Dreamforce 2012 Prepares To Storm San Francisco

Are you ready for Dreamforce? The annual cloud computing mega-event sweeps into San Francisco next week, from September 18 to 21, at the Moscone Center.

This year’s tagline is “Touch The Social Enterprise,” and the conference promises to deliver maximum cloud CRM bang for your buck, including keynotes from Virgin Group founder and social media master Richard Branson, as well as the chiefs of General Electric, Burberry, as well as Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff himself, with sonic support from Red Hot Chili Peppers.

If you’re heading to Dreamforce, don’t miss these other highlights as well:

1) Gamification: Increase Salesforce Adoption

Hot topic–and shameless self-promotion–alert: How can you enhance CRM with gamification, which means incorporating game-like elements–such as earning virtual badges–that entice employees to perform desired tasks. Learn how these psychological concepts be best applied to CRM, and what types of results you can expect, by attending my Dreamforce presentation on gamification with Rajat Paharia, founder and chief product officer of Bunchball, to find out. Titled “Slashing The High Cost of Low Salesforce Adoption with Gamification,” the session will be held at the conference’s Palace Hotel on Wed., Sept. 19, from 1:30–2pm.

2) Marketing Automation: Nurture Better Leads

Marketing automation is another hot topic this year, and with good reason. Many of our customers who’ve deployed Salesforce for sales automation ask us: what should we do next? One excellent strategy is to review your lead nurturing and campaign management capabilities, to see if adding marketing automation capabilities will help improve marketing efficiency and effectiveness, leading to more leads, and a greater number of sales. In a recent blog post, I detailed top marketing automation tool options, including Innoveer partners Eloqua and Marketo, which offer advanced, enterprise-class capabilities, as well as ConstantContact, ExactTarget, SalesGenius, and VerticalResponse, which offer more lightweight tools.

3) Customer Service: Apply Knowledge

Another recurring theme at Dreamforce this year involves working with Salesforce Knowledge, which–as I detailed in a recent blog post–is a SaaS knowledge management add-on for Service Cloud software. One big benefit of Knowledge is that it’s built on Force.com and ties directly into Salesforce software, allowing information from knowledge base articles can be published via Chatter, or even Facebook and Twitter. In addition, service personnel can search Knowledge using built-in Google search tools. Helping your customer service agents quickly find the right answer for solving a customer’s query is a great way to maximize productivity, as well as keep your customers happy and buying more.

4) CRM Contest: $2,000 Travel Voucher Daily

While at Dreamforce, visit Innoveer’s booth (#1346), where we’ll be running a CRM contest awarding one $2,000 travel voucher for each day (Tues., Wed., Thurs.) of the conference. We’ll also have the latest in free conference swag: All visitors to our booth will receive an iPad/iPhone/iPod charger keychain, or an Android (mini-USB) charger keychain.

5) CRM Secrets Of Red Hot Chili Peppers

Modern musical hit-masters Red Hot Chili Peppers will be headlining the Dreamforce opening night gala. What can attendees expect? In an exclusive interview, two members of the band gave me some hints about what they’re planning for the show. For more insights about what’s to come, check out my top CRM lessons from Red Hot Chili Peppers, spanning topics ranging from marketing campaigns and social business to sales leadership secrets and operating globally.

6) Social: Grab An Innoveer Splash

Finally, on the social front, we’re helping sponsor the Dreamforce 2012 Cloud Crawl. Be sure to grab one of our signature Innoveer Splash (Vodka Cranberry with a splash of Sprite) cocktails, and have fun.

Learn More

What’s the best way to implement a sales force automation (SFA) program? Or would you like to know the top sales effectiveness or marketing automation questions–and answers–you should be asking, to make your current CRM program even better? For all this and more, check out our Innoveer’s CRM expert videos.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user David Paul Ohmer.

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