Dreamforce: The Day After

325 Days, 0 hours, 49 minutes, and 57, 56, 55, 54 seconds until Dreamforce 2014!

“The clock is ticking and as of now we are keeping score!”  Top Gun

Takeways for planning an even better Dreamforce 2014:

  1. If your product or service can scale quickly, and there is a direct correlation to how much you spend at Dreamforce to how much pipeline and bookings you close in 3-6 months, and you close more than you spend at Dreamforce, then why not ramp up your spend more in 2014?
  2. Offer an “experience” at your booth – At ConnectAndSell, our company enabled booth visitors to put on a head set, and sit in the chair of what a Sales Rep does every day – and actually show them how they could get 8-10 live conversations/hour with their prospects.
  3. Ah nuts…   When we asked one visitor her top two experiences at the event – one of them was this booth that was full of nuts made out of wood.  When asked who the company was she nailed it – Service Source.  When asked what the company does, “I have no idea”.  Takeaway #3 – make sure as part of whatever experience you deliver, that the booth visitor can actually learn what it is your company does.  For the record, Service Source is a high growth renewals company who serves a lot of clients, and I’m certain they have expert marketers because I’m talking about this booth right now, and not someone else’s, and now my entire network and my network of other networks might actually call Service Source as a direct result of their marketing effort at Dreamforce!

So to Marc Benioff, all my friends at Salesforce.com, and Bay Area friends, it’s been great this week!

Final thought: Marc and Salesforce.com does incredible things with the 1/1/1 initiative, more of us should implement this incredible idea.  One recommendation that I overheard was for 2014, why not “point” the 1/1/1 initiative to solving problems here at home.  Haiti and other world projects are extremely noble, and should continue to be done, why not double down on America, list the big projects, rank them from the top down and continue to change the world!   Keep it up Benioff, you ARE changing the world!