The West Coast Consulting Group team is proud to have sponsored Dreamforce 2017, our 14th year of being a part of the Salesforce ecosystem.  So many visitors came to our home city of San Francisco, so much happened, and we wanted to take a moment to share with you what we believe are the most impactful things announced during Dreamforce this year that you should know for your ongoing business success.

The announcement that made the biggest splash was the Salesforce-Google partnership. This partnership will allow for a seamless integration between the two software platforms to provide greater business value to users. Tying these platforms together will, for example, enable marketers to get a complete picture in their Salesforce instance of what actions their email recipients take post-click: are they viewing, purchasing or browsing? Additionally, users of Marketing Cloud can now intelligently serve up digital ads to targeted prospects and audiences based on the data coming through Ad Studio.

Beyond the Google news, most of the other major announcements highlighted the move towards personalization across the Salesforce platform:  personalization of your user interface with Lightning; personalization of your company’s knowledge management processes with myTrailhead; personalization of your business process predictions with myEinstein, and more.

And as always, new products and improved features were announced with great fanfare, including Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Health Cloud, and myIoT.   Marketing Cloud has evolved to provide a 360-degree view of your customer interactions across all channels, including social media.  Health Cloud introduced features for more robust patient data management.  myIoT is a new offering that enables a business to integrate data and transactions generated by “things” with customer data to enable richer interactions with greater context.

The breadth of these few examples, from the many products and functions that were featured at Dreamforce, illustrates the gains that Salesforce has made in their evolution to becoming a powerful business platform.  It’s no longer just about CRM.  

For more of the West Coast Consulting Group team’s thoughts about features and functions highlighted at this year’s Dreamforce, please view our webinar or email us at info@westcoastconsulting.com.