DreamForce #2014

Being my first Dreamforce conference I can say I was certainly not disappointed. Wow do they know how to put on an event. With 145k delegates held in multiple locations, including hotels, theatres, halls, plazas, buses, cafés and bars in downtown San Francisco my first impression was how well organised this event was. Not to mention the branding, just about every building, bus, street sign and even my room key was branded Dreamforce. How well everyone was catered for and moved around the city was exceptional, not to mention the city was also host at the same time to the annual Fleet air-show celebrating past and current service men and women, oh yeah and a small thing called Baseball.

If there was one negative 145k people trying to access Wi-Fi can be kind of tricky. So considering this was a software / digital marketing conference that was a little disappointing as I couldn't Tweet, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram or use the Streaka app in real time. On that note real time decision-making for business based on real time data was definitely the major theme of the event.

As consumers’ needs continue to change and become more connected business needs to have a customer success platform that can be monitored in real time by sales teams on mobile devices. Companies such as Coke, Nestle and L’Oreal have done just this by encouraging sales teams to be mobile and giving them real time data and analytics on their mobile devices and empowering sales teams to make decisions on the run. Salesforce have launched a new analytics product that will rival Google analytics as it can report on everything including web, email and social media.

• Data from salesforce marketing cloud suggests that (CMO’s) to have higher IT spend than (CTO’s)
• Salesforce have interviewed the top CMO's in the US and they predict by 2019 75% of all marketing campaigns to be totally digital. Currently this sits at 25%, so huge growth in next 5 years is predicted.
 

I was representing Raine & Horne Pty Ltd so in that regard some things to consider are how the connected consumer will interact with real estate,  Salesforce predicts connected TV will change everything once again as mobile has done and that email will continue to be most important channel with  over 50% of emails  being read on mobile devices (http://www.internetwebmarketing.com.au/customer-relationship-management.html) . The connected consumer will engage across multiple channels, need a seamless experience with one version of the truth and they will expect personalised offers. 70% of consumer decisions are already made before they decide to buy. As marketing, sales and customer service are merging, serving has become the new selling, marketing is more about helping deliver customer experience.

More disruption will continue as wearable technology takes hold in the market ‘Will I Am’ from ‘Black Eyed Peas’ fame and ‘The Voice’ TV show has launched a new watch (http://iampuls.com/ ) which really is a game changer for mobile phones. This device has its own sim card and data plan so it does not need to connect to a phone to access the internet. This device comes pre-loaded with Salesforce CRM, so for the real estate industry it could be quite interesting. One of our major challenges is getting correct data into our CRM system, so in the future imagine a real estate agent conducting an open for inspection wearing their wearable device, to connect with a buyer/consumer (also wearing a similar device) all they would need to do is double tap and the contact details are switched and a Salesforce lead generation trail and email campaign is initiated straight away. Ok a bit far-fetched but something to keep an eye on, the technology is available to do this right now.

Some other take-aways for me are the full scope of all Salesforce tools; they have tools for building apps eg. loyalty programs, property inspections, data collection, sales assistant presentation tools for sales and PM listing presentation, intranet and much more. Also tools being used by Coke  in Germany to help decorate new outlets that will have Coke displays. For Real Estate this could be a great opportunity for virtual home decorating services.

In the current Australian Real Estate climate there is lot of noise about the major portal sites including www.realestate.com and Domanin.com.au and the launch of the new industry portal squiz.com.au. In my opinion all the sites play a part, but for Agents to become even more relevant and to offer great customer service they need to invest in tools that remove the mud from the windscreen and allow more vision on the internet highway. To help better understand what their customer’s needs are and how Agents can best service their customers more efficiently, it would appear that SalesForce and in particular their marketing cloud technology offers such tools.