Alright, alright, alright.

Grab that lukewarm coffee and let's dive in.

Today we’re focusing on all things Dreamforce and the God-King of San Francisco… BDB (big daddy benioff).

2 Take Aways from Dreamforce

Salesforce—love it or hate it, we're shackled to it.

✔ It’s the system for recording deals

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 The system that requires an army of specialized pros to use

🧐 The system your VP will never stop hounding you to update

🤬 The system which, even after you painstakingly updated every object, you’re still required to verbalize in front of your entire team (whys the CFO here?) every week in exhausting detail on your forecast call

💩 Yeah…. that system!

No surprise. Dreamforce this year? Full-throttle AI.

Let’s be real; whatever Salesforce churns out makes literally no impact on our SaaS selling existence….

But here’s a couple takeaways

🤖 Einstein 1: Déjà vu? Didn't they launch Einstein like 10-yrs ago? Yes.. but apparently now it does something!

They’re plannin’ on crammin’ everything (customer data, slack chats, content, telemetry, tea leaves, and the astrological signs of your buyers) into their "hyperscale data engine" (read MuleSoft) in an attempt to unify ALL customer data in a single view.

To make it even more complicated, new flows can be triggered by any change on any object.

They’re also beefing up their insights and analytics solutions (read Tableau) with Einstein 1’s new standardized tagging and access model, supposedly simplifying and unifying reporting.

👾 Generative/AI Assistant: SFDC vs ChatGPT

Introducing Einstein Co-Pilot—because apparently, Einstein wasn't busy enough. It’s a conversational interface to bring plain english commands into crm and salesforce’s suite of products.

Their aim is to help you accelerate your flow of work by allowing you to just straight up ask text questions. Sounds great!

❌ Lowlight: Co-pilot will be… proactive. It will take actions like providing “recommended action plan” after calls, check customer status, and even change stuff. This could be great, but could be spectacularly distracting and confusing.

⭐ Highlight: A “Yo, catch me up on Slack” feature. Seems chill, till you miss that one "urgent" message about the new coffee machine.

TLDR;

If your company is forking out the big dollars to access all the updates and have a SOPs team of a few hundred – you might get some cleaner data when you take over that one dude's patch who never stopped complaining about SDRs.

Plus, less Slack checking (woohoo!)

If you’re a Salesforce consultants? Ka-ching! You folks just hit the jackpot. 💰

Need more detail? (click)

Man on the Street: Dreamforce

Last year — Kyle lost in fantasy 🏈

His punishment?

Attend Dreamforce, of course.

Dreamforce? … TF? (Kyle, 2023)

IMO Dreamforce is the pinnacle of everything thats wrong with software trade-shows.

Not only is it not in Las Vegas — its held in the flaming hellscape of Mordor San Francisco.

They get 40,000 (yes, 40k!) tech nerds together to bow down to a 1990 SQL Database that needs If / And / Or statements to work.

Then, for some reason, they make downtown Mordor San Francisco look like a furry conference set in avatar land.

Anyways

After days of wandering around avatar furry fest (feet bloodied but held comfortably within new swag socks) … I attempted to attend some sessions.

The best I could make out is that Salesforce has “unlocked” many, many things.

Those things were “innovative, open, generative, integrated, automated, intelligent, no-code, platform, data, hype-word and dave matthews band”.

Now

I don’t know much…

But I do know our sales ops guy (dan) is gonna be pulling his effn’ hair out over this shit in about a month.

However, I do want to say one thing.

F*CK Accenture for hosting their “session” at Fogo de Chão.

After a long week, all I wanted was to “trailblaze” my ass through some meats on a stick but Accenture had to book the entire restaurant for a talk?

WTF DOES ACCENTURE EVEN DO TO MAKE ALL THIS FOGO DE CHEDDA’ ANYWAY?

Whatever.

Last note — I applaud BDB for his threats to move Dreamforce from Mordor San Francisco. It won’t help the city but at least I wont have to deal with this shit show every year.

Here’s to getting the meat sweats in peace 🥩✌

- Kyle

PS

Shout out to Will.I.Am for his session on AI — He’s the enterprise software luminary we needed to make sense of this rapidly changing (truly unprecedented) landscape we’re all operating in 🤡

PPS

Remember that time dude thought BDB was going to give up the crown? lol

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