I had the opportunity to attend Dreamforce 11 in San Francisco for the first time this year. Dreamforce, appropriately named with all the cool ideas, visions and overall feeling of the event was more than I had hoped.
A Social Revolution
The theme became a reality, starting with getting registered by a girl standing in the main lobby of the event with her ipad and getting my badge printed that pulled a picture of me off of my Linked in profile, to a full featured mobile app with my entire 3 day schedule on it (amongst other many other helpful things!)…
All of the sessions and keynote’s I attended had the theme of social, cloud, and empowering the workplace… Salesforce.com is really doing a great job of integrating all of these areas in a way that is intuitive to not only the Salesforce user, but also the users’ client/prospect network. I was inspired by Mark Benioff’s Keynote and how he (Salesforce) took not just the Salesforce.com users experience into consideration, but the experience of how sf.com users are connecting to co-workers, clients and prospects through social networks like Twitter, facebook and LinkedIn... They took both sides into consideration. This is something that often gets lost with companies, seeing both sides of the equation. Mark had customers like Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry and Tim Campos, CIO of Facebook come up and tell real-life use cases of how their companies are not only using but benefiting from these social integrations as a way to better interact with their users, clients and prospects. To me that’s what it’s all about. Give me a tool that I can use to make me a better contributor internally and also a better sales rep to my clients and prospects. If I can have access to more information on my prospects the sales prospecting experience becomes less “salesy” and more personal / consultative. Cool Integrations! There were many great companies at the event that had very cool integrations into Salesforce.com (too many for me to see them all). There were also many companies at the event who were hitching their car to the Salesforce.com train that really made no sense. I guess this is true for most big technology companies on the up and up… The two integrations that stood out for me were LinkedIn and Pardot, a tool Stefanie recently talked about. These two integrations made the social and empowering the workplace theme a reality. Having real-time relevant information on a contact or lead is big. Tie that in with having a marketing automation tool that allows you to focus your time on clients that have a need and you have a well oiled machine!
Dreamforce ROCKED! Dreamforce wasn’t all sessions and business conversations; we were treated to an amazing private performance by Metallica followed by an after party featuring Will.I.am. Salesforce doesn’t hold back on the entertainment, what a night!
All in all Dreamforce was a great learning experience, I took full advantage of my free 30 min session with a sf.com admin to answer some questions we had. I connected with many interesting people and got to see some solid technology that is very exciting. If you have the chance to attend next year I highly recommend it.
