By now you have seen recaps from my coworkers and most of them are developers and business analysts. However, there is an outside world not related to them – the marketing world. I’m part of the marketing team and attended Dreamforce to explore more of its marketing automation tool, Pardot, and learn other B2B marketing best practices.
This was my first Dreamforce; I feel like I attended many conferences at once. Someone described it as a mix of south by southwest, TED, and a trade expo, and I completely agree. Dreamforce is a big event, and it can be overwhelming to attend for the first time, but the good kind of overwhelming, very similar to how a child gets when visiting Disney World.
Marketing Sessions
Today I started my day with the session “No Lead Left Behind,” I learned best practices of using Pardot’s scoring and grading tools to prevent lead overload and help the sales team focus on the most interested and qualified prospects. To get to my next session I had to walk a couple of blocks, it was nice to get some vitamin D. Although fall has already started, San Francisco Indian Summer is full on with sunny clear skies and heady heat.
As I finally made my way to the next session, “When Sales Meets Marketing: A Love Story”. Mike Wolff (Salesforce SVP Small Business Sales) and Adrian Rosenkranz (Salesforce SMB Marketing Leader) captivated the attendees by making the session so engaging and fun that 40 minutes went by in a blink of an eye. They shared tips on how sales and marketing can successfully work together and how to scale the ultimate partnership between the two. They focused on the importance to arm sales with engaging tools, and how both teams need to row the boat in the same direction, simple in theory but hard in practice.
My marketing roadmap was finalized with a session on personalizing the prospect experience with Pardot. I learned more about how to strategically target prospects by delivering relevant content and meaningful messages on real-time customer behavior.
Remarkable memories were made this week at Dreamforce. I am so excited I got to interact with thousands of marketing experts during sessions, product keynotes, and demos. Learning was just one part of the experience this week. I had a great time at my team dinner, I got to see U2 perform live at the “Cloud Palace”, which was a nice treat, in addition to the B2B Marketer’s Bash Pardot put together at The Warfield with a performance from Flo Rida. It was an EPIC Dreamforce!
