Salesforce looks to better understand its clients at Dreamforce

Global Business

More than 170,000 people are attending the San Francisco Bay Area’s largest tech event of the year: Dreamforce. It’s put on by Salesforce, a cloud-based software company headed by billionaire founder Marc Benioff.

CGTN’s Mark Niu reports on the tech event.

“I hear these stories on and on and on, and I have to remember over and over again, why we come to Dreamforce,” Benioff said.

Benioff is often described as a tech’s mad genius.

“Behind everything is a customer. And that’s what all of us do. We’re working to connect with our customers in an incredible new way,” said Benioff.

Dreamforce in its own festive way seeks to help Salesforce better understand its clients.

“That’s part of what Dreamforce is all about. It’s all of our customers talking back to Salesforce saying here’s what we need. And that’s what we are focused on driving that growth of the company,” David Kingsley, Salesforce senior vice president said.

Despite criticism about overspending, Salesforce company revenues are now expected to hit $12.5 billion by the end of next year.

One of its platform’s key selling points is helping clients get more information about their customers.

“Tracking, but it’s more than that. It’s having the data to deliver the experience to the customer. But the truth is we’ve opted in to allowing companies to have this data about us because we trade it for the experience,” said Michael Fauscette, Chief Research Officer at G2 Crowd.

G2 Crowd is a business software review site that’s also at the moment, donating money to help victims of earthquakes and hurricanes when someone writes a review. G2 was influenced by Salesforce, which developed the 1-1-1 philanthropic model: donating one percent of their company’s product, time and resources to charity.

In fact, there are more than 5,500 non-profit and NGO groups attending the event. CEO Marc Benioff calls it the largest non-profit technology conference in the world. You can support science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Or you can buy some of their famous cookies and donate to the cause.

Salesforce said the 1-1-1 model has so far been adopted by more than 3,000 companies, lending support to the idea that social responsibility is actually good for business.