CRM is now mature and enables customer-centric process, and gives salespeople back their time to focus on the things that drive revenue and success. At the moment salespeople only spend a third of their time selling, according to the State of Sales Report. Salesforce clouds (marketing, sales, service, communities, integration, etc.) combine to deliver a customer success platform that is unrivalled, and is the best possible way to align with the buyer's journey and drive customer success.

3: Artificial Intelligence is delivering on the hype. AI is most simply defined as 'a computer than learns and then improves itself in performing a task'. Today we are working with Artificial Narrow Intelligence which performs specific tasks at super-human levels if it is fed with large amounts of accurate data and if it has been guided in its learning process. Watch the videos above and below to see how Salesforce Einstein ticks all the boxes in executing task automation, lead scoring, predictable forecasting, and much more. We are evolving to Artificial General Intelligence which will be able to attribute context and multi-task and Salesforce is blazing the trail with next generation sales enablement. In fact, according to the State of Sales Report, sales leaders predict AI adoption to grow by 155% by 2020.

4: Quotable sales Summit on Thursday 27th. Dreamforce attracts top industry analysts and experts such as CEB/Gartner and McKinsey, who will share what it takes to drive growth in acquiring, retaining and growing customers. Salesforce's own sales leaders will also share their own playbook on how they lead successful teams.

5: Sales VPs and Sales Managers can de-risk their roles. They no longer need to be the most likely to get 'booted off the island'. Average tenure for sales leaders is between just 18 months and 22 months. That's brutal and the typical reasons for a head of sales being terminated by the CEO are loss of confidence in the pipeline and forecast, and lack of disciplined sales process execution. Dreamforce will showcase how sales leaders can thrive instead of feeling threatened and they can do so by bringing people, processes, and technology together. Networking with peers and learning how others are delivering real sales transformation is a big reason to be at Dreamforce.

Beyond all this, Dreamforce is sure to reveal plans for Salesforce Integration Cloud and initiatives around the Internet of Things (IoT) and how service is being automated, but the technology can monitor for sales trigger events ... amazing but true. Integration is hugely powerful and, following the Mulesoft acquisition earlier this year, Integration Cloud is being widely touted as a 'revolutionary'. Marc and Keith are sure to spend worthwhile time talking about it.

I'll be flat out like a lizard drinking along with hundreds of other Aussies on the pilgrimage across the Pacific to the Mecca of customer success, but happy to catch-up with others at Dreamforce... send me an InMail if you'd like to have a chat while we're in San Francisco together.

To follow along with the action at Dreamforce, you can follow Salesforce on Twitter or Instagram and check out the broadcast schedule and tune in here.

I discuss what it takes to succeed in sales today in my book, COMBO Prospecting, published by HarperCollins and The American Management Association (AMACOM) and you can purchase it here on Amazon. 

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Main Image from Dreamforce.