The biggest win for ad sales isn’t a new feature. It’s less friction.
What AIforce, Data 360, and Tableau Next mean for seller effectiveness.
In brief
- The Dreamforce 2026 announcement that matters most for media & ad sales is AIforce, a sign that the Lightning UI will increasingly be an option, rather than the required way, into Salesforce.
- Less friction means better seller effectiveness: faster prospecting, automated meeting prep, and Opportunities that actually stay up to date.
- Data 360 and Tableau Next still have strong potential to democratize ad sales data and give RevOps teams control of the analytics revenue leaders need.
Watching Dreamforce 2026 From Afar
Let’s get something off the table. No, I didn’t attend Dreamforce 2026 last week. While it would have been fun and exciting, it wasn’t in the cards this year.
That said, I watched from afar and analyzed the various announcements through the lens of media & ad sales. Interestingly, when I reflect on where Salesforce is and where it’s going in a vertical we’ve specialized in for many years, I’d say the path is nuanced. Here are my thoughts.
Where Will Media & Ad Sales Benefit Most?
I’ll begin with the end in mind and work backward. If I had to pinpoint where I think media & ad sales will benefit, it’s AIforce. From my perspective, it’s not a “mind-blowing” announcement, but rather an acknowledgment by Salesforce that its native Lightning UI will increasingly be an option, rather than a required way, to access the platform. For those of us who’ve been doing this for a while, there are still days when we wake up and lament the deprecation of the Classic UI, which was just so clean and minimalist. Lightning Web Components have been cool and helpful, but I don’t think the Lightning UI incites “I love this app!” sentiment. Sorry Salesforce.
Why Is Ad Sales CRM Adoption So Hard?
For years, we at V2 have aspired to transform media & ad sales organizations across publishing, radio/podcasting, television/streaming, adtech, retail/commerce media, out-of-home, sports, and other segments. While every industry faces the shared challenge of establishing and maintaining Salesforce adoption, especially among tenured reps, I believe media & ad sales is particularly challenging. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve admired some extraordinary ad sales executives, managers, and individual sellers over the years; it’s just HARD to build a consistent passion for ad sales CRM. My firm designs and builds cutting-edge ad sales solutions and features that have been proven and optimized over many years, but there’s a deep cultural element in the middle management and seller layer that takes time to transform through proper change management. There’s no panacea.
Speed, Agility, and Less Friction
Back to Dreamforce 2026, here’s what I’m thinking. AIforce will give us tools to inspire media & ad sales managers and individual contributors like never before. Speed and agility are paramount in an industry that moves extraordinarily fast, responding to RFPs, getting campaigns live, making real-time campaign adjustments, tracking down IOs, and running unpredictable programmatic deals. A new model will emerge in which media & ad sales organizations will choose their AI or tech platform, and finally let ad sales personnel move at the high speed they want. Leveraging Slack or Claude (as two examples) to create, update, or analyze Salesforce CRM records greatly reduces the friction. In this at-times frenetic industry, friction can be the difference between success and failure.
In this at-times frenetic industry, friction can be the difference between success and failure.
The Real Story Is Seller Effectiveness
If we bring this assessment up a level, what we are really talking about is seller effectiveness. As a former seller at Oracle, I was taught to operate with rigor. As a management consultant and technologist, I’ve seen a huge range of variation in the level of rigor expected of sellers. In recent years, I’ve seen a resurgence of executive focus on it. It’s been refreshing to see a new wave of sales leaders who believe that operating with rigor and discipline is not an option. It’s no longer “if they are getting results doing their job, we will just leave them alone.” That old-school sales executive philosophy is being replaced by a more tech-forward mindset in which metrics are tracked and used to inform data-driven decisions on how to coach sellers, standardize processes, and scale the organization.
So what does the future of seller effectiveness look like in the Salesforce AIforce model for ad sales organizations? Here are a few predictions:
Prediction 01
Smarter prospecting
Prospecting for new and existing customers should become more efficient, as AI can leverage data from Salesforce, Gmail, and other systems to write highly customized 1:1 outreach; it’s not just about fancy outbound mass-email tools but about supporting old-school relationship-building communications.
Prediction 02
A daily command center
Ad sales executives, managers, and individual sellers will start their day with a command center or cockpit that recommends where time is utilized and provides helpful real-time insights - which of my accounts are in the news and how can I parlay that news into an effective outbound communication?
Prediction 03
Automated meeting prep
Meeting preparation becomes significantly more automated, and meeting notes are automatically generated or easily entered using AI; meeting transcripts are summarized, analyzed, and distributed to democratize key insights across the larger organization.
Prediction 04
Better opportunity hygiene
Opportunity hygiene eventually improves because the barrier to updating Opportunities is much lower, driven by AI user interface changes and/or agents who proactively work to keep Opportunities up to date.
Prediction 05
Improved forecasting
Forecasting also improves as UI enhancements are combined with improved data and analytics in Data 360 and Tableau (more on that from V2 soon!)
Prediction 06
Real-time insights in Slack
Slack Surface provides additional real-time insights that are easier to access compared to traditional reports and dashboards.
Prediction 07
Campaign pacing on demand
Previously time-consuming queries about ad campaign pacing are at sellers’ fingertips, and pre- and post-sales collaboration becomes more efficient and effective.
Prediction 08
Streamlined programmatic
Programmatic deal management will become more streamlined.
What About Data 360 and Tableau Next?
In the interest of rounding out this conversation, there’s another angle that deserves mention about Data 360 and Tableau. A year ago, those solutions, along with Agentforce, were the focus of most conversations. Today, there are newer topics the Salesforce marketing machine is highlighting, and with good reason (AIforce, Slackbot/Slack Surfaces, deeper Google & Gemini partnerships, etc.).
I believe Data 360 and Tableau Next still have strong potential to be game changers in media & ad sales. For those of you who know the industry well, you understand that ad sales data spans multiple systems and that enterprise architectures are complex. Salesforce CRM holds Opportunity pipeline data, which is just one piece of the critical revenue-forecasting motions that are so near and dear to media & ad sales organizations. Order management (“OMS”) and delivery data from downstream ad serving platforms are the other key pieces. And while we at V2 have done plenty of work pulling key datasets from lakeshouses, including Databricks, Snowflake, and GCP, and building advanced analytics on those datasets, Data 360 is an exciting evolution. We see a future where many ad sales organizations, whether traditional media, retail/commerce media, adtech, or other segments, bring subsets of data from those lakehouse environments into Data 360 and leverage Tableau Next to provide best-in-class analytics.
Salesforce CRM
Opportunity pipeline
Order management (OMS)
Booked orders
Ad serving platforms
Delivery data
Why take this extra step? It’s simple: many ad sales organizations need to “democratize” key data sets that are currently tightly controlled by their internal data organizations/teams. It’s time to unlock the data and give RevOps teams greater control over the key analytics that revenue leaders want and need. V2 will share more on this exciting concept in the coming weeks - keep an eye out for it!
Why Data 360
It’s time to unlock the data.
Give RevOps teams greater control over the key analytics that revenue leaders want and need.
Closing Thoughts: Why Industry-Specific Consulting Still Matters
In closing, while there WERE a lot of exciting announcements at Dreamforce 2026, the major headlines were not particularly targeted to media & ad sales transformation. It appears that Salesforce may be pivoting back to investing more time in building and/or partnering with strong, horizontally focused solutions that SIs, like V2, can leverage to build out nuanced, industry-specific features and functionality. The combination of these new Salesforce capabilities with consulting's deep subject-matter expertise will, in my opinion, chart a path to improved seller effectiveness and innovative enterprise architectures and solutions that will truly transform media & ad sales.
I suppose I missed some exciting parties, meals, and coffee chats last week, but not for any lack of passion to leverage Salesforce’s exciting developments and help media & ad sales organizations transform. It’s just “Dream Big” instead of “Dreamforce”.