On the 18th of July, Third Republic along with Markus Spillner of Adesso AG, and Marco Badorrek of Salesforce Germany hosted the third Salesforce Germany Community event. The event was held in the Salesforce Dusseldorf offices, and it was our most successful meetup to date! There were over 40 attendees ranging in skillsets – from Administrators to Architects.
The primary focus of these events is to bring the community together. The meetups were founded by Markus, Marco and the Third Republic Germany team to provide a greater Salesforce community presence in the NRW region of Germany, as well as the opportunity for Salesforce professionals to network and share insights.
The third in the series of meetups saw some fantastic talks from four key players in the Salesforce ecosystem – Alexander Goettke, Head of Digital Sales and Salesforce Implementation at Santander Consumer Bank, Jan Lukas Weigl, Solution Engineer at Salesforce, Jacques-Félix Elimbi, Lead Solution Engineer at Salesforce, and Haitham Zyadeh, Principle Solution Engineer at Salesforce.
Salesforce implementation at Santander
First up was Alexander Goettke who is leading the Salesforce implementation at Santander, Germany. He shared insights on the reasons why it’s necessary for the bank to employ a more efficient CRM, the compliance and risk aspects of how a bank should be tackling software implementation, as well as demonstrating how Salesforce is incorporated across the bank throughout Germany.
Alexander also revealed the plans for the future of Salesforce within Santander and how future Clouds could help to improve their digital transformation, converting them into a truly modern bank.
It was interesting to understand how a global Salesforce customer utilises various Clouds throughout Germany to improve their internal infrastructure, as well as improving their own customers experience. The attendees were intrigued to realise more about the project and were invited to ask any questions they had at the end of Alexander’s presentation.
This was the first time that we had a customer presenting at the event, and was a hit! Alexander’s talk was engaging, funny, and incredibly detailed. Also, after a laptop issue on the evening, he recreated his presentation in record time!
A networking interlude followed Alexander’s presentation. Salesforce provided some great food and the drinks were flowing. There was also a short tour of the Salesforce Dusseldorf offices, which got people talking all things Salesforce.
New Salesforce features revealed
Following the brief networking break, Jan Lukas Weigl of Salesforce talked us through the latest release of the platform and all the exciting new features that come with it. It was an interesting talk and certainly useful for all Salesforce users from Developers to Analysts.
How to better serve your customers
Next up was an insightful presentation by Jacques-Félix Elimbi and Haitham Zyadeh of Salesforce. They provided demonstrations on the huge transformation project that they are working on with a European utilities company, as well as discussing how businesses can better serve customers using Digital Marketing, Service Cloud and Field Service.
It was really interesting to see the entire customer journey from start to finish – from marketing, to Service Cloud, as well as a thorough demonstration of the Salesforce Field Service Lighting product. They closed the presentation by inviting the audience to take part in a Q&A – there were a number of interesting questions asked from various experts in the room who were intrigued to find out more. The whole presentation was great and will certainly be the topic of discussion for events to come!
See you at the next event
After the final presentation, the drinks and networking continued into the night. There were some excellent conversations had around how different businesses operate with Salesforce, alongside plenty of sharing of best practices.
It was another incredibly successful and well-received event! We would like to thank all those who attended and contributed to such a positive evening, with special thanks going to our speakers.
The next event will take place in 12 weeks on the 26th of September, with the event location and further details to follow on our meetup page. We’re always looking for event partners and speakers, and to expand into the community. If you know people who would be interested in attending, please invite them and bring them along to the next event.
