Connections is an annual conference hosted by Salesforce focused mostly around Salesforce Marketing Cloud. This conference was adopted from the ‘Exact Target’ days where this was their annual conference.
The first thing of note is that the ‘general floor’, where all the sponsor booths were, was labeled as ‘Campground’ and the decorations certainly lived up to this name. I must say that this was one of the most aesthetically pleasing conferences I have ever been to.
The Campground was well thought out and well set up, the only swing and a miss I saw was the theaters inside of the Campground. In theory, these seemed like a great idea, but were not that great in execution. There wasn’t much seating available and if you were standing, you could barely hear what was going on and miss most of the presentation. It could just be that I am getting old and attended too many rock concerts, but a small increase in the volume would have gone a long way for me.
I did really like the way they laid everything out. It was a very fun and organized atmosphere – allowing for a lot of personal space well also accommodating a significantly large volume of people.
Most of the content of the available sessions seemed aimed at beginner or mid-level users of SFMC. I know this is very likely to be the majority of the people attending, as not everyone is an expert in SFMC (otherwise I would be out of a job), but I feel like an opportunity was missed this year to show the Developers and veteran SFMC uses some love and provide a few more in-depth and/or technical sessions.
I spent most of the first day in an airplane, stuck in traffic or waiting for a taxi. After getting through that mess, I finally arrived. Once I got out of the taxi, I was very easily led through to the registration area. Now, I know I came a bit later then the mad rush at the beginning, but it took me a grand total of 3 minutes to register and get my lanyard and badge. Amazing! From there, it was easy to find the Campground and the sessions spaces.
The reception in the Campground was very well done with a buffet style set up with alcohol and sodas. I thoroughly enjoyed walking the floor and visiting every booth I could to learn and interact.
The next day, I started attending sessions, including sessions on Distributed Marketing, Einstein and Dropbox app. I mention these three, as they were the best of the sessions I attended.
Distributed Marketing session gave a good overview on what exactly Distributed Marketing was in SFMC, and the new updates and usage available for it.
The Einstein sessions were very well done. I thoroughly enjoyed the ability of the presenters to simplify answers for those less technical, but to also go deep dive into the technical with those, like myself, that try to get the ‘how’ and ‘why’ for everything.
I thoroughly enjoyed the Dropbox session. It was a great example of how you can leverage Dropbox as a sort of ‘external CMS’ while everything still remains inside of Content Builder. The speed and accuracy of the changes made in Dropbox and when they are reflected in SFMC were amazing. It certainly got the juices running on possibilities and usages.
At the DEG booth, Adam Spriggs and I had our ‘Ask an MVP’ session where Eliot Harper jumped in as well allowing our attendees to actually have 3 MVP’s brains to pick. It was a pleasure and definitely something I would love to do again.
I was able to see the Keynote where Customer360 was introduced. I think this is a really cool tool and is a great combination of data gathering, normalization and analysis on top of a fairly verbose AI – allowing for great learnings and optimization all inside a single spot.
I do worry that they are now competing against themselves with their recent acquisitions though. I feel like Datarama and Tableau both are very similar tools and are already on the market and adopted by many companies and now are forced to compete with a brand new Salesforce made tool.
On the final day, I spent this time mostly wandering around and talking with all the people I could about what they learned, what they wished they learned, etc. I unfortunately had to cut my stay a bit early and leave midday for my plane, but I left feeling very happy and fortunate to have gone.
Overall I would say this conference was a success and was very well done. There was a ton of other things that were going on there, I feel like I could literally write up a book just on my experiences there, but wanted to keep this focused and relevant. I think that my only feedback would be to have more in-depth sessions or something where its ‘Ask a Product Director’ or ‘Technical Architect’ etc. To let us developers or more technical people our chance to glean some cool new tricks or methods or even just learn the future of programmable languages or data storage, etc.