Wow! Selling on steroids, sellers everywhere, no sales tool left behind - it was all so much to do and see! A nonstop array of activities made for the most robust Dreamforce event yet. Dreamforce, which is Salesforce.com’s huge annual party, is a combination of giant user group, fan club, classes, trade show, and living commercial for a platform that is the 100 pound gorilla in SAAS computing. More than 30,000 attendees were signed up for this event.
Top Highlights of mine –
Data.com Launch – integration of Jigsaw data (an earlier Salesforce acquisition) with corporate data from premier data provider D&B. In our minds here at Score More Sales, that is a BIG deal for small businesses who do not have as much access to good data as corporate clients – but also for corporate clients to have the ability to populate records of information in a simple click. More about Data.com
Salesforce EVP and GM Brett Queener says that D&B is the first to integrate their data into Data.com because of the obvious value in the combination of the two. D&B is just the first data partner – which underscores why the Salesforce platform is a smart one for growing companies. What data provider could be next?
Great video of the conversation with Eric Schmidt (Executive Chairman and former CEO of Google) and Marc Benioff (Chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com) here -- you can select what you want to see and hear by topic, or just crank it up and listen for the hour or so. One group of attendees, after hearing Eric and Marc on certain topics felt this session was absolutely fascinating –and one of the best of the 3 days - from talk about Steve Jobs to creating jobs in America.
Sessions - I sat in some really fantastic sessions. A few were so great that I'm going to write about them separately. Stay tuned for that.
Industry Experts - There is so much to attempt to learn and see at this annual event. It was so good to connect with others who are typically much smarter than I. It’s always fantastic to see folks like:
Josiane Feigon, (@josianefeigon)
Anneke Seley, (@annekeseley)
Nancy Nardin (@sellingtools)
Craig Rosenberg (@funnelholic)
Mike Volpe (@volpe)
Ardath Albee (@ardath421)
Matt Heinz (@heinzmarketing)
The Social Enterprise is HERE, says Salesforce.com – I don’t think that is a surprise to anyone – but it was very interesting for the first time to see speakers like Gary Vaynerchuck (@garyvee) and Robert Scoble (@scoblizer) – it really was a who’s who of social media giants who you should follow on Twitter - @loic @charleneli @jowyang @lebrun and @danzarella
We will have a follow up post all about the tools that we saw at Dreamforce for small businesses - which is a subset of the 300+ vendors there. Most companies focus on huge, enterprise-sized clients, and the bulk of exhibitors were no exception. Stay tuned for the "must have" and "must see" tools we saw and tried out which could help revolutionize your business.