Dreamforce ‘13: Salesforce’s True Cloud Vision

Another Dreamforce (Salesforce.com’s annual user and developer conference) has concluded, and remarkably, attendance was even higher than last year, when 90,000 registered. This year, organizers claimed that more than 100,000 people attended.

As I listened to the keynote addresses and Salesforce.com’s lead breakout sessions, one theme was clear: Salesforce has permanently positioned itself as an enterprise cloud platform. With the company’s acquisition of ExactTarget, its Marketing Cloud is ready to compete in the enterprise marketing automation platform category. Its Service Cloud can drive mobile capabilities, and the number of apps available and being created for Sales Cloud is difficult to even comprehend. During his keynote address, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff emphasized the Internet-driven enterprise and how Salesforce’s cloud platform can support the needs of any and all organizations.

Despite all of Salesforce’s  impressive features and functionalities, I continue to hear from clients who are concerned with adoption within their organizations. How can so many companies be Salesforce clients, taking advantage of all of the solution’s features and spending a lot of money when the solution is not adequately adopted by their end users?

In response to this question, here’s some basic advice: Before you are dazzled by “bells and whistles,” get feedback from your internal end users to understand what they really need. Ensure that your processes are well defined and governed, and design and implement Salesforce (or any other application you choose) so that it provides value and insight to users. Tools can provide great efficiencies, but only when they support formal processes, are seen as beneficial to end users, and do not become more complex than they need to be.

So, please think big (for example, I’d love to have my Google Glass send information to my Salesforce instances), but design and deliver solutions simply and efficiently.