We are done & dusted with the Salesforce World Tour Sydney 2019 and as expected the event was packed with awesome trailblazer moments including 20 years of Salesforce, the big announcement for Aussie startups, a trailblazer getting her golden hoodie, the launch of myTrailhead, a top panel giving inputs on business growth, talks on sales trends, and giving back. It’s hard to say which were the best moments, but here are our top 6 picks.
The celebration of 20 years for Salesforce
Salesforce President and Chief Product Officer Bret Taylor kicked off the keynote on a very high note by announcing that Salesforce is celebrating 20 years on 8 March. He added “And in 20 years, the thing we’re most proud of isn’t the revenue. It’s the way we’ve built the company. It’s our values.” Bret also explained how Salesforce has been working around its core values such as trust, equality, innovation and customer success since past two decades. Giving an amazing stat on how Salesforce is giving back to the community, Bret said Salesforce employees have contributed 3.7 million hours to their chosen causes, while Salesforce has given $250 million in grants and offered product valued at $39 million to NFPs and education equality.
Aussie startups will get $50 million from Salesforce Ventures
In order to support innovation & growth in the Australian startup ecosystem, Salesforce has launched the new Salesforce Ventures $50 million Australia Trailblazer Fund. Australia’s Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment, The Honourable Senator Simon Birmingham has joined and said this will boost local startups and they can make of the opportunity.
myTrailhead launched
Salesforce has announced the official availability of their customizable training platform myTrailhead for companies. Ever since Salesforce introduced Trailhead, it has been the biggest source of learning Salesforce skills for millions around the globe. myTrailhead is a similar platform which allows a company to create customizable training materials for their employees following the same Trailhead approach. Salesforce first announced this idea back during Dreamforce 2017, and after testing it with several customers including themselves for a year in 2018, finally, they made it generally available.
Special guests talked about building a high growth business
This was one of the best moments of the Salesforce World Tour Sydney 2019 when special guests Red Balloon founder and Shark Tank judge Naomi Simson, New York Times Bestselling Author and co-founder of UP! Your Service Ron Kaufman, Entrepreneur and sales expert Cian McLoughlin, and Salesforce’s Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist Tiffani Bova took the center stage to discuss and share their advice for building a high growth business. The message from them was loud and clear. Customers are key – winning them, keeping them, learning from them, growing with them and earning referrals from them must be your goal as a business.
Kaufman explained how to drive higher customer service by starting with service transactions, building a service relationship, and grow into a service partnership. Kaufman beautifully explained this concept by explaining each stage. At the transaction stage, you have to deliver higher than your customer’s expectations; at relationship stage, they’ll give you referrals; However, you have to work really hard to find out what you will give to your customers so that you can take it to the level – partnership. Simson recommended business owners to cast their minds back to their businesses’ very beginning. McLoughlin said customers are key to innovation and recommends taking feedbacks from them. The discussion was highly enlightening and this is going to help businesses to grow for sure.
Current Sales Trends
During the Sales Keynote, News Corp Chief Information Officer Dominic Hatfield talked on how progressive organizations are transforming themselves from a product-centric organization to a customer-centric organization. Hatfield advised organizations to start focusing on business projects and stop focusing on technology projects, to have a clear plan, patience, readiness to change over time, and have a right mix of partner and team. Hatfield also discussed the top five trends which are forming sales now – Collaboration across sales & marketing, Intelligence and the rise of AI, Digital selling, New revenue channels/partners, Recurring revenue.
Salesforce gave back
Five non-profit organizations were in the Salesforce.org Zone in the campground to celebrate 20 years of Salesforce giving back: Australian Schools Plus, Greenpeace, Two Good, Batyr and The Shepherd Centre. Over 300 attendees posted a pledge on Salesforce’s giving back wall to bring change in their own lives in order to make a difference to themselves, their community and the entire world. 60 students from Casula High School which is one of the Salesforce’s Circle the Schools partner presented their Maker Fair projects focusing on tackling the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The entire campground witnessed astonishing AI-enabled robotic household rubbish bins to ocean clean-up projects.
There was so much to cover. Salesforce World Tour Sydney 2019 was truly a fun-filled day including innovation, learning, networking and giving back. Over 200 customers and partners shared their stories and the entire campground was packed with partners, demos, non-profits and much more. The day was closed with a demo jam and the entire Ohana was on their toes during the entire day.
This was CEPTES’s first World Tour in Sydney after becoming the Silver Consulting Partner. Our flagship product DataArchiva – A Native Data Archiving Solution for Salesforce, was again a center of discussion and the response we got was overwhelming. If you missed the Salesforce World Tour Sydney, do get in touch with us to request a demo.
See you next time.
Source: Salesforce
