Dreamforce was in a word, “inspirational”! Salesforce.com brought a massive amount of talent, energy, innovation...and money to its annual 9th annual Users conference, aka “Cloud 9”.
The experience motivated me to highlight and share five (what I consider cool!) concepts with you…
1) If the rules don’t support your vision, change the game – Salesforce.com has never wavered from its purist approach to cloud computing, delivering release after release of fast, easy and open hosted software. Since 1999, the company has overcome Enterprise-class competition, including Siebel, SAP and Oracle, survived phishing attacks, minimized the threat of downtime issues as well as expanded its core CRM offering through development, acquisitions and the AppExchange, which boasts over 900 applications from more than 450 independent software vendors (983,599 installs as of this post and counting!).
2) Innovation in the Cloud is just beginning – with 275+ exhibitors, there were so many new companies and technology, and it’s difficult to imagine less than 400 at Dreamforce 2012. I witnessed so many NCTs – next cool things/trends – I’ll save highlights for another post.
3) The Social Enterprise is real (and a bit scary) - Marc Benioff’s Day 2 keynote presentation on the Social Enterprise says it all. The power of this concept is the ability to get closer to one’s customers – almost intertwined in fact. Think about a centralized view of your prospect’s public activity – LinkedIn, blog posts, tweets within Chatter, Salesforce.com's "private, corporate" social networking interface. The delicate part of the equation is information overload. Have you looked at your “overdue” activities lately? I’ll bet 10 to 1 that we’ll see an emergence of “filtering” apps to help customer-facing reps separate the “wheat from the chaff”!!
4) Sales and Marketing functions are converging – It’s a foregone conclusion that the traditional Sales model has been turned on its head – the funnel has flipped! The way customers buy will continue to evolve in such a way that Marketing will continue to increase its influence on purchase behavior and processes. Never has alignment between these functions been more critical than now! Read a bit on Revenue Performance Management ...is it possible that the Chief Revenue Officer will replace the CMO & CSO??
5) People Rule! – Certainly the venue,agenda (Metallica anyone?!), content and technology play a major role in the quality of any conference, but people are the difference makers. Of the dozens of conferences I’ve attended over the years, Dreamforce seemed to have the greatest “people mojo” on the largest scale – with the right mix of knowledge, experience, social acumen and curiosity. Information distributed in the sessions was fantastic, but I think I learned more through Q&A on the tail end of sessions as well as in deep conversations with peers outside the classroom. This effect was likely strengthened by the Hawaiian opening greeting delivered by Daniel Akaka – hypnotic!
Over my (long and distinguished…;) career in tech, I’ve watched with awe and sometimes trepidation as salesforce.com blazed the path of creation to dominance of the SaaS industry. After Cloud 9, I’m a believer…how about you?
Here are my favorite posts on the DF11 experience and "what happens next"?
Dreamforce 2011 Wrap up: Our 10 Favorite Blogs about #DF11 by Appirio
4 Event Marketing Lessons From @HubSpot's Dreamforce Strategy #DF11 by Hubspot
Eric Schmidt: The Next Facebook will be Social, Mobile & Local by Eloqua
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