Sydney Salesforce World Tour 2017
NTT Data Australia is a proud attendee of the largest cloud computing event of the year in the Southern Hemisphere, Salesforce World Tour 2017, as a Gold sponsor. The event brought together over 10,000 thought leaders, industry pioneers, and CRM cloud enthusiast, we believe the conference was a great way to educate the Australian public about our Brand, Capabilities and network with partners.
NTT Data Australia is a proud attendee of the largest cloud computing event of the year in the Southern Hemisphere, Salesforce World Tour 2017, as a Gold sponsor. The event brought together over 10,000 thought leaders, industry pioneers, and CRM cloud enthusiast, we believe the conference was a great way to educate the Australian public about our Brand, Capabilities and network with partners.
The events started with Salesforce Partner forum sharing their focus areas for the year and how partners can align to them to increase business. Their primary focus will be Retail, Healthcare and Public Sector in terms of verticals. It was good opportunity to connect with key people within Salesforce. The next day was filled with Key Notes and Breakout sessions our team was connecting with the customers and prospects explaining about our services and differentiators. We had captured visitors’ details and also quite a few NTT Group company colleagues visited our booth. Among the visitors we had Mark san and Akifumi san from Tokyo, Luis from Intramart, Tinus from Oakton, Chris from Viiew. Both NTT DATA Figtree Systems and NTT DATA Australia teams collaborated throughout the day at the booth.
FIVE KEY TAKE AWAYS
Artificial Intelligence is here - On display at the event was Salesforce’s new Artificial Intelligence (AI) product, Einstein. Launched last year at the Salesforce annual Dreamforce conference in September, it was incredible to see the capabilities Einstein has for businesses. Integrated into the underlying data platform of Salesforce, Einstein provides insights, predicts outcomes, recommends the next best action and automates tasks across the full Salesforce stack (Sales, Service, and Marketing Clouds). There’s also no doubt Einstein will help to bring the Salesforce clouds closer together. Watch out SAP, Oracle and IBM.
Be a customer success company - Salesforce has positioned itself as a “customer success company” for the last few years but at the event the company showed that this is more than just a tagline or advertising campaign. Salesforce demonstrated that it is continuing to acquire and develop platforms that are designed to help organisations get closer to their customer. Marketing plays a key role in this by implementing personalised, data-driven customer communications. However, ultimately, it’s about delivering a consistent brand experience across marketing channels, as well as sales and customer service.
Technology is driving major organisational change - Many of the conversations I had over the day included how businesses are struggling with the implications of implementing marketing technology. There are some obvious challenges around introducing new skills and experience to drive the technology, but the problem is bigger than that. The main questions that was asked were: “How do you align traditional business units with competing objectives and KPIs in a customer centric organisation?”, and “Who owns the customer data?” The event highlighted the common problems businesses are having in implementing marketing technology.
Data is core - Data continues to be a challenge for all businesses, and is central to their ambitions of becoming customer centric. At the event, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud showed that its power is around implementing personalised communications across email, mobile, web and social. The event also highlighted that in order to execute highly targeted, and coordinated marketing across multiple channels, you need data. The more enriched it is, the better the business outcomes. Salesforce also highlighted that data is the common thread that runs through Salesforce uniting its Sales, Service and Marketing Clouds for an improved customer (and employee) experience.
The best time to start is now - There’s a natural temptation for organisations to hold off investing in technology until everything is sorted, particularly data. The reality is it will never be perfect, as there is more data being generated every minute you delay. And there is nothing like running activity to provide real results and learnings. You need a strategy, absolutely, but no amount of planning will replace the insights you get from execution. The longer you leave it, the further you fall behind. Implement what you can as soon as possible.
(Picture left to right : Akifumi San, Chris O’Meagher, Shobhit Garg, Mark San, Tarun Kumar, Rohit Kumar, Jamie Eames, Ricky Au, Luis Ohri, Ronaldo Dela Cruz, Lee Turner, Thomas Trika)