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February 2, 2018

Our 7 Salesforce Predictions for 2018

EMPAUA Salesforce Partner

Named by Forbes as the World's Most Innovative Company in 2017, Salesforce is a force to be reckoned with. The company continues to aim high, setting their growth goals at $20 billion by FY2022 up from current revenue of $10 billion. Needless to say, the #1 CRM in the world, is steadily marching upwards, faster than any other software company.As thrilling as it is, there are many rumours and predictions that are floating amongst the Salesforce Ohana on all that could happen in 2018. And with little or no doubt, one can vouch that Salesforce will definitely bring some disruptive changes to the software industry this year.Giving a voice to some of these rumours, here are some of the most interesting Salesforce predictions for 2018.

Salesforce will become even more customisable

Salesforce is already renowned as a CRM platform that is highly configurable and customisable to meet individual and organisational needs. At Dreamforce 2017, Salesforce announced five new features announced for their existing products, namely mySalesforce, myLightning, myEinstein, myIoT and myTrailhead, Salesforce users will be given even more freedom to tailor orgs to specific customer needs.

Time is nigh for Salesforce Lightning

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Source: janbask.com[/caption]Since 2015, Salesforce has set a new standard for customer success and CRM with the Lightning experience. The Lightning Experience (a.k.a LEX) is the intuitive and intelligent interface of Salesforce that helps Sales and Service teams collaborate on their work more efficiently. Popular amongst the early adopters, and pushed actively for the new Salesforce users, LEX is sure to gain a lot more traction in 2018. With the announcement of myLightning, which is expected to released by Spring 2018, companies will also be able to make their brand theme and colors reflect throughout their Salesforce experience. This will likely slingshot LEX into the forefront, accelerating the migration from Classic.

Salesforce Einstein + IBM Watson will help you mine greater insights

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Source: ibm.com/watson[/caption]2017 was the year when the world saw a glimpse of AI in full scale in enterprises. This was mainly centered around the landmark partnership of Salesforce and IBM. The popular predictions for this year are that the joined forces would see Einstein augmenting the technology across Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Support, BI, and Learning with Watson's tremendous collection of structured and unstructured data to realize customer-centric data. We’re excited to see how this turns out.

Trailhead will get bigger and smarter

[caption id="attachment_439" align="aligncenter" width="941"]

Source: trailhead.salesforce.com[/caption]Trailhead is the favourite Salesforce playground for trailblazers to learn while having fun. The testimony to this gamified learning experience of Salesforce would be the 4+ million badges that were earned and 15+ million challenges that were completed on it so far by the SFDC community.2018 is expected to see a lot more from Trailhead, with many hands-on badges, challenges, trail and trail-mixes for the latest technology, especially for Salesforce Einstein Prediction Builder, Einstein Bots, SalesforceDX, etc. myTrailhead would be the most interesting thing this year, with the power of Trailhead unleashed for all the customers and partners of Salesforce. myTrailhead would reportedly consist of:

  • Trail Maker - the guided setup tool
  • Trail Mixer - a consolidated collection of custom learning paths
  • Trail Tracker - an app for managers to track and assign learning &
  • Trail Checker - an interactive challenge designer to create stand-and-deliver assessments, quizzes, and hands-on challenges

myTrailhead is expected to be in pilot for the first half of 2018, with general availability later in the year.

Salesforce will venture deeper into new verticals

From public sector to the newly spawned financial services cloud, Salesforce is used in just about every vertical there is. Although, currently their major revenue comes from 4 categories, namely Sales Cloud (14%), Service Cloud (21%), Platform and Other (32%), and Marketing Cloud (32%), Salesforce is expected to venture into and capitalise more categories this year.With the targeted acquisitions of companies, Salesforce has already expanded their services with the likes of CPQ, Field Service, Pardot, Communities, Analytics, Financial Services Cloud, Health Cloud, LiveMessage, DMP, and Shield. 2018 will foresee a lot more acquisitions to strengthen their positioning in public-sector market, financial services, retail, healthcare, and others.

Better sales insights with Google's cloud infrastructure

Last year's announcement of Google joining hands with Salesforce was one of cloud computing’s highest-profile alliances yet. The strategic partnership will give Salesforce a leeway to use Google’s cloud infrastructure for expansion of its core services. The integration of Google Analytics 360 is expected to be the highlight of 2018, wherein the platform will help Salesforce's customers to connect the insights in their CRM with the rich data in analytics. This could be followed by Salesforce Lightning for Gmail and Google Sheets, Quip Live Apps for Google Drive and Google Calendar. Apart from the app integration, Salesforce may also provide connectors to Google BigQuery, Google’s data warehouse service, where users can combine their data with other enterprise datasets.

More jobs in the Salesforce Ecosystem

Salesforce with its 150,000+ customers has already created an ecosystem that spawns new jobs every day. By 2022, this ecosystem is expected to drive nearly 3.3 million jobs, creating employment opportunities within Salesforce and in the companies that depend on the CRM.The ecosystem, which is currently four times bigger than Salesforce itself, is expected to become five times as bigger by 2022. The Salesforce economy's largest impacts on industries are expected to be in finance,with a forecast creation of 585,000 new jobs and $164 billion in new business revenue and in manufacturing with 638,000 in new jobs and $159 billion in new business revenue.If you have invested in cloud technology to reap the benefits of becoming more agile, lowering capital expense and minimising operational issues, but are not quite experiencing the ROI that you wish to see, get in touch with a Salesforce Consultant at EMPAUA todayAbout the Author: Gokul is the Product Adoption Expert and Marketer at Whatfix. Working actively with the Salesforce Community in 3+ years. He loves writing for the SFDC community and actively participating in discussion on Twitter. You can find the articles he's written here and reach him on @I_mgokul

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