by Linda Forsstrom Torres 
Read what we at Nebula thought about Salesforce World Tour London and what our key takeaways were!
Trailblazing!
James Campbell, Director:
“It is no secret that there are currently not enough skilled admins, consultants and developers to keep up with salesforce.com‘s growth. Therefore unsurprisingly, the ‘We are all trailblazers’ keynote had a huge focus on how to become an expert in the platform and drive improvements in your business using technology as the enabler.
Trailhead has been developed as an online learning tool which makes learning Salesforce fun and easy so I really encourage you to go out there and blaze some trails! If you still need convincing, an Indeed survey found that both Salesforce Administrator and Salesforce Developer were ranked in the Top 10 best jobs in 2017.”
From a marketing point of view
Linda Forsstrom Torres, Digital Marketing Executive:
“This was my first Salesforce World Tour event and I wasn’t sure what to expect. One thing that I am sure of is that Salesforce have really found a great way for us users to learn more about the platforms that we are using. Salesforce also showed me what other opportunities we can add to fully utilise our Salesforce tools. I found this event especially useful working marketing because of the broad knowledge sharing from company success stories through their marketing strategies. I learned from success stories with B2C marketing and how these can be used with B2B marketing. The sessions also gave me ideas from Marketing Cloud strategies that can be used for Pardot strategies. This event is truly for any marketing users that works with any of the Salesforce tools.”
Time for networking
Doug Gardner, Salesforce Consultant:
“With the World Tour this year concentrating so much on Blazing Trails and education, I decided to spend a lot of time speaking with the people on the stands. This gave me the chance to get to know products (both Clouds and Apps) that I didn’t know so well. It also refreshed my knowledge of products I’m more familiar with. One thing that really stood out in speaking with those on the varied stands was quite how many people build products to fulfil the same goal. Products such as CTI or Sales person analysis. This not only provides further evidence of the stableness of Salesforce’s business model but also means that having the opportunity to speak to so many partners in one place was invaluable.”
It’s still all about the customer
Nicola Eagling, Pardot Consultant:
“Having attended the last few World Tours now, there is always a consistent theme about putting the customer first and how the Salesforce platform helps you to do just that. I thought this year evolved that idea even more by focusing on how the different Salesforce products can be used together to ensure we no longer work in silos across marketing, sales and service. Altogether giving the customer a cohesive and personalised experience. Hearing about how other companies are tackling GDPR was also interesting. We can with certainty say that it’s not the last we’ve heard of these regulations!”
Einstein is coming!
Simon Molloy, Senior Developer:
“It was another very busy year at the London ExCeL centre for the 2018 World Tour. Not only is it an excellent chance to catch up with old peers & colleagues, the future-looking presentations and keynote speech make it very worthwhile. I was particularly interested in the Einstein technology that has made progress since the 2017 World Tour. A progress that will really enhance Salesforce users ability to service their customers. Both at a higher level of predictability and with time saving.”
Mulesoft stole the show
Paul Kissick, Senior Developer:
“Every year, the Salesforce World Tour keeps getting bigger. Partly from the increase in customers and developers, and partly from the acquisitions and new products Salesforce introduces. This year it was the Integration Cloud (Mulesoft) which was star of the show. More and more customers are looking to connect internal systems with Salesforce, and this was the perfect product to help with that. As more products and services are made available education is a top priority for Salesforce, with the key message being to get on Trailhead and create more Trailblazers.
Products showcased for developers included Einstein Vision with the Image Classification and Object Detection features. This is making it even easier for customers to automate processes which were previously very manual, and Einstein Language with Intent and Sentiment services to help analyse text, either from online Chat bots or inbound emails. Heroku was also very prominent. With highlighting that existing apps can be migrated to Heroku’s hosted platform, and connect natively with Salesforce much more easily than before.”
Training with myTrailhead
Andy Murdoch, Salesforce Consultant:
“I’ve been to several of the annual Salesforce World Tour events, each bigger than the last. With the continual growth and development of the Salesforce platform, new features and functionality are added constantly. The World Tour is the perfect place to keep up to date with the ecosystem.
The previously announced feature myTrailhead was demoed this year, fitting perfectly with the ‘We are all trailblazers’ headline. With myTrailhead, Salesforce is extending the established Salesforce specific training platform, Trailhead. This enable companies to customise the internal learning environment with their own content and branding. From custom onboarding trails to company-specific enablement skills, any topic can be covered. Due to the ease of use and approachability, I can see a future where all Salesforce customers utilise this functionality for all of their internal training processes.”