Any Red Sox fan knows that the home-opener in Fenway Park is always a big event on the calendar! This year, the Red Sox game served as a great backdrop to the Salesforce Boston World Tour. With that in mind, let’s take a review of the recent Boston World Tour through a baseball lens.
First Pitch – World Tour events are always great events to bring in customers and prospects to a regional event and cut down on travel costs. Boston’s Hynes Center provided the perfect venue to not only find out more details about new Salesforce capabilities, but Engageware, as a Gold Sponsor, was set up to meet and talk with existing customers and new leads. One of the most effective lead engagement strategies we use for trade shows and events is our own Scheduler product, which allows people to book meetings in as short as 15 minute increments in a round robin format with our booth staff. Or, our Account Executives have their own invitation links that they send to clients for 1:1 meetings. Each meeting ensures that the right person is available to meet with the customer and we’re able to staff our booth accordingly, making each “First Pitch” a strike!
Hit and Run – As a Product Manager, one of the most valuable parts of these events is talking with other Salesforce customers about how they are innovating on the Salesforce Platform. This first-person perspective is really valuable in making sure that our future Scheduler roadmap is aligned with customer needs. Talking with Commerce Cloud users and Salesforce experts over breakfast was a fantastically productive first session. I had the opportunity to speak with a major athletic retailer and a local company providing video solutions, who were both not only advancing their own products, but putting the customer in a better position to score. And any time you can accomplish two goals in one at bat, you’re on the winning base path. Einstein recommendations in the Commerce Cloud serve up retailers’ recommendations that continually learn based on customer behavior, product data and order history. If Einstein generates sales of products like athletic footwear due to the presence of compelling video, it’s going to serve up those types of products more and more. The retailer and the video company both win. Go Team!
Extra Inning Analytics – As the game moves into extra innings, a Manager has to fully understand the players he has available, the match-ups that are presented to him, and the risk/reward payoffs that accompany late game decisions. It’s an analytics mash-up that big league managers execute every single game, but becomes magnified in extra frames. Fortunately, most Major League managers have honed their game time analytics over dozens of years. The World Tour highlighted Einstein throughout the show and made it abundantly clear that even arm-chair Managers can bring complex analytics into their game decisions in a very simple manner. With Einstein Discovery, you don’t have to be a Data Scientist to understand and use powerful AI. Einstein Discovery identifies the key contributors to business outcomes and in plain language, identifies the areas that can be improved. With Intelligent Appointments from Engageware, users can see how key meetings helped to drive Opportunities through to contracts.
Walk Off Hit – When the home team is up in the last inning, or in the Home Opener’s case, extra innings, all it takes is one key hit in the bottom half of an inning to end the game. It can be a game ending home run, or a series of key singles and walks, but nothing gives the fans more of what they want than the winning run crossing home plate at the end of the game. Salesforce’s Financial Services Cloud provides financial services teams across Wealth Management, Retail Banking and now Insurance with that excited feeling because it provides exactly what the users need. FSC includes rich data elements that allow users to identify financial health and can include everything measurable for a client from total assets to car loans. Financial goals allow wealth managers and bankers to understand key drivers for a client such as retirement planning, or college funding plans. And referrals for commercial bankers allow them to easily identify and track the key people in their company that are helping to drive additional business, like home equity loans or new credit cards. At the heart of every financial services relationship is trust and communication, which is why so many financial services customers have embraced Scheduler and Intelligent Appointment capabilities to reach out and easily set a meeting with the right person, for the right meeting. And with FSC, invitations are generated for key events or referrals automatically so that bankers, agents and wealth managers can focus on the relationship, and not meeting administration.
At the end of the day, not only had the Red Sox won, but Salesforce once again hit it out of the park with another successful World Tour event.