“The Greatest Show on Earth®”. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey ® own that trademark, but I must say that while at Salesforce’s Cloudforce meeting, held last week in San Francisco at the Mascone Center,  I felt like a kid at the circus. It was one of the most entertaining conferences I have been to, in both scope and presentation. The reason – illumination. Prior to the conference, I had dinner with a Salesforce employee that spoke of “drinking the corporate cool-aid”. Having never been to a Salesforce event, I did not understand the magnitude of the Salesforce aura. Yet, as I was on the plane back to Denver the next night, I sat there with my mind firing on all the new exciting ideas and innovative concepts I had been exposed to. Cool. Listening to Marc Benioff discuss the vision of Salesforce and his concept of social enterprise was enlightening.  The opening presentation highlighted testimonials from NBC Universal, Burberry, LivingSocial, Kimberly Clark, and Toyota. Each one illuminated how people could collaborate to accomplish amazing results. The evoloution of the ability to centralize and normalize data was presented in a truly engaging manner. Benioff highlighted the concept of social divide, and his commentary was backed by testimonials that explored this subject. The divide exists between companies, which have traditionally disseminated static information, and social media use by employees and customers alike that supply instant information and feedback. I walked away with some amazing new statistics courtesy of the presentation.

•  45 billion transactions for its customers in 2011 (Salesforce)
•  1% of Salesforce’s equity, profit, and time into 5013c 14,000 non-profits supported, $30million in grants (Salesforce)
•  8 hours a month on social media & 1.9 billion social users surpassing email (Salesforce)
•  Facebook 123% growth in corporate homepage vs declining website growth (Salesforce)
•  World wide expansion of mobile devices to 1.8 billion devices by 2014 (Salesforce)
•  In 2014 1.8 billion network computers and 3.5 networked products such as coca-cola machines – 5.3 billion total (IDC)

So what were my big take-aways from the Salesforce conference?

•  The way that the folks at Salesforce are thinking about capturing, collaborating, pro-actively driving and analyzing data is way ahead of the curve.
•  The social experience, as defined by Salesforce, is raising the bar for CRMs to a point where Salesforce is now considered a core infrastructure instead of an independent CRM application.
•  I question whether a middle ground exists with Salesforce – to maximize the salesforce effectiveness, customers need to be all in, or all out.
•  The Salesforce model, as currently designed, supports basic needs of the investment professional and the home office. The platform is limited when it comes to books and records demands and its related compliance requirements, thereby restricting its overall adoption for broker-dealers that support 1099 investment professionals.
• Existing application and business model integration within the AppExchange is geared toward investment professionals rather than to broker-dealers.

In our recent survey roughly 20% of the broker-dealer respondents chose Salesforce as their partner. That is a sizable number, but RedTail leads the CRM pack at over 35%. My thinking is that if Salesforce can get their arms around the books and records needs of broker-dealers they would have the possibility of increasing their market presence percentage, both at the broker-dealer and the investment professional level. For firms in the broker-dealer and investment professional CRM category, Salesforce is an open book from which to explore the CRM of tomorrow. Look at them – the rest of the world is.

After an hour of watching the opening keynote, I realized that the one key challenge for companies, including broker-dealers and investment professionals, is: “Based on corresponding needs and budgets, which ideas and innovations are realistic and achievable for the financial services firms?” Form your own opinion – I have attached the link to the video of the keynote below.

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