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!

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.

Social Media Facts and Figures for B2B Sales

Social Media Spending

Sales Productivity Lost During the World Cup

Building a Company with Social Media

A Day in the Internet

Women In Social Media

Social Media In Business

Who Participates Online

Visualizing 6 Years of Facebook

Twitter Territory

The World Of Facebook

The Story (so far) of Twitter

The Social Media Effect

The Rise Of The Social Networking Ad Spending

The Rise of Facebook Mobile: 2010

The Social Media Effect

The Life Cycle of a Blog Post

The Journey of a Tweet

The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions

The Evolution of Twitter: 2010

The Biggest Shift

Social Media Statistics

Social Media Addiction

Social Marketing Compass

Social Landscape

Profiles of a Twitter User

Popular Site Demographics

More Truth About Twitter

Make Social Media Work For Your Company

How The World Spends Its Time Online

How People Share Content on the Web

How Companies are Leveraging Social Media

How are Mobile Phones Changing Social Media

Gender Balance on Social Networking Sites

Facebook was a Country

Facebook Vs Twitter

Facebook Facts and Figures 2010

Conversation Prism

Breakdown of the Blogosphere

Balance Your Media Diet

Age Distribution on Social Network Sites

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.

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 on Facebook:

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.

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.

InsideView is hosting and sponsoring a couple parties at Dreamforce all around our theme of seeing your leads in 3D. Our booth will be broken up into two parts. Half the booth will be in a theater set up with a massive 3D TV (we are giving this away at the end of the show) where we will have guest speakers talking about Sales 2.0 and Social Selling.

The big question is where are all of the Dreamforce parties? I was asking around and started collecting some places then I figured I would go to LinkedIn and and ask the question in the Dreamforce Group to see if there was already a list compiled. Sure enough, not only was a list made but it was also included with a map of the locations. I guess I could have recreated this with the information I already had but this is just too good of a resource. Click on the map for a full list of parties. Thank you Cindy Montgomery for posting this in the Dreamforce Chatter group!

Make sure you sign up for the InsideView 3D Party.

For those of you that didn’t know, Foursquare is a mobile application that makes cities easier to use and more interesting to explore. It is a friend-finder, a social city guide and a game that challenges users to experience new things, and rewards them for doing so.

Foursquare is very popular with people that check into places like work, stores, Starbucks and even in outer space. With the growth of the popular check in application reaching 4 Million users, there seems to be no end in sight. One of t things companies have been trying to do is use the application in ways they use services like Twitter and Facebook.

InsideView has a new Foursquare profile that we will use to create events we are hosting as well as checking into events that we attend.

This will be used to keep our customers up to date on some of the places we are going as well as run some cool contests that will only be available to our friends on Foursquare. With Dreamforce coming up, you may want to look into getting that Foursquare app on your phone. (hint..hint)

Last year at Dreamforce, InsideView showed the power of Smart Agents and how it developed typical data into sales intelligence. This year InsideView is going a few steps forward to show companies how to get a 3D view of your customers and prospects to increase revenue. DreamforceIn3D.com

See Your Leads in 3D

Sales people are always looking for an edge. Looking for any piece of information that they can use to identify an opportunity or build stronger relationships through social media. With Twitter on its way to hitting 200 Million registered users, 80 Million professionals on LinkedIn and 500 Million on Facebook, sales people should be looking at this as an opportunity to drive opportunities through the roof.

InsideView recently kicked off the Social Selling University and the entire campaign is designed around showing sales people how to use social media in a way that builds their networks and generates new opportunities.

Dreamforce Resources

Dreamforce is only a couple weeks away and fans of the cloud are going to be looking for online resources that can keep them up to date with Dreamforce news.

InsideView has a few resources for our Dreamforce readers. The InsideView Facebook page will have a lot of information but we have segmented a few other Dreamforce Facebook places for you. The Dreamforce Event page already has over 850 people saying they will attend.

Dreamforce Parties

I’ve been trying to find a list of all the parties that people will be hosting during Salesforce but there has not been much posted on them. Maybe InsideView is ahead of the curve with our announcement of our joint party with ExactTarget on Wednesday at the Metreon and InsideView is hosting a party on Monday that will be sure to welcome all of our friends and customers coming in from all over the US.

InsideView will be at Booth # 924 in Dreamforce and you will want to come by early and get entered to win our event prize, a 50″ 63″ Samsung 3D ready TV.

We will also be breaking our booth into two parts. one or general foot traffic a demonstrations of the application and the other half will be used as a theater to where w will have guest speakers (to be announced) and more Social Selling University content.

Paul Greenberg published an article on ZDNet called “Looking Back at 2010 – In 2010” and he gave a great explanation of his methodically scientific approach to forecasting. Covering the increased priority of mobile CRM social marketing, and the growing need for companies especially y in the support function deploying social CRM to work with customers.

When it came to integration with traditional CRMs Paul had some great things to say about InsideView.

InsideView continued its relentless drive to integrate with everything including the basil plants that are growing inside varying foodies homes – and they’ve been a happy success accordingly with integrations to most of the CRM standards out there.

You can read the entire article on ZDNet here.

Besides all of the great keynotes by Marc Benioff, Bill Clinton and the music by Stevie Wonder, people come to Dreamforce to party. Sure we all want to learn more, meet new people and hang out with people we haven’t seen since the last event so why not hang out with them at a party where all you have to do is show up and put a drink in your hand.

InsideView is sponsoring a couple parties this year and the first to be announced is our Dreamforce Party with ExactTarget. I can’t let out all of the details but I will say that racing for your chance to attend the party should be one of your top priorities. You can register on the Eventbrite Dreamforce Party listing.

Wait, that’s not it. Sure you want to make sure you register for the party and get your invitation confirmed early but we want to go the extra mile for our friends, fans and followers. In the next couple of weeks InsideView is going to offer some great prizes leading up to Dreamforce and you will need to connect with us on Linkedin or Facebook to be eligible.

Special prizes for LinkedIn fans

Head over to LinkedIn and RSVP to the event and I will be posting an update later this week.

http://events.linkedin.com/Dreamforce-2010-Party-ExactTarget/pub/486160

Follow the party on Facebook.

If you are a fan of InsideView on Facebook, be sure to RSVP on the event page for the Dreamforce Party.

This year we are full steam ahead with our booth design and working out the details for this years theme. What we wanted this year was a Dreamforce event that would jump out at people looking for new and better ways to integrate social selling and Social CRM to their busineses. ince we already know the stats on the number of Fortune 100 businesses involved in social media, having a sales team that knows how to target those customers is more important than ever.

InsideView has created a new Twitter list for this years Dreamforce ’10 that is also rolling up into the Dreamforce Daily web-paper. If you or someone you know should be added to our Dreamforce ’10 Twitter list, leave me a comment or send me a tweet. Since InsideView is all consumed with Dreamforce this year we also started a Dreamforce Facebook event.

InsideView already brings sales teams the most comprehensive social media content into your Salesforce CRM and we are going to continue bringing new content into your favorite social networks. Join us on Twitter or Facebook to get new content and special news on us and be the first to know what we are developing for this years Dreamforce ’10 event in December.

Sales professionals rely on many things to be successful, primarily the internal motivation to move a lead through the sales cycle using every available resource in order to provide value and close the deal. Technology plays a big part in that and it was an interesting string of responses to the question that brought this to my attention and create a post about this.

by photographer padawan

Not all CRM applications are equal

One of the first things an inside sales team needs to be more effective in sales is a first class CRM in order to manage leads, contacts and accounts in a way that can be measured and can integrate with other divisions of the company like support and marketing. Salesforce.com is the CRM solution of choice for many companies but there are other solutions out there that can be customized in many of the same ways like Netsuite, SugarCRM and others. Before investing in any CRM solution you need to have a good idea of what you want the CRM to do. Because no company uses (or should use) the out of the box CRM configuration, you need to make sure that you know what data besides name, address, company name and other basic information that you want to collect. Spending the money and time to customize your CRM will pay big rewards as your company grows and in some cases will be the reason many companies are able to grow quickly.

This data will be used by your inside sales team to know as much as possible about the lead, contact or account they are working on. Salesforce.com also has a very extensive Appexchange marketplace where you can get additional functionality for your Salesforce CRM around everything from Sales Intelligence (where SalesView can be found), Project Management and Finance Administration where our friends from BigMachines has an application to configure, quote and generate proposals. Netsuite has a marketplace for these extended applications as well called SuiteApp.

You should take the time to evaluate your CRM options and make sure you find one that can be used with your existing business process or enhance it. I am a huge proponent of dashboards to get a view of revenue, pipeline and other sales related activities. I could write an entire post on the best practices for this but you need to make sure that your CRM solution can create these dashboards so you can see your company from a high level and be able to drill into details and deals.

Inside Sales Needs to Send Email

I’m not talking about Outlook but that will play a part in this. Your inside sales teams should be given some access to a marketing tool that they can use that sends customized communications to their leads and contacts. I highlight “customized“ because there is nothing a customer or prospect will hate more than getting an email from a sales rep that looks generic and not positioned to them as an individual. Make sure you can create a series of templates that can be customized for the sales team so they are not having to write the exact same email 50 times a day with minor variations. With most CRM solutions this is an option but again, this is something you should look into as you consider a new technology for your inside sales team.

Online Meeting Software

Another must have for sales people is the ability to fire up a online meeting space. Sure there is more of a marketing and support need for these tools but I believe that sales people need this ability also. There are a few vendors out there like WebEx, Fuze Meeting and GoToMeeting that can give your inside sales people the ability to host a meeting and share their desktop with prospects and customers.

Enable Your Sales Team to be Successful

A company spends a lot of energy recruiting and building an inside sales team and as important as it is to hire effective sales people, you should invest in the best technology to make their jobs easier. This will give them the tools to engage with people on a more advanced level and also give management the ability to track the results of the sales team and make the process adjustments needed to drive even more revenue.

Leave a comment and let us know what other technologies you think an inside sales team should have at their disposal?

If you have been following trends in sales, you would know the entire paradigm of buyers and sellers has been shifting. You should give up on the cold calling techniques that were used for the past few decades and start focusing your energy on building social selling strategies for your product or service. Customers Want Your Sales Efforts to Go Social.

One of the best known ways to spread information about your company is through word of mouth and it’s more important today than it was 10 years ago. If your customers aren’t talking about your company then you might as well close up shop. You should read 5 Ways That Sales People Can Benefit From Using Social Media.

When hiring sales people, part of the experience you should be looking for in them is that are in tune with social networking and already know how to use social media. Even if it’s only on a personal level, the business translations of social media and sales run parallel.  I am a firm believer that Social Media Can Provide a Push in a B2B Sales Environment.

In addition to asking great questions to move a prospect forward, sales leaders should care if their sales team is using social media and encourage them to use it in ways that can help them individually as well as drive additional revenue for the company. There are many resources available that can give you a heads up on who is on what social media sites like this infographic.

“In just a few weeks of using SalesView, our lead generation reps went from generating 20 appointments a month to generating 70″ – Experian

Outside of making this a blog post about how much InsideView can help make your sales teams more effective and drive real, actionable intelligence into the CRM, I want sales leaders to stand up and look at their sales team. If it’s 4 sales people or 400, the reality is that if they are not conscious of the differences between sales data and sales intelligence in order to know more about their prospects and customers then you are going to lose deals to your competition.

Your sales people should be almost fanatical about your products and should be more than willing to dive into social media to connect with people that your company could help. Even if it’s just swimming in the LinkedIn pool and getting involved with a few groups, your sales people should be connecting with people on a deeper level than just treating them like a name and phone number from their CRM or Outlook contacts. As a sales person you should be working with marketing to identify where you need to be located online for these conversations. Brian Solis @briansolis wrote the 10 stages of integrating social media into a business and has a quote that I’ll have to paraphrase here “If someone says something about your company online and no one hears it, did it really happen?” The answer “Yes” and that should concern you also. Your sales people need to get more active in social media and learn to manage their territories in this new world or they will find themselves out of work.

What do you think?

And we’re ecstatic.

Quality of data is the key to the sales intelligence business and we pride ourselves in being able to deliver smart, fresh and complete information to sales people all around the world in real-time. BNET‘s David Weir wrote an in-depth article today from Dreamforce on the changing landscape of sales intelligence industry and the increasing importance of data gleaned from social media. Weir gives InsideView’s Sales 2.0 business model a strong endorsement in the piece, noting, “Meanwhile, the legacy biz-intel companies are still out there, trying to adapt, but disruptive technology companies like InsideView look to me to be poised to eat their lunch.” To read the full article, please click here.

As we noted in our announcement earlier this month, the constantly increasing sources of data now available on the Web have led to the rapid abandonment of traditional editorial providers like Hoover’s and OneSource for Sales 2.0 solutions like SalesView, which are able to quickly aggregate relevant information from across the Web and deliver it immediately.

Throughout the #DF09 expo floor this year, you’ll see folks working in the “better data” realm left and right. Everything from ensuring accurate account views to monitoring sentiment information to the real-time aggregation end like we work in — and this all of course validated by the huge announcement from salesforce.com yesterday on their new Chatter launch — it’s becoming all about the data.

Just what we like to see!

Are you headed to DreamForce next week? The InsideView team will be there, demoing, speaking, and most importantly helping attendees learn more about using social data to drive ROI in their businesses. The show this year is packed with interesting companies, sessions and even fun contests. If you’re interested in the confluence of social media and the enterprise and how it all mashes together at Dreamforce, we’ve gone ahead and picked some of the more interesting ways to fill your Dreamforce dance card.

1. Sales 2.0 Night – Get cocktails and network with Sales 2.0 leaders Thursday, November 19th, 6pm – 8pm at the Sculpturesite Gallery – RSVP here: http://tinyurl.com/y8nfbec
2. Attend InsideView‘s panel “How to Tap into Social Media to Drive Sales Results” Wednesday, Nov 18th @ 3:30 PM, at West Mezzanine 254
3. Follow the #DF09 hashtag on Twitter
4. Check out some of these cool vendors’ booths: Genius, Xactly, BlueWolf
5. Party in the Cloud Tuesday 8-10pm at Two Bar. RSVP here: http://bit.ly/2pCMjV
6. Get on the Napa Valley Wine Train: Dreamforce attendees get a special deal
7. Enter our contest to win an Aston Martin for the weekend: Register here
8. Join the mosh pit at the Black Crowes concert
9. Share InsideView‘s James Bond-themed Dreamforce video: