As key executives, industry thought leaders, and even a Celtic rock band descended on Boston for the Salesforce World Tour, members of the Primacy team grabbed a front-row seat. Throughout the day, our team was bombarded with valuable insights on how Salesforce is helping companies thrive in the evolving marketplace; from the pre-show to the main keynote and breakout sessions, this was truly a can’t-miss event.
Despite a live performance by the Dropkick Murphy’s, Salesforce Vice Chairman, President, and COO Keith Block managed to steal the show. He eloquently identified the challenges modern companies are facing, and discussed how Salesforce is helping big brands transform their strategy, accelerate growth, and innovate faster in the ever-changing marketplace.
Though the conference was littered with jaw dropping stats of Salesforce’s amazing growth and success, as well as the future vision and roadmap for the company, themes of Artificial Intelligence and other innovative marketing technologies stood out from the pack.Key Highlights from a Primacy Perspective: How AI Will Transform the Agent & Customer ExperienceIn this session, we reviewed how insurance and financial services companies are always looking for new ways to generate and nurture leads, close deals, retain customers, and be more alert and responsive. With changing customer expectations, new regulations, and industry disruptors, conservative companies need to start looking to thought leaders like Primacy to help up their game with emerging technology. During the World Tour, we examined real life examples of how Einstein (Salesforce’s AI for CRM) and Watson (IBM’s AI intelligence) are joining forces and using Artificial Intelligence to increase productivity, streamline service and claims, analyze data, and personalize customer experiences. “Blaze Your Trail” with Keith Block & Special GuestsKeith Block, Vice Chairman, President and COO at Salesforce, spoke proudly and confidently about the successes that Salesforce has achieved over the years. As he offered a refreshing take on how his special guests were transforming their businesses using Salesforce, he centered the discussion on the latest craze--AI. He used Einstein to showcase how companies of every size and in every industry can succeed using AI, marketing automation, and sales and service tools to work smarter and innovate faster.
An executive from IBM attended the keynote to shed light on the recent Watson-Einstein partnership. She highlighted how insights from Watson are available directly in Salesforce’s Intelligent Customer Success platform, mixing Einstein’s customer relationship data with Watson’s stores of structured and unstructured data—including weather, healthcare, financial services and retail information—to provide innovative solutions for businesses. She exemplified how an insurance company can harness the Watson AI within Salesforce to push messaging to customers based on the weather on their preferred marketing channel (email, SMS, push). By alerting customers in advance of a serious hail storm they were able to save millions in claims to vehicles that would have otherwise been damaged. Other features, including predictive lead scoring and the Sales Cloud dashboard, continue to improve the processes that lead to lead nurture and sales generation.
The Future of Healthcare: A Unified Patient PlatformAs Salesforce has been investing in a healthcare platform focused on patient-centered health care, it’s only natural that there were a few focused workshops on the Salesforce Health Cloud. The Primacy team gave their undivided attention to Salesforce’s Chief Medical Officer, Joshua Newman, MD, MSHS, and valued customers shared motivating stories on how the cloud has helped drive efficiencies, manage patient and member journeys, and connect the entire healthcare ecosystem.
Historically, the healthcare industry has been focused on medical records management. To be successful in the future, there needs to be a shift to focus on improving patient satisfaction, delivering high-quality patient care, controlling avoidable costs, and improving outcomes. With a solid marketing technology and CRM ecosystem, infused artificial intelligence, and a customer-centric marketing strategy, healthcare systems will see immense success.Salesforce for Marketing: The Smartest CRM for 1-to-1 Customer JourneysAs marketing continues to evolve, putting your customer and the center of every experience is the most important pillar to success. Understanding the customer journey—from awareness and acquisition, to lead nurture and retention, to communicating with the customer at the right moment and on the right channel—is no longer a nice thing to have – it’s a must have.
In this session, an online learning system showed how it uses Pardot to generate leads and nurture them until they are sales-ready before handing off the hot leads to the sales team. This sales and marketing ecosystem helps the teams work together to improve lead management and address top-of-funnel alignment issues. Automated lead nurture programs, intelligent sales dashboards, and AI-infused lead scoring and qualification enhances marketing strategy and makes every communication timely, relevant, and engaging.
A popular coffee brand also presented about how they are using Salesforce Marketing Cloud coupled with Sales Cloud, Lightning Voice and App Builder for lead generation, lead nurture, customer communication, and analytics. They described their crawl, walk, run approach, and the continuous testing that they did in every communication. The biggest take away for our Primacy team was how their marketing technology worked together to keep the customer at the center of every communication, and deliver relevant content at the right time in a way that was useful and beneficial to the customer.Primacy + Marketing Technology + AI As Primacy continues to be a leader, innovator, and forward thinker in technology and marketing, we rely on our team’s painstaking attention to detail in these emerging technology conferences. As we identify new strategies and client solutions, Artificial Intelligence and Marketing Technology remains at the top of our list.
In a most recent Forrester report¹, Joe Stanhope talks thoroughly about how AI will infuse itself into many, if not all, areas of marketing within the next 5 years.“AI provides the cognitive scale brands need to keep pace with escalating customer demands, the deluge of data and content, and almost limitless customer journey permutations. AI also aligns with B2C marketers' fundamental priorities to make customer engagement more timely, personalized, and results driven. AI will transform marketing over the next five years, leaving few facets of customer engagement untouched.” We continuously drive and push our clients to see what’s next and be thought leaders in their industries. In 2017 and beyond, our mission is to help clients evolve their CRM and marketing automation technology and integrate AI into the core of their business strategy.
¹AI Must Learn The Basics Before It Can Transform Marketing”, Forrester Research, Inc., June 1, 2017
The Future of Healthcare: A Unified Patient PlatformAs Salesforce has been investing in a healthcare platform focused on patient-centered health care, it’s only natural that there were a few focused workshops on the Salesforce Health Cloud. The Primacy team gave their undivided attention to Salesforce’s Chief Medical Officer, Joshua Newman, MD, MSHS, and valued customers shared motivating stories on how the cloud has helped drive efficiencies, manage patient and member journeys, and connect the entire healthcare ecosystem.
Historically, the healthcare industry has been focused on medical records management. To be successful in the future, there needs to be a shift to focus on improving patient satisfaction, delivering high-quality patient care, controlling avoidable costs, and improving outcomes. With a solid marketing technology and CRM ecosystem, infused artificial intelligence, and a customer-centric marketing strategy, healthcare systems will see immense success.Salesforce for Marketing: The Smartest CRM for 1-to-1 Customer JourneysAs marketing continues to evolve, putting your customer and the center of every experience is the most important pillar to success. Understanding the customer journey—from awareness and acquisition, to lead nurture and retention, to communicating with the customer at the right moment and on the right channel—is no longer a nice thing to have – it’s a must have.
In this session, an online learning system showed how it uses Pardot to generate leads and nurture them until they are sales-ready before handing off the hot leads to the sales team. This sales and marketing ecosystem helps the teams work together to improve lead management and address top-of-funnel alignment issues. Automated lead nurture programs, intelligent sales dashboards, and AI-infused lead scoring and qualification enhances marketing strategy and makes every communication timely, relevant, and engaging.
A popular coffee brand also presented about how they are using Salesforce Marketing Cloud coupled with Sales Cloud, Lightning Voice and App Builder for lead generation, lead nurture, customer communication, and analytics. They described their crawl, walk, run approach, and the continuous testing that they did in every communication. The biggest take away for our Primacy team was how their marketing technology worked together to keep the customer at the center of every communication, and deliver relevant content at the right time in a way that was useful and beneficial to the customer.Primacy + Marketing Technology + AI As Primacy continues to be a leader, innovator, and forward thinker in technology and marketing, we rely on our team’s painstaking attention to detail in these emerging technology conferences. As we identify new strategies and client solutions, Artificial Intelligence and Marketing Technology remains at the top of our list.
In a most recent Forrester report¹, Joe Stanhope talks thoroughly about how AI will infuse itself into many, if not all, areas of marketing within the next 5 years.“AI provides the cognitive scale brands need to keep pace with escalating customer demands, the deluge of data and content, and almost limitless customer journey permutations. AI also aligns with B2C marketers' fundamental priorities to make customer engagement more timely, personalized, and results driven. AI will transform marketing over the next five years, leaving few facets of customer engagement untouched.” We continuously drive and push our clients to see what’s next and be thought leaders in their industries. In 2017 and beyond, our mission is to help clients evolve their CRM and marketing automation technology and integrate AI into the core of their business strategy.Primacy’s Marketing Automation/CRM Expertise
¹AI Must Learn The Basics Before It Can Transform Marketing”, Forrester Research, Inc., June 1, 2017