Missed Salesforce Live’s Keynote? Catch Up Here.

Salesforce Live UK and Ireland was a fully packed-out success at ExCeL London in November 2022. Attendees enjoyed a performance from the marvellous National Youth Jazz Orchestra, inspiring talks from industry leaders, and networking opportunities with over 2500 attendees. And, of course, our keynote — a highlight of the event. If you're feeling like you missed out, don't worry — we've rounded up some of the most memorable moments from Director of Messaging and Engagement at Salesforce UK&I, Ruqaiyah Jaffery’s, inspiring speech so you can catch up.

For instance, did you know that the Salesforce Customer 360 is helping 98% of our customers meet or exceed their return on investment (ROI) goals? Well, you do now. You can read about a select few of the other fascinating findings discussed below and learn how Salesforce can help you reduce costs, increase productivity, and continually add value. Sound good? Look out for next year’s event schedule on our website — we’d love you to join us in person.

It’s a new day for us all

A key theme at Salesforce Live was that it’s a new day for businesses.

We’re seeing macroeconomic headwinds across the UK & Ireland. Ruqaiyah shared that more customers are coming to Salesforce needing to lower costs and drive efficiencies — all while dealing with changing customer expectations. 

All of this change means it’s a new day for Salesforce too. Our customers are calling for us to be more than just a business. They want — and need — us to be leaders, innovators, change-makers, and much more. This market shift is a challenge, but Salesforce is here to meet these new needs and help its users better serve their own customers too.

Increasing customer success and efficiencies

Another focus of the opening keynote was that Salesforce is only ever as successful as its customers. Ensuring customer success is one of our core values, alongside trust, innovation, equality, and sustainability. And it’s these values that have helped us to become the #1 CRM for the ninth consecutive year. 

An ever-growing number of businesses are using Salesforce to help them increase value and drive cost efficiency. And they’re seeing success too. But don’t just take our word for it — we’ll let the numbers do the talking.

As Ruqaiyah highlighted, the Salesforce Platform reduces IT costs by 25% on average, while Service Cloud sees support costs drop by 27%. 

Salesforce helps businesses bring in more money, as well as save. Sales Cloud, for example, is leading to a 29% increase in revenue. 

Real customers are seeing measurable results, and we heard success stories throughout the day. Take a look at the utility company Veolia, for example. They have seen a 15-day reduction in time taken from the first contact to order. Broadband provider, Jurassic Fibre, has also seen success by automating 80% of its sales processes — freeing up its team from time-consuming manual tasks. 

Could you be next to transform your business with Salesforce? Head over to Salesforce+ and learn more about how we can help you meet your goals.

Doing well and doing good

During Salesforce Live, we also took the time to celebrate Salesforce’s wider impact outside of our business results. We believe in doing good and are proud to share that we’re now recognised as leaders in philanthropy, innovation, and culture. 

We were joined at Salesforce Live by the National Youth Jazz Orchestra. This organisation gives gifted young musicians the opportunity to start their musical careers and introduces jazz to a new audience. We were delighted to award them a grant of £10,000 to help them reach more young people. Its alumni include the iconic Amy Winehouse and Strictly Come Dancing’s musical maestro Dave Arch, so we hope to support more stars of the future. 

This was just one of many grants given by Salesforce. We also celebrated giving over £1.1 million in grants throughout 2022. This included £600K going to Absolute Return on Kids and a further £520K for the Big Education Trust — two charities that do so much to give disadvantaged young people the chance to learn work and life skills.

30% of UK workers feel their job doesn’t provide opportunities for digital up-skilling, and more than 25% don’t feel confident in any digital skills. With digital becoming increasingly important, these statistics need to change. As a large organisation, we feel a responsibility to help train the nation and highlight the opportunities tech careers can offer. By investing in young people’s skills, we are helping to close the digital skills gap and support the businesses of the future — not just today.

How Customer 360 is innovating

Of course, it wouldn’t be Salesforce Live without an update on the latest Salesforce solutions.

Salesforce technology has continually evolved to suit economic changes and market needs. We’ve been innovating for 24 years, and resilience is now more important than ever.

Ruqaiyah discussed how technology is moving in real-time and what this means for Salesforce and our customers.

We have more devices and more data than ever before. As a result, customer expectations and how our customers do business are changing.

Customers now expect you to meet them wherever they are, giving them what they need when they need it. And the ‘when’ is usually ‘now’. It’s a real-time world and companies need something that enables them to operate this way. But many are struggling because they’re disconnected from their customers.

The average company has nearly 1,000 different applications. This leads to multiple, disconnected views of the same customer which then leads to poor experiences. The result? 56% of customers say companies treat them as a number.

Salesforce Customer 360 can help businesses treat their customers as the unique individuals that they are. Customer 360 is our complete portfolio of products and services designed to help companies better connect people and data. It helps businesses reduce costs, increase efficiencies, and automate time-consuming processes. 

This is all made possible by Einstein, our native AI, which uses predictive insights to help businesses be as relevant as possible. We’re currently delivering 175 billion predictions a day. 

Plus, Salesforce Flow automates complex business processes through clicks, not code — resulting in our customers saving more than 109 billion admin hours. 

Salesforce helps customers do more with less. We work with a vast array of businesses, including Formula 1. At Salesforce Live, Paul O’Sullivan (our SVP of Solutions Engineering) and Zarah Al-Kudcy (Head of Commercial Partnerships at Formula 1) talked us through how the global motoring phenomenon has used Customer 360 to serve its 500 million global fans more effectively.

Your transformation could be next

Feeling inspired? Join us at a future event and learn more about how Salesforce can help you meet your business goals — whether you’re focused on saving money, automating processes, increasing productivity, boosting efficiency, or achieving all of the above. We’d love to meet you there. And if you can’t make it in person, look out for our online recordings on our website. We’ll be publishing presentations from this year’s Salesforce Live soon.

Don’t want to wait? Learn how Salesforce Customer 360 can help you deliver Success Now.