Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual user conference, was held in San Francisco from September 20th to September 22nd. It is notorious for its large crowds, big-name guest speakers, free concerts, and overwhelming content to empower Salesforce users and promote sharing best practices and new ideas. Among the 40,000 attendees, this year were Paciolan’s Senior CRM Manager, Christopher Carney, and Senior CRM Strategist, Andrew Campbell.
Check out their Dreamforce recaps below!
Christopher’s Biggest Takeaway
This was my fourth in-person Dreamforce, and it was the first time I felt I could take full strategic advantage of the conference.
If you have never been before, Dreamforce can be highly overwhelming – over 2700 sessions in two and a half days spread out across a square mile of real estate in San Francisco. It is impossible to see everything. How is someone supposed to decide between seeing Bono speak about personal growth and transformation when Dr. Jane Goodall is speaking at the same time about her work with gorillas and the future of conservation? By year four at Dreamforce, the answer is easy – you skip both and go right to a session on admin best practices!
I came into Dreamforce this year to ensure that our team, both externally for our clients and internally in the PAC Community, is using the latest best practices and continuing to evolve and adapt our tried-and-true methods. Overall, I came away feeling proud of where we are and what we can do to help our clients achieve, but I see plenty of areas of opportunity to come! I’m excited to share those with our clients in the coming months (and don’t be afraid to bring some up to us if you think you have some)!
Christopher’s Favorite Session
Admin Best Practices for User Management. While this was not the most exciting session, it had all of the Salesforce Administrators in the crowd losing their minds. It took me back to my time as a Box Office Manager at PACnet when I would skip the enticing marketing sessions (don’t skip those, I present on those now) to attend sessions about the newest process updates in tRes.
I am constantly striving to find efficiencies in how our team and our clients operate, and there were many tools presented in this session that will allow us to do just that. One of our most immediate wins from Dreamforce was born out of this session – a new tool for Managers to quickly activate, deactivate, and transfer records between new hires and old reps (reach out to your admin today if you want this in your org).
What’s Next for Christopher
After Dreamforce, Andrew, myself, and the team gathered our notes and put together a post-Dreamforce action plan to take advantage of everything we learned. What’s next for me is ensuring we follow through on that plan, adjust when we need to, and continue providing top-tier Salesforce admin services for our clients. If you’re interested in learning more about any sessions Andrew and I attended or what some of those additional follow-up items may be, don’t hesitate to reach out to your admin today!
Andrew’s Biggest Takeaway
As with every Dreamforce, content is served like an all-you-can-eat buffet of curiosity.
No business process has not, at some point, been optimized using Salesforce tools. However, distilling content down to a single takeaway can be challenging. So I think, for 2022, it is this: now more than ever, Salesforce is developing tools for Admins to mold the platform to fit any number of business challenges.
Dynamic Forms and Fields are bringing a level of customization to page layouts that will drive a unique and different experience for each user group. Managers, Sales Reps, and Development Officers can all have different experiences while engaging with the same record. All process automation is moving to Flow, which will become the one-stop shop for all automation across the platform. Already we are utilizing a new process that allows sales managers to deactivate an old user, create a new user, and transfer existing open opportunities and accounts to that new person (talk to your admin if you want to get in on this new tool).
I look forward to the countless ways we can more effectively achieve some of our most common tasks.
Andrew’s Favorite Session
Automate This! Record Trigger Flow Design Patterns. This session had great insight into achieving the same automation end goals. Next, we’ll create a standard practice and use more efficient automation tools to help page loading speeds, increase data feed efficiency, and improve metadata hygiene and governance.
What’s Next for Andrew
Winter Brainstorms and Spring Cleaning. I want to automate more processes in the current season, especially around common use cases and consistent on-sales (such as Season Renewals and planned giving campaigns). I plan to take highly engaged accounts and serve hyper-focused leads to our Sales Teams with clean processes from untouched leads to fully closed opportunities.
In the Spring, we can cleanly ensure our old flows/dashboards/reports are built with consistency and best-practice metadata hygiene.
Co-authors:
Chris Carney, CRM Manager, Paciolan
Andrew Campbell, Senior Strategist - CRM, Paciolan
