Dreamforce TX 2020: Digital transformation in sales, support, and marketing

As Dreamforce TX 2020 comes to a close, we wanted to provide you with a summary of what you may have missed from the event. As mentioned in our recap of the Dreamforce 2020 opening keynote, this year’s event was focused on digital transformations, gaining a single source of truth, and working in the new normal.

Our team attended sessions that were tagged for sales roles, service and support roles, and marketing roles. Below, we have summarized the main takeaways from each track and shared insights from our favorite sessions.

Dreamforce TX for Sales Roles

There was an abundance of sales-focused sessions at Dreamforce TX and our team learned a great deal from attending those sessions.

We found a few common themes among all of the sessions:

• The new competitive advantage for sales teams is the ability to adapt and respond to quickly changing environments. This year brought huge digital transformations and showed sales teams the importance of being able to quickly redesign processes.
• Utilizing data, especially AI-driven insights, will be a must-have capability of sales teams that want to succeed. Guided decision-making helps sales reps sell more efficiently and effectively.
• Cross-team and cross-functional communication is key. Not only do you need to successfully manage and motivate your sales teams, but you also need to bring together other internal teams, like marketing and service, to help you reach your sales goals.

Along with these key takeaways, we also got to see different Sales 360 tools in action, including many exciting new features.

Our favorite sales-focused session was “New Ways to Run a Best-in-Class Virtual Sales Team.” This session provided great insights on how to successfully manage your sales teams, even in a remote environment. McAfee joined the session and talked about the tools and tactics they utilized to stay on track for their 2020 sales goals.

Here are the three main takeaways we had from the session:

1. Enable your sales teams to sell virtually: McAfree took processes that were already in place for their inside sales reps and copied them over for their outside reps to use for more efficient virtual selling.
2. Standardize sales engagement best practices: Re-engineer processes to make sure customers are having an outstanding experience every single time.
3. Bring artificial intelligence into the sales process: McAfee combines NPS scores, engagement metrics, and more into Salesforce and lets AI tell their team when accounts in their renewal pipeline are at risk.

We highly recommend that sales leaders and reps view the recordings from the sales-focused Dreamforce TX sessions. Plus, make sure to check out our recent article on sales tactics for success in 2021.

Dreamforce TX for Service & Support Roles

We were excited to attend some sessions from the Service and Support track at Dreamforce TX and we are happy to report that we uncovered a variety of best practices and tips for utilizing Customer 360 to improve the customer experience.

Here are the main takeaways we think you should know:

• Consumers require digital support options. The pandemic rapidly shifted the way your customers want to access support. You must rapidly scale service across every channel, connect each touchpoint, and scale engagement.
• Building customer trust is more important than ever. In the uncertainty of the world today, building customer trust is essential for driving brand loyalty.
• Bring artificial intelligence into the customer experience. Using AI enables your agents to provide smarter, faster, and more personalized support.

The support-focused session that stood out the most to us was, “Accelerate Agent Productivity with Connected Service.” The Salesforce team provided important best practices, demonstrated how to actually put them to use, and CarMax came in to share how they help their agents (and all other employees) be productive. Here’s what we learned during the session:

1. Organizations must unify their data into one single place for a complete customer view. One way to significantly increase agent productivity is to provide them one single workspace where they can quickly view and handle support cases across all channels.
2. Automate business processes, routine tasks, and other common workflows with AI. Using machine learning can help your team instantly get recommendations on how to handle cases and can guide them step-by-step through workflows.
3. Empower your teams to work smarter. By prioritizing workloads and using data to make decisions, your service teams can deliver quality support more quickly.

Shamim Mohammad, CITO at CarMax shared how they give every employee access to customer interaction information, in one single area, and in real-time, with Customer 360. If you are looking to digitally transform your support/service team, you should definitely take a look at the Dreamforce TX sessions for Support and Service roles.

Dreamforce TX for Marketing Roles

Our team found great value in the marketing-related sessions at DreamforceTX. Updates on flagship Salesforce products like Pardot and Marketing Cloud were given alongside an overview of the “new normal” for marketers and what we can do to future proof our marketing efforts.

After attending the service and support-focused sessions, we wanted to highlight the main takeaways we think you should know:

• Create customer-centric digital experiences: Marketing teams must deliver an entirely digital customer experience to capture their audience, convert shoppers to customers, and drive brand loyalty.
• Meet consumers where they are: With so many different touch points available to today’s consumers, brands need to extend their digital reach beyond their traditional channels.
• Bring artificial intelligence into marketing decisions: Using AI enables you to make data-backed decisions and innovations across all marketing channels.

We found the most value out of the “State of Digital Top Consumer Trends” session which highlighted what you need to know as a marketer to stay relevant in our rapidly changing world.

Three main trends were covered:

1. Digital experiences are now mandatory. Consumers expect to be able to shop online, do research on social media, and have contactless pickup.
2. Agility is the new competitive advantage for marketing teams. Your team must be ready to respond to changes with speed and effectiveness.
3. Personalization is now more important than ever. To stand out, your team must personalize offers based on who your customers are and what stage of the customer journey they are in.

If you’re a marketer looking for ideas to digitally transform your marketing practices, we highly recommend that you view the recordings from the marketing-focused Dreamforce TX sessions.

Dreamforce TX 2020 comes to a close

To close out DreamforceTX, a special DreamTX edition of B-Well Together was held with education activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai. She was asked heartfelt questions submitted by students from all over the world and gave inspiring answers that centered on her personal journeys through life and how to take action for equity in education.

This closing keynote was a perfect way to end the conference and to end the year. We can’t wait to see what next year’s event will bring us.