Dreamforce 2013: Technology conference meets music festival

What do you get when you combine a business software conference with a music festival? The answer, if you are Salesforce.com, is Dreamforce, a four-day mega-event that took place earlier this week in downtown San Francisco.

Over 140,000 people registered to attend Dreamforce, a sprawling city-within-a-city that featured high-profile keynote speakers, celebrities, multiple rock bands and a cult-like following of all things enterprise business technology.

Marc Benioff, the gregarious showman and Salesforce chief executive, fired up the crowd as he delivered a 2½-hour speech about what was new in business software, cloud computing and the evolution of technology.

His key message, and the big news to come out of the conference, was the launch of Salesforce1 — an innovative new mobile platform designed to connect customers and businesses to sales, service and marketing.

“There are 50 billion things connected on the Internet,” said Benioff, an original promoter of cloud technology. “And behind each of those connections is a customer.”

For those not familiar with Salesforce, it is an enterprise CRM system that has been extended to include capabilities to automate service, marketing, call centers, social media monitoring, business intelligence and more. What started out as a sales-automation built on cloud technology has rapidly expanded over the last decade to become the de facto operating system for the enterprise.

Due to its rise as an industry standard for business technology and rapid growth, an entire consulting and “white label” industry has been created to develop applications to supplement Salesforce with new capabilities and customize it for specific industries. Similar to how Apple has created the App Store, full of hundreds of thousands of apps to run on the iPhone, Salesforce has created the App Exchange of many third-party applications.

While Salesforce has gained traction in many Fortune 1000 companies, it has yet to crack the code in the wealth management space. Due to the fragmentation of the advisor industry and the many nuances involved in how advisers work with their clients, Salesforce has not penetrated our industry in any meaningful way.

Current “purpose-built” CRM and office automation platforms such as Junxure and Redtail continue to be the ‘go to’ technology solutions due to their customized features and wealth management roots. That momentum should continue with the upcoming release of Junxure Cloud and planned enhancements to Redtail.

Salesforce’s back-seat strategy in wealth management, however, soon may change. This was evidenced by the “industry days” of content that were on the agenda to showcase how Salesforce is evolving to create industry-specific solutions. In the financial services track, there were several sessions on the evolution of the adviser desktop and customer stories on how advisers had revolutionized their businesses through Salesforce.

Prior to this new vertical focus, Salesforce relied on third parties to market their platform. Most notably were the high-profile announcements by the custodians (The Charles Schwab Corp., TD Ameritrade Inc., Pershing and Fidelity Investments) several years ago of their ambitions to integrate their core brokerage systems on top of the Salesforce platform to drive efficiencies.

While bold in scope, the past several years have shown little momentum by the custodian offerings, with the noted exception of TD Ameritrade Institutional.
TDA now has over 1,100 users of their custom Salesforce VEO integration and was the only custodian visible at Dreamforce. In years past, Schwab and the other big players were prominently featured, but not so much this year.

Andy Wang, senior manager for technology product management at TDA and the business lead for the Salesforce relationship, said: “TDA’s focus on a comprehensive rollout that included work flow tools, advanced features, training and direct support was key in driving adoption. “

From an adviser point of view, the impact that Salesforce and cloud technology is having on productivity and ways to run a better business was visibly illustrated by Mark Clark, vice president of Nepsis Capital Management Inc., a $380 million advisory firm.

In his general session, Clark describes how his firm was in search of a cloud solution so that they wouldn’t have to manage hardware and infrastructure. Due to Nepsis’ unique business model of being a third-party money manager and the success of its investment strategy, they were also bringing on advisers as independent adviser reps.

Because of the many complexities involved, Nepsis needed an integrated solution that brought a seamless interface from “the sales side to the back office and all the way through compliance,” Clark said “With the Salesforce-TDA technology integration and associated workflow automation, we were able to double our assets under management in 18 months, without bringing on any additional staff.”
Timothy D. Welsh is president and founder of Nexus Strategy, a leading consulting firm to the wealth management industry, and can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @NexusStrategy.