New York City was the final stop on the Salesforce World Tour in 2018, and what a great place to end the season. The representation of nonprofit and financial services organizations (and sometimes both in one) strongly demonstrated the cross-section of the sectors. But, even for New York, this year’s content was especially tuned to community development organizations. There were some very tangible steps forward towards reducing the cost and complexity of innovative solutions.

In this post I will share a few reflections on the event and some key takeaways including accessible innovations, analytics and interface updates, and additional apps to consider. I hope it provides a capstone on what has been a very lively year in the Salesforce ecosystem.

Accessible Innovation

Salesforce has a long history in the financial sector. Though, this World Tour felt a bit different. There were interesting new case studies, Lightning components, and integration examples that were relevant to a variety of organizations regardless of size. Typically, large corporate banks receive all the air-time at main events. This year, seeing small-to-medium CDFIs emphasized was refreshing, as we have seen so many lending organizations successfully adopt Salesforce in 2018. Their representation helped strike home that many of the “premium” features have been scaled to a price-point where they are accessible to the wider market.

Salesforce Heroku, a development platform, and Salesforce IoT, a platform for connecting devices with customer data, were two interesting integration examples in the small-to-mid sized market. But, perhaps most encouraging was seeing Salesforce’s packages at a low minimum purchase. This is especially true of their predictive analytics package, Salesforce Einstein (more on Einstein below). Another noteworthy example was Salesforce Inbox, which offers email and calendar integration with pipeline activities. When so many of our buying decisions need to first consider price, it is encouraging to see so much within reach.

Einstein Analytics

The World Tour provided one of the most compelling demonstrations of predictive analytics for philanthropy I have ever seen – it was a leap rather than the incremental improvements we are used to seeing. The Einstein Prediction Builder is one such example. As part of the Einstein package, the tool is a significant step forward in creating predictive models for things like “propensity to give”. Many large organizations have historically done this through separate business intelligence tools, but this solution allows for predictive modeling within Salesforce.

Smaller organizations, on the other hand, are tasked with using various reports including LYBUNT (Last Year But Unfortunately Not This) and SYBUNT (Some Year But Unfortunately Not This) reports. A lot of organizations have held off on investing in BI tools due to the cost and complexity that these solutions have been known for in the past. Seeing the power of heavy-hitting analytics packaged into a cost-effective, simple and configured solution means now is the time for organizations on Salesforce to start thinking about implementing Einstein Analytics.

For further information on Einstein, Trailhead offers a 25-minute primer that lays down the basics.

Lightning User Interface

In 2015, Salesforce released a new user interface (UI): Lightning. Watching the evolution of Lightning these past few years has been nothing short of eventful. Originally, the new UI caught a lot of grief for slow page loads and limited features. While every release showed progress, I was struck by the drastic improvement of World Tour presentations on configuring smart applications. They were visually compelling, effectively led end-users through business processes, and combined analytics into every step. The presentations demonstrated how widely adopted Lightning components are across a wide range of organizations. For those that have not transitioned to the new UI, now seems like the right time to implement a Lightning rollout.

Additional Apps to Consider

There are a few other applications we have been watching that appear to be making headway in the market. A few I felt were worth calling out include:

• OwnBackup for data and system restoration. Most people’s first question is, “Why would we need to back-up Salesforce, a massive cloud-computing organization with layers of redundancy?” OwnBackup’s answer is pretty simple: Salesforce cannot protect you from yourself. No amount of testing can fully eliminate the human error – the “oops” that leads to a widespread, often irreversible, change across your data. OwnBackup makes the complete data restore process possible. And, its licensing is in the thousands (vs. tens-of-thousands), which was encouraging for mid-to-large clients with data that cannot easily be recreated. More on OwnBackup.
• GetFeedback for customer surveys. The survey tool market is awfully hard to distinguish yourself in. What GetFeedback has done is mastered the customer experience integration within Salesforce. Surveys can be triggered based on activity. This means that the tool captures information at the moment when an individual is most likely to provide it. More on GetFeedback.

I should also provide an honorable mention to DocuSign (digital signatures), Gearset (metadata/data deployments) and New Voice Media (phone integration). While I didn’t see anything particularly new from these folks, I was reminded how useful and reliable they are as part of a toolkit.

Summary + Conclusions

It is hard not to be overwhelmed by the marketing of these events – to fall into a vat of “Salesforce Kool-Aid.” Clearly, Salesforce knows how to put its best foot forward, and admittedly they backup the hype with real innovation. The showcase of accessible innovations, analytics and interface updates, and additional apps provided a lot for organizations to consider in the months ahead.  The event felt like a great capstone to the year – and showed practical, financially-viable innovations that will help organizations of all sizes deliver on their missions in the New Year.