Dreamforce 21 Takeaways

In our pursuit to build the best possible customer quoting and onboarding tools, Dreamforce conferences receive our full focus to calibrate our product strategy with emerging platform features.

This year’s virtual 2021 Dreamforce delivered some key points that we think are relevant to the future of your Sales organization and the use of Salesforce moving forward.

Some key takeaways (continued below)

Visual Flow Is the Future
If your org is invested in classic workflow rules or process builder flows, then take note. Salesforce is deprecating these tools in favor of visual flows, which have now reached feature parity with legacy workflow solutions and many Apex trigger coding use cases.

Salesforce flows are the future of Sales Orchestration, and not just in the technical sense. Future Salesforce Job Descriptions will be defined, personnel trained, and partners aligned around this common workflow platform.

But not to worry. Salesforce announced a gradual transition to flows and a commitment to auto-conversion tools to help Admins make the transition. Similar to S-Controls, legacy workflow processes will continue to work. But new process builder flows may not be supported at some point in 2022 or 2023.

Learn more about iDialogue Flows and Actions.

Event Driven Programming
Parker Harris referred to event-driven programming as the ”future of development“. Events, such as opening quote room links, viewing quotes, eSigning documents, submitting payment methods can be published in real-time into Slack channels, or emails sent to record owners.

Learn more about iDialogue platform events

iDialogue now includes a pre-built Room Events flow template for handling all room events. Review the latest release notes here.

​Slack Integration
We tend to think of Slack as the human-side of event driven programming. With all the data flowing in today’s Internet-powered economy, it can be difficult to distinguish the signal from the noise. Subscribing to Slack channels with intelligent bots gives humans selective control over which events to monitor, and potentially engage with customers with via Slack actions.

Given that Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack closed just weeks prior to Dreamforce, there was a surge of unreleased demos and sessions that demonstrated Salesforce’s commitment to Slack.

Our Slack connector dates back to 2019, when we needed to fill a void in our product to publish room events to an internal audience. Now with the acquisition of Slack formalized, our integration is no longer an “add-on”, but now a primary delivery channel for all quote room events.

Learn more about the iDialogue Slack connector.

Sales Enablement
Salesforce is bringing Trailhead videos and training materials directly into Salesforce to assist with onboarding new Sales reps. This is very much aligned with iDialogue’s goal of measurably enabling Sales Reps with dynamic content, guided product configuration flows, and auto-generated rooms.

Q4 2021 is when many of these new iDialogue SE features are rolling out, and our product demos will soon reflect some of the merged SE functionality in Sales Cloud.

See iDialogue feature roadmap and releases.