My Adventures at Dreamforce

In the past few years I have come to fully embrace my inner nerd and, as such, I am completely fascinated by the way people and organizations are using data to “do more with less” in the wake of the Great Recession. When it comes to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools, though, it might be said that people are learning to do more with what they already have. It’s about finding the value - in terms of automating processes and eliminating redundant efforts - in the tiny bits of data that are already there but haven’t yet been arranged in a way where they form a clear picture. When it comes to creating a unified picture out of all those seemingly unrelated bits of information that we gather daily, it’s like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle with only some of the pieces laid out on the table in front of you. You might get a part of the picture but you can see that there’s a significant chunk that’s missing. You may even have enough of the puzzle put together to know that one of the missing pieces is a note that you wrote down during a meeting two years ago in a notebook that is now....where? 

So, as a big-picture guy who is easily distracted by little shiny data points, I have been having a great time playing with Salesforce.com over the past half-year. I am overjoyed by the breadth of data that CRM solutions like Salesforce.com can gather, group and serve up in nifty little dashboard widgets and such. Needless to say, when I got the invitation to attend Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual cloud computing extravaganza, I was more than a little bit stoked. On top of my general curiosity, the event had been hyped up to me by colleagues who had attended in previous years. I saw it as a great opportunity to really get under Salesforce's hood and get some hands-on training in the finer points of data analytics. Yes, please!

In my role here at BAVC I rely on data to help me figure out which classes are getting consistent enrollment so I can make sure I am scheduling classes in topics that the people want. Creating a simple report that serves up the raw numbers on which classes had the best performance within a given time period is a very straight-forward operation. But looking backward is only one half of the formula for accurately predicting which classes our community members want more of now and - more to the point - how we should be enhancing and building upon our offering now in anticipation of a need that has not yet materialized. It's a little like alchemy. But I digress. I was talking about Dreamforce.

As soon as the registration site was up I signed up for a series of breakout sessions and even booked myself a "Success Session" - a 30-minute one-on-one with a bona fide Salesforce ninja. I was filled with a certainty that, upon emerging from Moscone Center on the final day of the annual gathering, I would walk away from Dreamforce 2010 with new insights and techniques for wielding the power of Salesforce like a mystical combination of seer stone and sniper rifle.

Needless to say, my lofty expectations were dashed pretty much as soon as I arrived for registration. Dreamforce is, after all, a good deal like a mashup of a band camp, a church revival and a trade show. Also, I think the true magnitude of the event in terms of biomass had not quite made its imprint on my mind prior to my arrival at the Moscone. The sea of humanity, the currents of which I was for the most part adrift upon for the better part of three days, was at once maddening and exhilarating. I don’t do well in crowds and I’m pretty sure I have a serious yet undiagnosed allergy to the unintentional rudeness that results from putting 17,000 people into an enclosed space and giving them a coffee bar and Wi-Fi. But, somehow, the energy and excitement of the event won out over my neuroses and I found myself having a fine time.

The bottom line is that I got a LOT out of the experience. It was amazing to see what Salesforce the company is rolling out this year. It was awesome to get hands-on training in creating custom report types. It was humbling to see first-hand that the CRM that BAVC uses is the exact same platform that ginormous companies and universities use. That last point was perhaps one of the most important takeaways for me. It went beyond the “we’ve got an awesome hot rod of a CRM solution” observation. The way that it clicked for me was in the breakout sessions and in speaking with other attendees about how they are using Salesforce.

During my three days at Dreamforce, the biggest revelation for me was how all of us in attendance - from the small non-profit orgs to the multi-national corporations - are trying to solve very similar problems but invariably coming at them from directions that are unique to our own point of view. In a sense, we are all trying to solve the same problem - which is, essentially, “How do I keep the customers I have, add new customers efficiently, and reliably predict what both existing and future customers will buy from me a year from now?” Anybody who sells CRM solutions will tell you that the answer to that question is CRM. But owning and using a CRM tool on a daily basis is not the same as knowing how to use it to answer that fundamental question for your particular company or organization - just like owning a guitar is not the same as being able to kick out a tasty face-melting riff. This I know from experience.

And that’s the cool thing about Dreamforce. The cool thing about Dreamforce is that it is like a mashup of band camp, church revival, and trade show. You’ve got classes and clinics that teach you new tricks, hype-heavy sermons on the power and promise of cloud computing in general - and Salesforce’s products in specific - that will get you fired up and ready to go back to work and take CRM by the horns, and a bunch of vendors lined up to sell you products and solutions that you never knew you needed. All of this within the overarching theme that we are all in this together: we all ultimately want the same thing out of Salesforce and we each help to make the Salesforce user community stronger simply by participating, asking questions and collaborating.

While I can’t say that I forged any lasting Dreamforce friendships this year, I can say that those of us from BAVC who attended Dreamforce ‘10 are energized and excitedly cooking up some tasty new features to roll out in ‘11. And, even though most of you reading this will probably never even notice most of the features, I do think you’ll feel the benefit of us doing more with what we’ve got.

by Keith Battle, BAVC Program Resources Lead