Top Takeaways from Dreamforce First-Timers
Last week, seventeen members of the Idealist Consulting team made the annual trek to San Francisco to attend Dreamforce. With staggering numbers like 170,000 attendees, ten million online guests, and 1,600 sessions, our group of seventeen had a lot to take in! Here are some of the highlights, provided by attendees on our team that are new to the conference this year. Thanks to Jo Ann Lewis, Roz Burton-Torres, and Kristen Speth for contributing to this post.
1. What were the 3 most impactful solutions or presentations you saw?
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Pardot presentations: I learned a ton about Pardot but was also able to enjoy some really entertaining and thoughtful presentations. The amount of time and effort put into their demos makes you believe in their product.
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Guided tours of the Lightning Experience in the developer lounge were great; Lightning is coming and the more we know the better prepared we will be.
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Girl Develop It - because who doesn't want more female coders!
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Communities presentations, and in particular, the one that gave three examples of companies using communities. They discussed their vision and how it was important to figure that out with regards to their communities. They also went into how Communities will help keep technology relevant since Salesforce is continually improving it’s own technology (helps them to stay ahead of their peers). It provided good takeaways on how to plan and create a good vision for how you want to use the technology.
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The ‘You Gotta Know When to Flow 'Em’ session on when to use Process Builder, Flows, and Workflows was really helpful. With so many choices it is nice to know when each one is best employed.
2. This year's big announcements were centered around SalesforceIQ and Lightning. Where do you see value in this for the nonprofit sector?
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There’s been room for improvement on the UI side of Salesforce for some time. It will be exciting for our nonprofit clients who can take advantage of the sales experience but also when they roll out out to other areas (like Communities) that will be helpful as well. I also learned about the component exchange that I was not aware of. And of course, it will be more visually appealing.
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The integration between the inbox and CRM has been the source of some pain points, and users don’t always know when to send from the inbox vs. Salesforce. So, I look forward to seeing how SalesforceIQ makes this irrelevant by seamlessly integrating the two (fingers crossed)!
- When development work is needed it can keep smaller nonprofits from moving forward. Instead, they default to the standard solution when their process could have benefitted from the next step. I'm hoping to see Lightning narrow that cost gap and allow nonprofits to have more freedom in their deployments without breaking the bank on development they can't support.
3. What are the trends you see in the Salesforce space that are worth paying attention to in the coming year?
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All Lightning everything - Sales, Service Console etc. Look for all aspects of salesforce to be struck by lightning in the coming releases.
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Community and engagement internally and externally.
- UI improvement seems to be a top priority. If we can leverage new features it will be helpful for user adoption and overall satisfaction with Salesforce.
4. What was the strangest/most unexpected/favorite part of Dreamforce?
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Meeting the Idealist Consulting team face-to-face.
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Love the innovation and seeing all the cool enhancements
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Are you sure enough people attended Dreamforce? It seemed kind of empty. Kidding!! It was almost impossible to pre-plan because things were so spread out and there were so many people to navigate. There were weird and interesting things happening unexpectedly around every corner, so if you were too focused on "working your plan" you would have missed some cool moments. Spontaneity won the day!
The dates for Dreamforce ‘16 have been announced! Clear your calendar October 4-7 and start formulating your plan of action now.
