Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO made a wide-ranging keynote address at Salesforce’s Dreamforce event in San Francisco. His address highlighted a number of societal issues and crises that everyone, including businesses must rise to meet the challenge.
Benioff noted that the world continues to face a Coronavirus pandemic and a sustainability crisis. In addition, businesses are also facing a workforce crisis with fewer employees returning to the office. Employees are also relocating and wanting to work differently and remotely. Benioff also noted how Salesforce responded to the Coronavirus pandemic to support the global response effort.
Benioff discussed how society is facing an inequality crisis. Every race, gender or sexual orientation has had a different experience during these crises. “Women are 1.8 times more vulnerable to lose their jobs in the pandemic. When you add all those things up, looking at the inequality crisis, then we know there’s a fundamental trust crisis.”
Creating more trust
Benioff unveiled Salesforce’s playbook for the new Trusted Enterprise and discussed how to create more trust. He explained that Salesforce had the experience to support businesses to become customer first. “Because becoming more customer first is definitely one of the paths to get through this crisis.”
Benioff discussed Salesforce’s long-established core values of trust and customer success, innovation and equality. And asked, “How do we seed and amplify our core values, and also look for gaps where they’re not happening.” He then went on to unveil Salesforce’s playbook for the Trusted Enterprise
- Trust
- Customer first
- Digital HQ
- Health and Safety
- Sustainability
Digital HQ
Bret Taylor, President and Chief Operating Officer of Salesforce, also joined Benioff on the podium. “Our mindset about work has shifted from a place you go, to something you do. Every company needs a digital HQ to connect its employees, customers, and partners, and thrive in a work-from-anywhere world. Organisations around the world build their digital HQs on Salesforce and Slack so they can work better and grow faster.”
Following the August launch of new Slack integrations across Sales, Service, Marketing, and Analytics (Tableau). The company has launched integrations across the majority of its products, including commerce, experience platform, Trailhead, MuleSoft and Quip.
Benioff emphasised that Salesforce is not just a business. With 9.3m global jobs in total and a global economic impact of $1.6tn – “It’s an economy of trust.”
Enterprise Times: What this means for business?
Marc Benioff firmly put Salesforce’s Trailblazer community centrefold at Salesforce’s Dreamforce keynote address. Trailblazer is Salesforce’s enthusiastic network, eco-system of 1,300 community groups, spread across 90 countries with 15 million members. Members meet and collaborate with millions of other trailblazers, based on location, role and areas of interest. Throughout his speech, Benioff rightly paid homage to the trailblazers, “The pioneers, inspiring their communities, ceding trust with each other. They are the conduit of trust between Salesforce and customers. They are trailblazers – there’s no question about it.’
The other interesting point in the keynote address was the digital HQ concept. For businesses considering developing a digital HQ, means thinking carefully about the digital infrastructure that connects everyone in the business. Providing them with the tools to help them find new ways to innovate, collaborate and stay connected. This explains why Salesforce’s purchase of Slack is so important to the company. It becomes a business single system of engagement that connects employees, partners, all applications in a single platform. No matter where an individual is working. Slack has the potential to become the glue that holds together all the disparate elements that is evolving in Salesforce. In addition to becoming the main conduit of trust between Trailblazers and Salesforce itself.
