As a newbie to the world of the #1 CRM in the world, Salesforce, this was my first experience with a Dreamforce 2021 event. Exclusively streamed on Salesforce+, the new video streaming app from Salesforce, and also happening in San Francisco, the first day of Dreamforce 2021 was remarkable.
You already may know Dreamforce is a global family reunion of Trailblazers, where we all gather together to get inspired and connect. This year, for the first time, happening through a hybrid setup due to the pandemics restrictions, the event brought us 4 broadcasting channels covering every role, industry, and topic, with more than 100 hours of original content and, I can say, a lot of surprises.
Stick with us for the review and insights we found relevant during the event. Find below the agenda I followed to attend day #1, on September 21st:
- Dreamforce Main Show: Welcome to the Trusted Enterprise with Marc Benioff and special guests
- Welcome to Your Digital HQ
- Digital Workplace: Experience-led, Outcome-driven
- Grow Moments into Relationships with Slack-First Marketing
- The Evolution of COVID and the Power of Partnership to Heal
- Purpose-Driven Ventures: Ecopreneurs Scaling Climate Impact
- Ripple Effect: The Movement to protect our Oceans
1. Dreamforce Main Show: Welcome to the Trusted Enterprise with Marc Benioff and special guests
Opening the Dreamforce 2021, Leah McGowen-Hare, the host, delivered a special message. No one was certain that this would happen and we should never take moments for granted. After the pandemics spread, the world has changed into a more unpredictable space for anyone anywhere.
However, with the global efforts to battle this worldwide issue, it’s time to celebrate safely together with the progress we achieved until now.
The host Leah McGowen-Hare started to announce the already known Salesforce+, the video streaming platform for Trailblazers to thrive even more into digital transformation and business topics. Also, thinking about the Trailblazers themselves, Salesforce announced a new series, exclusively streamed in Salesforce+ about 5 people building a better world – an inspiring real-life tale about Trailblazers, their spirit, and how they tap into this community, changing their careers and their own lives.
Following this announcement, Marquita Sibide, a business analyst, made it into the stage to speak their mind about how Salesforce changed her life. Five years ago, she was unhappy with her career and wanted to make a huge shift. She started studying software development but she really found her way after Salesforce Certification. She made her husband turn into a Trailblazer too!
Then, Metallica happened! The famous metal band made onto a stage to perform their iconic jam “Nothing Else Matters”. It was also announced that Metallica is a Trusted Enterprise, using Customer 360 by Salesforce. The band raised more than 650K dollars to help covid relief while using Salesforce to engage with their fans and stakeholders.
This musical moment was followed by another! Danny and Anna Akaka delighted everyone with a Hawaiian song, also promoting the offer of a 1-year Disney+ free subscription for the ones attending the event.
Well, after these inspiring musical moments, Marc Benioff, Chair & CEO of Salesforce, entered the stage to officially open the event. He started to speak about the big change in the world, how everyone is feeling it. However, we still want to reconnect with others.
As announcements, Marc spoke about the increasing market share of Salesforce when compared to other competitors and how the company is doing well and doing good. Salesforce is the leader in philanthropy, culture and innovation, with 22 years of giving back and supporting communities.
Regarding topics such as the pandemic, sustainability, the workforce crisis with only 15% of people planning to return to the office or the trust crisis, with more than 40% of Americans distrusting the government on COVID issues, Marc enlightened business as the greatest platform for change.
Other announcements were done – the already known acquisition of Slack, the Health Clouth 2.0. Salesforce announced that the company reached net-zero and renewable today, intending to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals established by the United Nations. Also, announcing the Sustainability Cloud!
Then, Bret Taylor, President & COO of Salesforce entered the stage to announce some of the big releases happening on Salesforce Clouds, which review we are launching soon at Stellaxius Knowledge Center.
2. Welcome to Your Digital HQ
This Dreamforce 2021 session was hosted by the CEO & Founder of Slack, Stewart Butterfield, celebrating Slack as a solution to the Salesforce universe.
The vision of Slack is a world where organizational agility is the core to any process, no matter the size of the company. Stewart highlighted the two major differences between Slack and other common messaging apps – channels and platforms. Well, channels organize conversations through topics, projects, initiatives or whatever you might need.
Once you set channels properly for your organization, you have the perfect set-up for any kind of approvals or processes you might need during a task. You can share files, data, or whatever your people are doing with anything – Slack integrates with any software and that’s where it becomes a platform!
Within Slack, other systems are integrated simply and easily.
When people are aligned within a company, everything moves frictionlessly. Communication is the most fundamental thing we do as humans – most of our daily work can be summarized into communication too. And that’s why having a solution that simplifies these processes is so important for your organization.
Slack empowers organizations to transform the way you communicate, so it’s possible to transform everything after this – culture, processes, structure, diversity, innovation, engagement, and so on!
But, wait, digital HQ? What does that really mean?
Stewart started to explain that after the pandemic spread last year, Slack became the digital headquarters of his company – a one-stop place where everyone can be reached, complementing with all the tools used every day.
Then, Tamar Yehoshua, Chief Product Officer at Slack Technologies entered the stage.
Tamar highlighted how the world has changed within the last year, and how digital transformation became even more priority. She also gave some tips on how to build your own digital HQ – break down silos, embrace the flexibility of work and automate work.
Tamar also announced Slack Connect and the capability of inviting anyone into the channels, even when they are not Slack’s customers yet.
3. Digital Workplace: Experience-led, Outcome-driven
At this Dreamforce 2021 moment, hosted by Stan Martin, the Managing Director of Deloitte Consulting, and the service leader for the digital workplace Salesforce Alliance in the Service Cloud practice in North America. Stan is working with Salesforce for 15 years to improve the employee experience of many companies using the solution.
Introducing Susan Tincher, associate CIO at the University of Southern California, and John Brownridge, from Deloitte, and part of Martin’s team. They focused on the topic of how and from where work is done nowadays and how it is rapidly evolving: logically, the future of work!
John started to enhanced how the pandemic created an environment that changed the worker-employer relationship, supported with some outstanding stats: 40% of people are now considering leaving their job and also 50% will consider it if the employer doesn’t give the flexibility they achieved during the pandemic. So employers must provide options and solutions so everyone can work from anywhere, supporting the hybrid model for their workforces.
This employee movement, as John mention, will increase the volume of remote work post-pandemic. So it’s important to think that the digital experience with work will become the same as employee experience with the company.
Employees had to manage an average of 10 apps every hour to manage their work, from communicating and messaging to their operational activities and this leads to a pretty significant loss in productivity. Emails are growing. Meetings are following the same path. And employees lose an average of 25% of their time understanding just how they have to do it.
Susan brought a new lens to this discussion. Approaching this topic from the education industry and how USC is focused on enhancing the students’ experience in virtual platforms. It is important to understand how technology fits the business needs and the community that makes the specific organization. The USC implemented Slack to answer the needs of all the 65,000 member community in May 2020.
Digital tools should be personal – people are spending most of their days connecting to them.
4. Grow Moments into Relationships with Slack-First Marketing
Featuring Denis Scott, Vice President at Momentive, Charles Navarro, Vice President of Marketing Technology at HBO Max, and Patreesksha Barman, Andrew Eberting and Jennifer Thompson from Amazon Business, and hosted by Michael Kostow, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Marketing Cloud at Salesforce, this moment was all about Slack!
The Dreamforce 2021 session opened with a parody musical moment with a song written about marketing topics, this session started with a lot of fun.
Michael started to speak about how the last year changed the marketing workforce. With 84% of marketers saying that customer expectations are shifting their digital strategy in the last year. Every moment counts to connect with your consumers! The way Trailblazers are transforming the marketing job is amazing – becoming data-focused, AI-savvy, prioritizing privacy and working agile while facing remote and hybrid teams.
Data leads marketing activities now. Michael announced the integration of Salesforce CDP and AppExhange, being launched in GA Winter 2022, and directly connecting with an ecosystem of partners. Then, Denis Scott participated virtually speaking how Salesforce helped to connect with customers after the SurveyMonkey’s rebranding into Momentive! Using only one platform to integrate data makes it possible to generate smarter automation for communication actions.
The second moment of this session regarded the human touch that all marketing activities should integrate. Using data is a synonym for humanizing your marketing strategy with better insights into how your consumers are interacting with your content.
Michael initiated a conversation with the 3 people from Amazon Business via Slack to demonstrate how the platform can work. They presented 3 top tips from Amazon Business: know your data, empower usage through custom user roles, and earn trust with sales through grading and scoring strategy.
Slack-first marketing was then presented with a demo. It’s possible to collaborate with Journey Builder through a simple thread in Slack! Also, Pardot Automation will be available on Slack in the GA Spring 2022.
Charles Navarro then entered the session to deliver some powerful insights, regarding his experience with this 1-year old project, HBO Max: make every media dollar accountable, developing complex campaign taxonomy to measure any granular income; then make all data available to action with Datorama Advanced Reports, now available!
5. The Evolution of COVID and the Power of Partnership to Heal
This Dreamforce 2021 session was hosted by Dr Geeta Nayyar, Executive Medical Director at Salesforce, introducing Jennifer Lotito, President and Chief Operating Officer of RED, and Carmen Villar, VP of Social Business and Innovation at Merck. Salesforce and RED are partners since 2016, for the fight against health issues like AIDS and now COVID-19. The main topic of this moment was how partnerships can deliver life-saving solutions to those that need them most.
COVID-19 can delay the progress achieved in the fight against AIDS. But what really is important is to compare both pandemics spread. Stepping out of the lockdowns and thinking everything is normal is not the way to stay far from the disease. RED is assuring people is thinking about this issue globally as an ecosystem. This topic was brought by Jennifer. Carmen highlighted how it is important to create an infrastructure that is sustainable over time and provides healthcare, health education, and access to all communities.
Usually, during an epidemic or pandemic stage, the funding efforts to fight the diseases increase. But then people forget what happened and this effort declines. Misinformation and disinformation causes this to happen. It’s critical to understand how to solve this issue, providing communities accurate messages when it comes to health.
6. Purpose-Driven Ventures: Ecopreneurs Scaling Climate Impact
Hosted by Ruth Hicking, Director of Strategy and Communications at Salesforce, this Dreamforce 2021 session was focused on climate impact and how our generation can take advantage of a global issue. The emerged role of the ecopreneurs is here. They are innovative entrepreneurs that are scaling climate impact and solving this issue as the main core to their business.
Introducing Diego Saez-Gil, CEO of Pachama and, Catarina Schwab, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of NPX, the topic was how their companies help other companies fighting this global challenge.
Pachama is a company using AI to drive carbon capture and protect global forests. They already helped on restoring 1.5B hectares of forests. They are also working with Salesforce to select which forest projects they should invest in. Pachama allows other companies to purchase carbon credits for your organization.
On the other side, NPX focus on linking the capital with impact. They created a donor fund model that makes donors donate only and if impact is achieved. Until today, they raised more than 20 million dollar donations to help reforestation and global poverty alleviation.
Both these leaders agreed on how companies should stand for transparency when they’re speaking about carbon marks. As a worldwide team, we can join the effort to reduce CO2 levels. They also mentioned the importance of initiatives like UpLink. It’s an open crowdsourcing platform for mass participation to accelerate the progress on SDGs.
7. Ripple Effect: The Movement to protect our Oceans
As you may know, Salesforce is a company that truly concerns about sustainability (as also as equality and diversity) and this commitment to using business platforms for change, creates a community (employers, customers, and partners) that really increase the impact that they are making.
We, at Stellaxius, team up with this purpose which also becomes ours! And that’s what we took from the Dreamforce 2021 session with Dr. Douglas McCauley, Director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative and Professor at UC Santa Barbara, and Jane Fonda, Academy Award-winning actor, producer, author, and activist.
Ocean health is connected to different kind of subjects as climate change, endangered whales, plastic pollution, but in this days, climate change seems to be the one that we need to focus. It’s impacting the ocean but also the entire planet.
Last year, for example, we also had big problems related to climate change – fires, hurricanes, storms, floods, heatwaves, and it will begin to get worse on natural disasters.
Climate crisis will determine our existence. And this might sound cliché, but it’s true.
Jane Fonda makes a comparison as a Russian doll: where the outside doll is the climate change, in the sequence is the racial crises, the crises of democracy, and the crises of inequality patriarchy. They are all at the same level because they all relate with the same mindset: no empathy, no fairness.
As they mentioned, it’s important to get work done, but it’s also important to educate, by researching, bringing data to discussions, and using science to inspire and attach people to this cause.
So, it is relevant to change for green energy and to turn down by half our fossil fuel emissions now. We can relate racial equity to climate crisis too. This connection was understood when a study that came out in 1987 found how big companies are choosing to put their infrastructure for toxic waste – into communities of colour or indigenous.
We’re only now understanding that we don’t have enough time and there’s no need to convince everybody, just the right amount of people.
We don’t have enough time and we don’t need to convince everybody, just the right among of people. To summarize, you can and need to demand changes from companies and partners. But it all starts with you! If you’re still having trouble understanding this issue, Jane Fonda wrote a book about what else you can do and how!
So this was our review to the first day of Dreamforce 2021! Stay tuned for more updates!
If you’re also looking for the 2nd day’s review of the event or the 3rd day’s event sumary we got it covered for you too! I made this article collaboratively with Gabriela Scatena and Sandra Soares.
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