Chris Robinson on Horizons
Chris Robinson is Pracedo’s Marketing Cloud Lead. He assists customers with achieving their transformation goals from strategy, design and configuration through to integration, testing and deployment. Chris has worked with a variety of different organisations from charities like The Brain Tumour Charity, to Higher Educational institutions like The London School of Economics and bespoke travel agency Audley Travel offering Market Cloud solutions.
Can you tell us a little bit about The Higher Ed Summit Horizons?
The Higher Education Summit, Horizons, is an annual event hosted by Salesforce to encourage higher ed customers to learn from each other and share solutions. This year’s event was held in Paris. A higher ed summit has been held in the USA for 8 years now and last year EMEA had our first Horizons event in Barcelona. Next year’s event will be held in Amsterdam.
What was the presentation you delivered about?
The University of East Anglia (UEA) employees Sarah Cox, Matthew Cooke, James Maas and I delivered a presentation around our experiences of self implementation. We discussed how they implemented Salesforce products Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud. We also looked at some of the resources available for self implementation and the role that Pracedo played in this project.
What was special about the project with The University of East Anglia?
The project between UEA and Pracedo was a ‘match made in heaven.’ They were really eager to make this project a success and effectively used our time together to learn as much as they could. This great collaboration between us ultimately led to a really high-quality org which is exactly what everyone wanted.
Why can self implementation be a good tactic for some organisations
Self implementation can be great for some organisations because it ensures learning is occurring throughout the whole organisation.
If you have been heavily involved in the build, then you will know how it works and can fix any problems that arise with it. Self implementation is also easier to make a success than it has been in the past with resources, like trailheads and webinars, which give you a really strong foundation. There are lots of resources out there which can help to make your project a success.
Why should a company involve consultancies at all in self implementation builds?
It can be useful to get a consultancy involved with your self implementation project as they can offer advice on best practice to make sure your org is running effectively. We also have a lot of skills and knowledge from other Salesforce implementations which might be relevant to your build.
What else did you get involved with on the day?
The London School of Economics gave an excellent presentation about integrating their contract management into Salesforce.
I thought it was very positive to see a presentation around this topic taking place especially from one of our customers. I also watched the keynote from Graham Brown Martin, which was good, he spoke about how we need to reimagine education in a time where robots could soon dominate the workplace. He pinpointed three key areas where humans outperform machines, creative endeavours, social interactions and mobility, and dexterity. It will be interesting to see how this impacts the higher education industry and many others in the future.