The Blog

  • October 7, 2014
  • Dreamforce Preview

    dreamforce_logoNo need to speculate about all of the Salesforce announcements expected to emanate from Dreamforce next week in San Francisco. The company is providing an assist to the news starved — and the news weary — ahead of the event.

    They’ve unveiled Sales Cloud1 and Service Cloud1 as reimagined application sets that better address the times which automatically means mobile devices and more intimate service capabilities. I see a pattern.

    First Sales Cloud1 has seven new apps to help sales reps work smarter according to the press release. They include, Today, Tasks, Notes, Events, Sales Path, Skills and rewards, and Sales Data. You can read the PR for details but the names are adequate descriptors.

    Two things strike me about Sales Cloud1. It is very much oriented toward sales process and best practice. You can certainly use it tactically like many sales reps will likely do but the power of this new alignment is in its strategic process orientation. I have recently been noodling on process and concluded that when process is innate to the rep it is a good thing but when the attempt is to impose it from above resistance can be fierce. So this re-imagination of Sales Cloud is interesting because it is insidious — it seduces reps into better processes by offering a path with less work. You have to like that.

    Service Cloud1, like its mate, is completely developed on the Salessforce1 Platform, which is to say very little, since all Salesforce apps have forever been built on their platform. But the emphasis is worth noting because it carries the subliminal message that you can tinker with it, add functions, workflow, and objects, and generally make it your own for –- watch this — your specific internal processes.

    My favorite aspect of the Service Cloud1 product, and there are tons, is the ability to embed an SOS button in your service apps to presumably bring a helpful person running to your encounter when you need one. This points the way to better and more efficient customer relationships in the future. Vendors will be better able to be in customer moments of truth and because there is an aspect of customer self selection, vendor resources will be applied to situations where they are expressly needed.

    On the down side, the Service Cloud1 release still talks about “consumers” which for me is a no-no. We are customers. We have relationships. Consumers need no relationships because they simply consume whatever is available but there is an element of choice in the concept of a customer. And if you look at all the contortions businesses are making to address the very real fact that people do have choices and vendors desperately want to be the chosen ones, then you see that consumer has no place in modern CRM.

    Also, I am cold to the name of the “SOS” button because it connotes danger and calamity as does it’s progenitor “Mayday.” Customers are not calamities that we need to run to with fire extinguishers. They are half of the vendor-customer relationship and should be treated with the respect of that position. It starts with the term that recognizes the rough equality between the two instead of the hierarchy inherited from last century’s business paradigm. The button ought to be seen as an opportunity to be in a customer’s moment of truth and to strengthen the relationship but I digress.

    So over the last few weeks we’ve seen announcements about sales, service, and at the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud conference in Indianapolis, we got an eye-full of marketing. What’s left for Dreamforce? Well, something about partners, something about developers, with a soupçon of wearables thrown in, and perhaps something about reports and analytics is my guess. That’ll keep us busy. See you next week.

     

    Published: 9 years ago


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