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Dreamforce 2011 was an amazing event. With over 40,000 registered attendees, this marked a new milestone for Salesforce’s annual conference in San Francisco. We had an excellent time meeting with our customers that have InsideView embedded into their CRM and met a ton of new people that wanted to know more about how our application can help drive sales and marketing efforts.
After a lot of planning on our booth and theme, it all came down to the actual event and seeing if we were able to execute as well as we wanted. Turns out we did a bit better than expected. WooHoo Insiders!!
Knowing that there was going to be a focus by attendees on Radian6 getting acquired by Salesforce and the growing trend for companies trying to become more social, we stuck with a focused message around “Cutting through the noise.” One of the chief complaints I hear about social media being used by B2B companies is that listening is great but getting to the relevant conversations that can be leveraged by sales people is difficult. That’s where sales intelligence comes into the picture and has shown to increase revenue for B2B companies.
The first Keynote by Marc Benioff focused on the Social Enterprise and showed how companies from all over the world have started collaborating and engaging within social networks and Chatter. This messaging was music to our ears since we have been leading the charge with delivering social intelligence to companies for the past 5 years.
This really got people here excited because the Social Enterprise is much larger than just sharing news with people in Chatter groups. There are very few applications that people can use to gather social intelligence on companies that enable sales and marketing teams to get alerts and monitor trigger events within their accounts. Having links to a contacts social profiles are nice but when that gets compiled with relevant business events and you’re able to see how you are connected to people in ways LinkedIn can’t show, you have a powerful application that can drive revenue in any company.
Social Selling Panel
We held a session during Dreamforce around how companies can cut through the noise of social media and get very targeted intelligence on what their customers and prospects are doing. Our speakers included Umberto Milletti, InsideView; PC Christopher, Avaya Inc.; Mark Stock, Adobe Systems Inc.; Mike D’Onofrio, Concur Technologies Inc.
Social media is changing how customers interact with enterprises and how they buy. At the same time, customers’ social media conversations with peers are creating “big data.” For sales reps, making sense of all this data is overwhelming. The session showed how winning sales organizations are increasing their performance and gaining an edge on their competitors by harnessing big data and using changing customer behavior to their advantage. Each of the speakers gave real world examples of how they leverage sales intelligence to grow their pipelines and close more deals.
The Metallica Axe
We launched a mini-Dreamforce campaign around Metallica who was playing at the Global Gala. That all came about when we heard the first rumor/leak that Metallica was going to be playing at the event. We searched all over and found the most awesome giveaway possible. An autographed Metallica guitar. Then we spun up a Twitter profile for the @metallica_axe and started building the buzz. The Metallica guitar giveaway was so successful that we had people coming to our booth wondering how we worked out a deal with Dreamforce to have this as the giveaway. There was no deal, we just wanted to give away the most amazing prize during the event.
We wanted to focus on the people around Dreamforce so we identified some of the top influencers and built a presentation to showcase them.
The autographed Metallica guitar was such a hit that Marc Benioff sent us a message when there were problems getting into the concert.
The Winner of the Guitar
The winner was pulled from about 1000 names. Rebecca D. or SFDC_Nerd as she is known on Twitter was the lucky lady who walked away with the prize. After a bit of back and forth with Jetblue, Rebecca and the guitar were given VIP passes back to Boston where the axe will be cherished.
Conclusion
Dreamforce 2011 was a great event. One of the largest events we attend every year. Getting to meet so many customers and talk to people wanting help with sales enablement is a wonderful experience. Now we just have to start thinking abut how we are going to out-do ourselves next year.
One of the best messages from Dreamforce was the realization from 45,000 attendees that data is good but it is not enough to move the revenue needle. The comments from current customers and new businesses that stopped by the booth validated that cold calling is dead and without a very targeted message with relevant information from both traditional sources and social media, a sales rep’s chances of getting contact and creating new opportunities is very slim.
With the announcement that Jigsaw and D&B are being combined to create Data.com, our customers are echoing our response that this is just further validation that data is a commodity and without a layer of intelligence to help sales, marketing and support identify the right people to contact, you may as just use last years Yellow Pages.
Where’s the value-add? D&B and Salesforce are pitching this idea as a marriage between two classes of data: Salesforce contacts and D&B business. (For “Salesforce contacts,” read “Jigsaw.”) But Jigsaw data already associates contacts with their companies, and already contains (by Salesforce’s own estimate) over 4 million crowd-sourced corporate profiles. Of course, this calls into question the authenticity (and accuracy) of those profiles versus D&B’s professional research.
Keeping the entire company on the same page with prospects and customers is something that CRM can help with but it’s not the answer. There are so many things changing with companies on a daily, weekly and monthly basis that it’s impossible for anyone or any company to keep up with all the changes in leadership, news and events. This is why we believe that sales intelligence is the answer.
Adding a layer of intelligence to your sales process will dramatically increase sales productivity and increase your opportunity win rates. Does social media answer all the needs of every sales organization? No. But it adds an additional layer that gives sales people an edge when identifying new prospects and making that first phone call less awkward. Even marketing automation companies like Marketo see the value in leveraging social media for sales.
10 additional Articles on Data vs. Intelligence
- The problem with BIG data.
- 10 tips to drive sales productivity.
- Social Selling in the Enterprise
- The Only Sales Application on the Gartner Magic Quadrant
- Data Accuracy vs Quality
- Sales and Marketing alignment with social media
- Listen to your customers using social intelligence
- Is social media the new cold call?
- Using Twitter for social selling.
- Intelligence Trumps Data for Sales Productivity
The annual event by Salesforce was lit on fire when it was leaked that Metallica was going to be playing at Dreamforce. What’s a little more noise added to an event that draws a crowd of about 20,000 people all drinking off the SaaS fire hose. It was about this same time that we were working on our Dreamforce plan for the year. We needed a prize that would be as great as prior years. We introduced our sales intelligence in 2009 so gave away an Aston Martin fitting for anyone with secret agent desires of being the next James Bond of selling. In 2010 InsideView was bringing social media relevance to sales people and building the foundation of Social Selling for the Enterprise so we delivered a 63′ 3D TV. This year had to be even BIGGER.
I think that there are so many companies now talking about social media and with the acquisition of Radian6 by Salesforce it’s bound to be the focus of the event. Sure, we will be focusing on leveraging social media for sales too and our thought that we deliver the best application for Social Selling for the Enterprise is our driving focus. That’s the keyword, FOCUS. The industry is exploding with sales 2.0 and old companies trying to jump on the social selling train and the truth is that there is room for a lot but we haven’t found a company yet that can deliver trigger events along with social connections to drive a dramatic decrease in sales research and deliver an ROI on social selling.
After about 10 minutes and a few searches online we had found what we feel is the best giveaway during Dreamforce. A guitar autographed by the entire Metallica band during the 2000 Summer Sanitarium Tour. The official contest announcement is scheduled for later this week but I’ll tell you that you should give our Facebook page a big Thumbs UP if you want the information of how you can bring home a piece of Metallica history.
This is the first mentions of Salesforce having Metallica as their featured performer at their annual Dreamforce 2011. Metallica known for songs like The Unforgiven, Master of Puppets, Fade to Black. I was skeptical about the news but the profile is owned by a Salesforce.com sales rep. Sure it could just be a rumor but coming from someone within the company adds some credibility to the update I would think.
There has been no official statement from the Salesforce or Dreamforce team on this news but I would suspect that will happen soon. They need to get on that before the entire world knows Metallica will be attending their massive conference before they say anything. It’s also really nice that Shakeel is willing to give out some passes. I’m sure he’s going to be the popular guy within the #DF11 group if that’s the case.
Twitter has been spreading the news about Metallica fairly quickly and most people are excited at the news. Are you more or less excited about Dreamforce now?
Update: Marcus Nelson the head of social media for the company passed along this reply to my request. hmmm…. I didn’t hear a “NOT True” in there. I bet we hear something by the end of the day.
Salesforce has officially responded which makes me think Metallica IS going to be the performer. Why else would they @metallica (hence getting their attention) if they were not planning on signing them or already have. Again. Still all rumor but this is all adding up to a Heavy Metal Dreamforce.
Thank you Marc for confirming the news!
I responded to a poll on LinkedIn asking “What is your primary Client Relationship Management (CRM) software that you use?” and then took a peek at the results. I’ve been focusing a bit more on LinkedIn for sales people lately since it is the primary social network for companies and professionals. I thought the the information from a poll like this would be perfect for deeper analysis. Even though many of the answers were what I expected, I was caught off guard by one of the results.
Overall the numbers look great, there is still about 18 days to respond but with 1535 votes, this is an impressive number of people. CRM applications are what drives a company, customer engagement and pipeline in a way that helps executives and sales people keep track of what really matters and not focus on deals that are stalled and have a low chance of closing. Salesforce, Microsoft CRM and Oracle were the targeted choices with the option for people to choose “other” as well. Since there are probably a hundred other CRM applications that a company could use, these are the big 3 because of their enterprise adoption.
No CRM?
What surprised me in this this poll was that the creator added in a “None” option to the list. Makes sense but the number of people responding to the LinkedIn poll with this as an answer was concerning.
Of all of the responses, the largest number of “Managers” indicated that they do not use any CRM. None…zero. Though the poll is impressive for other reasons, I’d be interested in doing a follow up poll with this subgroup just to understand how they are managing their business.
After searching far and wide for infographics I figured I would share some of the ones I have come across that focus on social media and B2B. InsideView puts out infographics on a regular basis, two are included in this post with more to come. These are my favorite 40 that cover Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and other social media trends and business related infographics.
Social Media Facts and Figures for B2B Sales
Social Media Spending
Sales Productivity Lost During the World Cup
Building a Company with Social Media
Read the rest of this entry »
Today begins day #3 of Dreamforce. The shear magnitude of the Saleforce conference is overwhelming to most and with the added bonus of the gala featuring Stevie Wonder and Will.I.Am the attendees have a great mix of information of the cloud and entertainment.
As for InsideView, so far the show has been a huge hit. We have been flooded with visitors from customers and people looking to give their sales teams more relevant sales intelligence. We have had guest speakers like Josiane Feigon, Joanne Black and others that have talked about the growing need for sales teams to use social media as a tool to find new opportunities, generate referrals and build deeper relationships with customers.
We still have a couple days to go but Wednesday should be the last big day of the even with the InsideView ExactTarget party which is now completely SOLD OUT. The venue even had to be changed to accommodate over 1000 people that expected to come to the Dreamforce party.
The time for Dreamforce has finally arrived. It was exciting to see all of the Tweets and Facebook updates from people as the arrived. Within hours great pictures started getting posted online for Dreamforce. Here are some of my favorites.
Dreamforce is T-Minus 5 days 00 hours 44 minutes and 40 seconds as I write this post. The InsideView office has all hands on deck getting the last minute details worked out and preparing for the orchestrated chaos that is about to unfold. Every department has a role to play in the largest event we attend every year. Sales is polishing the presentations and following up with customers that will be attending, Marketing created some great graphics all around our theme of “See your leads in 3D“, created the microsite Dreamforce in 3D, and just received our shipment of the largest TV in the world that will be given away to a Dreamforce attendee.
As much fun as I know Dreamforce will be, it isn’t without a small level of stress that I’m sure every vendor has wrapped around worrying about all of the little things that could go wrong. Luckily I haven’t had any nightmares about the event but I would be lying if I said I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night from some lucid dream about the show and making a note about things I need to be sure to follow up on.
GlanceNetworks must be going through the same stuff since they posted this picture on there Twitter profile showing their Dreamforce final checklist.
Tradeshows especially the ones as massive as Dreamforce require a lot of planning and even more faith once it comes to execution. I started this week searching the intertoobs for blog posts about Dreamforce and trying to see what everyone else was writing about the event that could help Dreamforce veterans as well as the newbies of the show.
Dreamforce 2010 Resources
14 Things You Probably Don’t Know About Dreamforce by our friends at Marketo gives a great overview of what to expect at Dreamforce and even offered to give away a VIP prize to one of their fans by paying for their trip.
InsideView created an online paper all about Dreamforce that shows some of the best news on Twitter about the event and highlights some of the most interesting posts by Dreamforce fans.
CRMFYI aka. Jeff Grosse has a collection of blog posts around Dreamforce that go back a few years that are still relevant.
Arkus has a great post about the Top 10 reasons to go to Dreamforce. Although I think that #2 should be replaced by InsideView will be there, the #1 reason is spot on with education and going to this event expecting to learn more about the cloud and how Salesforce will impact your business in a wonderful way.
Dreamforce: Tips for First Year Attendees was written by Force Monkey and has some excellent tips for people new to the Dreamforec experience.
7.) If you know certain people are going to be at Dreamforce, and you really want to meet them — make arrangements in advance! With Chatter, there’s no excuse to not reach out and make those connections now! Ask if they can get together with you for breakfast, lunch, dinner, coffee, drinks.
I just happened to stumble upon an #awesome collection of blog posts by Paul Young that feature an Insider’s Guide to Dreamforce. He covers everything from food, dealing with the over-stimuli of the show and even touches on the bathroom issues.
- The Insider’s Guide to Dreamforce, Part 1
- The Insider’s Guide to Dreamforce, Part 2
- The Insider’s Guide to Dreamforce, Part 3
Let’s not forget about the Dreamforce parties! After running around the event, collecting SWAG and listening to some of the best thought leaders in CRM, you get a chance to unwind and have a few drinks courtesy of some of the Dreamforce sponsors. If you haven’t seen it yet, make sure you look at the Dreamforce Party Directory.
Dreamforce Foursquare
For all of you geolocation addicts like me, you will probably be checking into Dreamforce from your phones. There are more venues being created daily it seems but there is only 1 Dreamforce 2010 – Moscone Center.
It has arrived! I don’t know how we are going to move this thing to Dreamforce. It took 2 guys that looked like they belong in the WWE to carry into the office but it’s here. This year at Dreamforce we are giving away a 63″ Samsung Plasma (3D ready) TV.
The TV will be be on display at the Dreamforce event in our booth #924 being used in our theater for presentations by special guest speakers and other great 3D visuals.
