The GroupSwim Diving Board

DreamForce is the big user conference for SalesForce customers and partners.  Everyone comes together to learn more about SalesForce, imbibe some drinks, and network with others.  In our case, we are looking for customers.  Business that use SalesForce are perfect potential customers for us.  They are comfortable with SaaS, most likely reliant on making good use of their information, and are the right size.  We are very excited to meet with many of these business and show them GroupSwim.

Prepping for a conference like this takes serious time.  Here are some of the things we’ve had to do or are doing right now:

• Decide to attend or not.  This was not an easy decision.  It is an expensive conference to be a sponsor but we do believe the ROI will be there.
• Pick a booth location.  This is surprisingly hard.  You need to factor in where the competition is, where people are likely to congregate (by the bar and food go figure), and if there are other big vendors around you who are likely to attract crowds
• Create booth artwork.  SalesForce does provide a nice booth and customized artwork to cover it.  Our ace designer Luke had to create 3 panels for this.  It took hours of planning on what we should do, and then having him whip them up
  

  GroupSwim DreamForce Booth

• Create give-aways.  We did some shirts that we will give away and we also have datasheets that we had to design and get printed.  This all took serious time
• Finalize messaging.  We need to make sure we all are saying the same things when we man the booth.  We’ll get questions about how we integrate with SalesForce, do we charge differently, etc..  We have all this but need to make sure we are consistent
• Plan logistics.  We need to get our monitor, aforementioned shirts, and datasheets to the conference before it starts.  We also need to plan the schedule so we make sure the booth is manned the whole time, while not driving each other crazy and having people attend some of the sessions
• Schedule meetings.  There will be many partners and GroupSwim customers in attendance, and we are in the process of scheduling time with them.

As you can see, there is much to do.  We are very excited for next week.