My RSR partner Steve Rowen and I attended Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2017 convention in San Francisco last week, and it was… well, massive! How massive is “massive “? Here’s my attempt: In a city of less than 1M people, an additional approximated 170,000 devotees of Salesforce crammed themselves into a 6 or 7 city blocks and about 16 buildings and open areas. The magnificent new Salesforce Tower, San Francisco’s largest building, loomed large over the south-of-Market Street festivities.

Having lived near San Francisco for almost 50 years, I thought I knew the place like the back of my hand, but it was easy to get a little disoriented. Moscone Center and the surrounding satellite locations were transformed to a fun and slightly cartoonish national park motif, complete with guides dressed up in “park ranger ” costumes (complete with Smokey-the-Bear hats) at every corner, helping people get to their destinations.

Coming out of the elevator at the Marriott, I was approached by one such guide, who cheerily asked, “Are you enjoying Dreamforce? ” I responded, “I’ve never been to a technology conference quite like this! “, but she emphatically replied, “We’re not a technology company, we’re a PEOPLE company! ” And that was it in a nutshell: speakers from CEO Marc Benioff on down the line all preached the same theme. Salesforce is an equality-driven company based on three fundamental values: Trust, Growth based on mutual success, and Equality & Diversity.

There’s nothing wrong with such a focus – as a matter of fact in a corporate environment that seems to be driven by short-term earnings-per-share at the expense of both employees and customers, it’s absolutely refreshing. My favorite business management guru, Peter Drucker, eloquently laid out the position that Mr. Benioff has clearly taken, in 1994:

“Organizations must competently perform the one social function for the sake of which they exist – the school to teach, the hospital to cure the sick, and the business to produce goods, services, or the capital to provide for the risks of the future. They can only do so if they single-mindedly concentrate on their specialized mission. But there is also society’s need for these organizations to take social responsibility – to work on problems and challenges of the community. “[1]

Salesforce is the quintessential San Francisco company, a city and region that celebrates diversity and innovation. And so Dreamforce seemed as much a celebration of San Francisco values as it was a technology conference.

And there’s the rub: if you have bet your company’s future on the capabilities of the Salesforce platform and went to Dreamforce to find out where the company is taking you, you might have had a really hard time getting to the details you came to learn. The company’s message seems to be, “trust us! We’re nice people! ” This message was perfectly stated by Salesforce Chief People Officer Cindy Robbins, who spoke to a room full of industry analysts. She outlined the Salesforce engagement strategy: “culture + technology + data = engagement “. Robbins stated, “Happy people solve harder problems! ”

I absolutely believe this to be true (I’ve seen it in my own career), but I wanted more. The Salesforce Commerce Cloud, the former Demandware, looks great, and the Salesforce Customer Cloud is the #1 CRM in the world, for sales, service, and marketing. But the question remains, “Where are you taking your customers? ”

Mr. Benioff broadly addressed the new roadmap during his keynote presentation:

• Trailhead – a customizable employee learning and empowerment environment to help employees with learning paths, skills assessment, points & badges, and credentials;
• Einstein – an AI engine that can help businesses personalize the value proposition to consumers based on both their stated and implied needs, including a “prediction builder ” to help companies target just the right value propositions to just the right consumers;
• Lightning – a development environment that enables customization of Salesforce capabilities to fit the customer’s particular needs, particularly using mobile devices;
• IoT – Internet of Things capabilities integrated with CRM, that enables integration of consumers’ digital and physical shopping journeys;
• Heroku – a front-end user experience development tool;
• Analytics, and
• AppExchange.

To see all of this in action proved to be the most frustrating part of the Dreamforce 2017 experience. The best case study that I was able to get to was in a demo-pod on the Dreamforce expo floor showing off innovations at Adidas. It looked great, a clear demonstration of personalized value delivery coupled with order management capabilities in a beautiful, intuitive, and friendly way.

Steve and I had useful one-on-one’s with the Salesforce Retail team. Rob Garf, who came to Salesforce via the Demandware acquisition (where he was the Vice President of Industry Strategy and Insights), shared insights into the Salesforce “DMP ” (data management platform), that is intended to enable Salesforce to ingest data from virtually any source, easing the integration burden to legacy applications considerably. According to Rob, the DMP will “combine data from any source to better target marketing offers “. The goal of Salesforce for Retail ultimately is to provide one “engagement platform ” that combines the capabilities of the Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Commerce Cloud into one seamless environment.

I would have liked to see and hear actual case studies that demonstrated how retailers are really integrating Salesforce functionality into their existing portfolios. But that was extraordinarily difficult, and not because Salesforce or any of the featured customers were being coy about the details, but because the venues were wildly overcrowded. The Retail Track was held at the iconic Palace Hotel, but as both Steve and I can attest, once you got up the elevator to the conference room area, the only space for your body was on the escalator back down to the ground floor! Of the several tracks that I wanted to attend, I managed to elbow my way into just a few of them.

The Bottom Line

The Salesforce value proposition to businesses has really caught on fire, and it’s hard nowadays to find a direct sales organization that doesn’t use it. The company’s entrée into Retail has been accelerated by virtue of its acquisition of Demandware, and it’s clear that the company sees Retail as an almost greenfield opportunity. That’s one of the great advantages of being a disruptor; coming at a business segment from the outside-in rather than from the inside-out, Salesforce doesn’t see all the yeah-but inhibitors that get in the way of adoption. Given that Retail needs disruption, Salesforce could be a real game-changer.

Finally, Marc Benioff’s vision of a socially responsible company is compelling, and if Salesforce is any example, something to be emulated. But Dreamforce as it is currently designed (as both a giant convention PLUS user conference) is straining the capabilities the beautiful City By The Bay. The company is going to have to offer industry-specific user conferences, or find a bigger venue. I expect that it will be the former and not the latter; Salesforce and San Francisco go together like baseball great Willie Mays and the Giants.