When Ebury attended the Salesforce World Tour in 2015 it was a chance to meet potential vendors in the Salesforce space, such as CloudApps, and catch up with existing partners, like Birst and New Voice Media.

We watched a couple of customer breakout sessions and said we should get involved.

This year, we did.

We were invited to participate in three sessions at Salesforce World Tour London 2016…

Our UK Head of Sales, Thomas Davies, kicked off the day by speaking about his career journey to sales leadership. The panel session featured senior sales professionals from National Instruments, Rentokill and Salesforce themselves.

In the AppExchange session our CTO, Toby Young, spoke about his favourite three apps from our sales stack – New Voice Media, Avoka and CloudApps SuMo.

Finally, I spoke at the New Voice Media session, alongside Vax, where we discussed the impact of Contact World on sales and service teams, how we selected New Voice Media and the elements of our sales and service technology stacks.

All three sessions were opportunities to talk about who we are, our technology and how we enable businesses to trade internationally.

A few key things really stood out from the day:

Marketing Cloud is everywhere

There was a lot of Marketing Cloud this year. It got mentioned in most of the big customer stories and there was a good session on how Salesforce use the platform. Additionally Pardot was given a dedicated session on B2B.

It got us thinking about our marketing technology, some gaps we currently have, like send time optimisation, and the importance of the platform’s integration with Salesforce.

Keynote gets political

UK Government Minister Ed Vaizey pitched up in the keynote address. Hot on the heels of the Queen’s Speech, where access to broadband was reclassified as a human right, the Minister talked about the UK digital economy, digital apprenticeships and London Tech City (otherwise known as the Old Street roundabout).

He then moved onto blockchain, used the terms “disruption”, “unicorns” and “medtech” and finally gave a nod to Salesforce by mentioning them in the context of the Digital Marketplace (a UK government dating site where public sector organisations can hookup with tech suppliers).

No wave

Last year’s keynote item was Salesforce’s move into Business Intelligence with Wave Analytics. We had a look last year and saw it lacked cohort analysis. Despite Wave’s impressive growth figures shown yesterday, we don’t see it featuring this analysis quite yet. At Ebury, we need to track both account revenue and objects in our pipeline over time, so we’re happy with our decision to go use Birst instead.

That’s it from our time at the Salesforce World Tour London 2016!

Thanks to everyone who came along to our panel sessions!

If you missed the event, you can always connect with me on the details above.