Any fears that the digital format might disappoint were quickly put to bed by Marc Benioff’s keynote address. It was filled with the kind of levity and fun that we’ve come to love.

If you didn’t have time to tune into the event, here are the top 5 (fun) takeaways:

#1: You can visit San Francisco—or you can just walk 9,000 staircases

Dreamforce is usually held in San Francisco. So, it was no surprise that host James Corden referenced the iconic home of Silicon Valley while delivering a hilarious opening monologue. In it, he finally put to rest just how hilly the Valley is, by letting everyone know that in lieu of attending the conference, you could just walk 9,000 staircases.

#2: The Digital Imperative is Here to Stay

2020 has been the year of accelerated digital adoption. In his portion of the keynote, Bret Taylor, President & COO of Salesforce, reaffirmed that observation with one of our favorite quotes from the entire conference: “Digital part of your business. It is your business”.

Although we’re all hoping that Dreamforce 2021 will return to its traditional, in-person format, there is no doubt that the importance of digital has accelerated by leaps and bounds this year and will only continue to grow in the future.

#3: Strong Leadership is About Moving Forward

2020 has been a year full of challenges. One of the people who knows that very well is Gina M. Raimondo, the Governor of Rhode Island. She spoke about the need to make challenging decisions during times of adversity.

During her talk, she emphasized that crises are always stressful, even for the strongest leader. What’s important is not that you don’t feel stressed, or even overwhelmed, but that you continue to move forward. It was a strong message that everyone should take to heart.

#4: The Public/Private Sector Partnership is More Important than Ever

The interconnected nature of our societies is more prevalent than ever. And this year, the need for cooperation between the public and private sectors has taken center stage. Sarah Franklin, the EVP & GM of Trailhead and AppExchange, addressed this in her talk about how the private and public sector can work together to create better outcomes for society.

It was a great talk, and one that highlights the need for creative solutions to today’s problems.

#5: Bentley Has a Rainbow Car

All the talk of digitization, leadership, and creativity were great. But in the end, the showstopper belonged to Bentley. Adrian Hallmark, Chairman and CEO Bentley Motors gave an impassioned talk about the need for green sustainability. 

Or at least, we think that’s what he said. Because during his talk, a picture of a Bentley painted in rainbow colors flashed across the screen and we really couldn’t pay much attention to anything else after that.

DealHub Integrates Seamlessly with SalesForce

Salesforce Dreamforce is about building community. DealHub’s Salesforce integation empowers sales teams to do more with their Salesforce CRM.

DealHub allows leadership to manage their entire deal flow within their CRM. You can increase optionational efficiency via auto-syncs, get better insights into your contacts with our sales engagement platform, create a single source of truth that streamlines collaboration, and more.

DealHub’s zero-code approach also gets you to results in record time. There are no costly integrations or technical complexities to worry about–you can start using DealHub with Salesforce in just a few days, and get fully onboarded in just three weeks.

Our next-generation technology is the future of sales enablement, where technology works for your organization by integrating with your existing Salesforce CRM so you can get achieve higher revenue than ever before.

The Salesforce Dreamforce Keynote 2020 Delivers

While this year will be different than other years, it’s clear that the Salesforce team is making the best of a difficult situation. Nothing can replace the crowds, interaction, and pure energy of Salesforce Dreamforce. However, if the keynote is any indication of what’s to come, this year is still going to bring a lot of great content and insights.

We’ve come to expect nothing less from Salesforce. It’s clear that the same time and effort they put into building a community of Salesforce applications and integrations is on display here again. Even though we’re hoping to get back to the live event next year, we’re still looking forward to a great month!

The post Top 5 (Fun) Takeaways from the Salesforce Dreamforce Keynote 2020 appeared first on DealHub.

We know that Salesforce is the market leader when it comes to CRM, and the recent article in Forbes supports this. With so many companies invested in them, their ever-present challenge is to innovate in ways that add value to the end user. People that use Salesforce CRM as part of their daily habit are looking for ways to improve their sales process and daily workflow.

Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, said: “in each and every case, [our customers are] working to understand and have a 360-degree view of their customer.”

How to use DealHub to get a better understanding of their end-customers in Salesforce is the challenge that many of our customers asked us to solve.

Understanding Your Current Salesforce CRM Limitations

It is crucial that your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software gives you a clear understanding of your customer. Specifically:

• Who they are
• What they buy
• Why they buy it

When selling to other businesses, you will also need to know who is responsible for decision-making and which stakeholders will have an input in that decision. Best practice in many discovery conversations is to ask what their ‘buying process is’ so you can understand not only ‘who’ but also ‘how.’ There is more to know about understanding your customer needs that we often push to the side.

Salesforce as a CRM does an excellent job of logging and measuring the milestones in a Sales Process and allowing you to drill down from the total pipeline to individual Opportunities and Contacts. At a contact level you can see their activity history, but no rich insight into how they have experienced your communication touch points.

Recognizing Your Growth Opportunity

Sales Engagement Platform (SEP) is a new categorization of sales technology. The underlying aim is to measure buyer engagement throughout their journey. As each stage progresses closer to ‘closed won’ the value of that engagement becomes higher. You could also say that the value of the engagement insight becomes more valuable too. You can derive buyer knowledge from the content you have sent and how it has been received.

Strong buyer engagement is a by-product of personalizing your messaging and including relevant content that elevates their thinking. Essentially your sales process will now follow this flow:

Not only will your process be more efficient, but it will also be more successful – DealHub’s customers see up to 27% increase in win-rate over the industry competitors. This is because a purpose-built Sales Engagement Platform will always be more effective than silo software solutions that usually don’t speak to each other.

DealHub’s bi-directional integration with Salesforce provides a seamless user experience for its customers and allows them to take advantage of advanced CPQ capabilities for Salesforce.

Knowing When to Optimize Your Sales Process

Most Sales Operations teams swing from one extreme to the other and fail to see the ‘right’ signals or create a purpose-built process. They start by responding to internal pains and complaints. When they become frequent or costly enough, they make a purchase and add it to their stack.

I can empathize with the reality that it’s difficult to know all the new sales technologies that are out there, as they are increasing at a rapid rate. So, thought-leaders and peer review sites help to a certain degree.

But, what you will see this year is an acquisition trend towards unification.

• Conga acquires Octiv – March 2018
• Seismic acquires Savo – May 2018
• Docusign acquires SpringCM – July 2018

These are pieces of the puzzle being added together, but what they are not is a purpose-built, end-to-end unification of the Deal stages. Only DealHub delivers this unique value!

By optimizing your sales technology stack into one complete Platform approach, you will achieve the following:

• Create a real-time view of each buyer
• Avoid an information silo
• Avoid duplication of spend
• Avoid duplication of effort – the cumbersome task of managing multiple systems and processes
• Get the technology working for you! (not the other way around)
• Build a process that is robust when scaling, and detailed enough to give you ongoing insight

Salesforce and Dealhub: Bridging the Gap

It’s not only us at DealHub that are saying it’s mission critical for you to intimately know your customer; Marc Benioff also supports our value statement for Salesforce users when he says, “…integration is mission-critical for our customers to gain that 360-degree view of their customer.”

The reason that Salesforce has a such a large AppExchange is the fact that they recognize both their core competency and their limitations.

DealHub is here to bridge the gap, complete the view of your customer, and give you a seamless platform experience within your sales process. The cost of not adopting this Platform approach is that you will become less competitive in the deal process at an increasing rate.

If any of these insights stood out for you, I’d love to hear from you. We’re here to help, so share your thoughts, learn from our industry experience, and hit your quotas.

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