The small city of digital marketers who descended upon San Francisco for Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference this week were treated to music from Bruno Mars and Cake, and keynotes from Hillary Clinton and Neil Young. In between all the glam, they buzzed about the inevitability of sales and marketing integration. “Now we’re talking about finally experiencing the true promise of CRM,” said Lattice CEO Shashi Upadhyay at the event. “Salesforce customers we work with are using predictive analytics to increase conversion rates and deal sizes by as much as three times.”
CEO Marc Benioff (above) said Dreamforce was created to excite, entertain, educate, inspire, and motivate. But it’s also a showcase for new products. Some noteworthy ones:
MindTickle introduced MindTickle for Sales, a “sales readiness” platform to help growing companies quickly ramp up the skills of new reps. The guiding wisdom of the new product is to bypass third-party trainers and put introductory training into the hands of companies, who are better aware of their own products and processes. MindTickle claims companies can easily customize best practices, product training, pitch coaching, and updates. “Increasingly, products are being rolled out to customers in a more continuous fashion, which makes typical bi-annual sales training camps highly ineffective,” noted Dinesh Katiyar of Accel Partners, a tech investment firm. “Plus, as millennials become a significant portion of the workforce, on-demand, bite-sized social learning through mobile devices is becoming the norm.”
Two new cloud apps for the communications and insurance industries were launched by Vlocity at the San Francisco event. Industry-specific cloud and mobile apps are a coming trend, according to company CEO David Schmaier. “Organizations are asking for cloud software that embeds industry best practices,” he said. The communications industry app provides users with a cloud-based business support system that configures price quotes, billing integration, and subscriber services. Vlocity Insurance segments property and casualty sectors to help with quotes, pricing, and renewals.
Deloitte Digital released a 2.0 version of its pre-configured, pre-integrated CloudMix solution with expanded partner offerings from Apttus, Box, Dell, and DocuSign. Fortified with Deloitte’s best practices for the high-tech, consumer, life sciences, and pharmaceutical industries, the enhanced software’s aim is to create a more connected cloud ecosystem including leading tech providers. “By continuing to expand the cloud technology partner set, we help our clients get to the future faster,” said Paul Clemmons, Deloitte’s global Salesforce.com alliance leader.
B2B intelligence company Radius introduced a software product called Radius Insights that tracks hundreds of customer signals, ranging from revenue to social media activity to online advertising efforts. The program connects with users’ CRM data and synchronizes updates from the Radius Index, a real-time tracker of more than 20 million U.S. businesses. “With data, more is always better. The trick is making sense of all that information so you can see who is truly your best customer,” said Radius CEO Darian Shirazi, who earlier in the week joined LinkedIn selling expert Koka Sexton and Totango CEO Guy Nirpaz on a Dreamforce panel discussion on building an intelligent funnel.
