The Best Connections. Ever.

Connections started out as an ExactTarget user conference in 2007 and ran for eight consecutive years in Indianapolis, growing to become one of the largest digital marketing conferences in the world. The event was moved to New York in 2015, then Atlanta the following year. Salesforce announced that Connections 2017 would be held in Chicago, but they cancelled the event a few months out, prompting me to write an open letter to the SVP of Salesforce Strategic Events.

But just when we all feared that Connections had been wheeled off to the conference retirement home, Salesforce unexpectedly announced that the event would go ahead in Chicago in June this year.

While I was grateful that Connections was back on the Salesforce events calendar, I was also somewhat apprehensive. It has been an unsettled event in recent years, shuffled from city to city, only to be cancelled the last time. I was concerned that Connections might have lost its momentum and magic. But I was wrong.

Another Salesforce Event

Salesforce know how to run an event. In fact, you would be forgiven for thinking that Salesforce is actually an events business, off the back of which they sell a customer success platform.

Connections 2018 bore all the hallmarks of a Salesforce event. Its corridors had a Trailhead Outdoors theme, with props ranging from canoes to trees, and were lined with mounted cut-outs of Salesforce’s refreshingly uncorporate mascots. The keynote presentations were slick and the demos were predictably flawless.

Not Just Marketing Cloud

It’s important to recognize that, unlike in previous years, Connections 2018 wasn’t solely a Marketing Cloud event. Rather, it was a B2C event, where DMP, Commerce Cloud and other Salesforce platforms were also represented. The expo hall also was filled with kiosks featuring other Salesforce clouds, products and Partner solutions, so you could go on an all-out demo binge.

Not an Announcement Conference

Any Connections alumni will tell you that the capstone of the event is product announcements. I believe that in bygone years, ExactTarget felt they had an obligation to make new announcements at Connections. I’ve often treated these announcements with a degree of skepticism, as several have either proved to be premature or haven’t made it to GA (General Availability). You really need to pay close attention to those forward-looking statements.

The Marketing Cloud announcements at Connections 2018 were very much anticipated and included:

• Google Analytics 360 integration, announced at Dreamforce last year. This integration enables GA360 insights to be previewed within Marketing Cloud, and audiences can be targeted within a journey.
• Interaction Studio, originally announced at Dreamforce last year as a partnership with Thunderhead. This new offering integrates with all customer touchpoints, including call centers, in-store point-of-sale and other offline channels. A decisioning engine enables marketers to serve the ‘next best action’ across any channel, including corporate websites.
• Einstein Segmentation, released in April this year. This leverages machine learning and pattern analysis in DMP to enable predictive decision splits in Journey Builder, based on a customer’s predicted behavior or persona.

But at its core, Connections 2018 wasn’t about new announcements, or the lack of them. There was a new side to Connections, one that I hadn’t seen before.

Announcing the Unannounced

There was an unusual emphasis on upcoming features across several roadmap sessions. These weren’t product announcements but rather provided insights into new features that we can expect to see in future releases.

Intelligent marketing was a core theme, with upcoming Einstein features to include:

• Live Weather Block for Content Builder, which enables relevant content-based weather conditions at the location where the email is opened
• Campaign Insights that provide recommendations to improve message engagement; for example, surfacing insights like top-performing subject lines
• Send Frequency Analysis that identifies the optimal engagement rate by Subscriber, maximizing engagement and reducing attrition
• Frequency Analysis that identifies ‘Oversaturated Subscribers’ and ‘Undersaturated Subscribers’ and creates Data Extensions of these audiences with a single click
• Author Resonance for Social Studio, to identify influential content and individuals within communities
• Custom Workflow Classifiers for Social Studio, to enrich incoming posts with intelligent classification, like priority, related topic and automatic routing to improve response times.

Einstein aside, we can also expect to see major enhancements to Marketing Cloud Administration. Salesforce acknowledge that account configuration during the onboarding process is a daunting task for many customers, and a process that is over-reliant on Salesforce Partners. At Connections, Salesforce demonstrated new self-service interfaces that make the platform onboarding process a breeze.

But perhaps the most alluring agenda items for me were a series of UX (user experience) feedback sessions, where Salesforce solicited customer feedback by sharing their product direction for Marketing Cloud Administration and Journey Builder.

Salesforce revealed prototype interfaces and then asked questions of their customers, and I really felt they took the feedback onboard. While these features were clearly work-in-progress, I left these sessions feeling assured that Salesforce are listening to their customers, and most importantly of all, that they have a vision for product development and are clearly heading down the right path.

In one UX session I attended, Salesforce previewed Einstein Activities for Journey Builder that are under development. Designing an optimized customer journey is a highly subjective process, as every marketer will have a different opinion of what a journey should look like. But through leveraging big data and machine learning, Einstein is helping to take the guesswork out of this process, resulting in higher customer engagement and conversion.

Salesforce also shared usability improvements to the Journey Builder interface involving the ability to collapse branches, making the canvas easier to navigate. These features are also still under development and very much unannounced, so it was unusual for Salesforce to openly disclose them and to solicit customer feedback outside of an NDA context.

I also participated in a hands-on developer workshop where Salesforce staff sat alongside developers and walked them through the process of building custom blocks for Content Builder using the Custom Block SDK. I was able to get valuable one-on-one advice for a content block I’m working on, and to learn the process for publishing my block in the AppExchange marketplace.

Unsung Heroes

While Salesforce appear to effortlessly pull off mammoth events like Connections, organizing them is actually a hard gig. After months of preparation, the Salesforce events team is always the first one in and the last one out of the venue. And it’s a massive task for product teams to orchestrate keynote scripts, sessions and a whole lot more—all on top of their day job.

Salesforce don’t always get it completely right. Connections had some minor bumps along the way. For example, I organized a series of technical, developer-oriented sessions for the first morning of the event. I was concerned that session titles like Email Content Architecture Strategies and REST API Integration in Automation Studio Using Script Activities sounded way too boring, but they didn’t deter people. On the contrary, we had standing room only in the designated space and a long line of about 600 delegates snaking down the corridor. I had no clue about what to do. Fortunately, while they were a little caught out, Salesforce are always ready for the unexpected, and Liz Farrelly marshalled the sea of delegates like a highly trained traffic cop. It may have been a frustrating start to Connections for those who were turned away, but Salesforce will be better prepared for it next year.

Great Connections

While Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the leading digital marketing platform today, there’s still work to do. Salesforce themselves acknowledge that Marketing Cloud isn’t quite perfect. When you’re the market leader, it’s easy to be arrogant, but across all my interactions with Salesforce staff at Connections, that’s not the signal I got. They were genuinely listening to their customers and showed sincere humility. They truly connected with their customers, which after all is what this event is really all about.

While attending Connections 2018, it was clear to me that Salesforce have a far-reaching vision for Marketing Cloud, and while there’s still much to be done, there are exciting times ahead. I left the event revitalized, although exhausted after an intense three days. This goes down in my book as the best Connections I’ve ever attended. And I, for one, can’t wait until the next one.