Posts Tagged ‘conference’
March 6, 2009
We attended the Sales 2.0 conference for the last 2 days. It was a great experience. While I didn’t get to hear every speaker, the ones I did hear spurred great discussion and ideas. Here are some of the things that caught my attention:
- I was very impressed by Brett Queener from SalesForce.com. This company really knows how to do marketing and messaging. They are a benchmark as far as I’m concerned. While they don’t have the best software in my opinion, they do a fantastic job of focusing on business value, not features. I really liked the video he showed on why cloud computing is awesome. Here is a link to it if you are interested.
- A question during this session I liked was how SalesForce measures ROI when prospects ask about it. Brett’s response was to ask the customers what metrics they use today. The implication is most customers probably have no metrics to calculate an ROI. This is an excellent way to avoid or control this discussion. If the customer is sophisticated enough to have good metrics, then they are probably willing to sign-up for it. If not, it is a moot question.
- On SalesForce, I do think there is mismatch with all the lip service they pay to usability and listening to customers on the product. I find SalesForce to be very un-intuitive and hard to use. It does some things well, but it is definitely not user friendly. It is hard to believe that they have 3 rounds of user testing before releasing product. Or, I would be interested in meeting these “customers” because I must be using a different version than they are.
- Much of the focus in the sessions I attended was more on lead and demand generation. I can see why given the state of the economy. One of the speakers commented on how you need 50% more leads just to run in place and that sales cycles are all getting much longer as the economy sinks further into the abyss.
- Twitter received significant attention during the wrap-up session. In fact, there were at least 10 to 15 people including me who were tweeting updates the entire conference. Click here to see the list of tweets used during the conference. It was very interesting. Most people there don’t get Twitter, which I can understand. Sales people are very busy and want to focus on sales, not Twittering. I had a good conversation at my table about Twitter. My take on Twitter is it is good for company and personal exposure; I actually use it as a channel. I monitor a series of key word searches for GroupSwim on Twitter using Twitter search and Google Reader. I watch for things like “sales collaboration” or “customer community”. When I see someone Tweeting a question about online collaboration or GroupSwim, I Tweet them back. This is the only really practical application I’ve found for Twitter (I truly don’t care how good your burger was at lunch). I was thrilled to speak with a prospect early in the week. I asked him how he heard about GroupSwim and he mentioned that I had Tweeted him.
- Gerhard Gschwandtner was great in pushing on how there are too many tools and too much information and knowledge out there to absorb. He said the key to sifting through all the information was search and that having knowledge is no longer the advantage; the thing is the ability to find what you need when you need it. I liked this comment given search is one of our strengths.
- He also spoke of the ridiculous number of “Sales 2.0″ tools on the market now, and don’t just use these products without a plan on how they all fit together. Don’t just buy something because it is the shiny object. Twitter is free but I think it is the ultimate “shiny object”. If I were Twitter, I would sell the company tomorrow. They have never had to earn a dime and can only one direction from here, which is down.
- Tom Barrieau of IDC made some great comments on the importance of tribal knowledge for sales teams. He was referring to the documents and information that people trade, but aren’t formally released by marketing. This is one of the key things that GroupSwim helps manage so I was obviously a fan instantly. He also spoke of the importance of tagging which we also spend an enormous amount of time building.
There was much more than this at the conference but I missed much of it while sitting at the GroupSwim booth. What did you learn or take away?
Tags:conference, GroupSwim, Sales, Sales2.0
Posted in GroupSwim, Random | 4 Comments »
November 14, 2008
SIIA issued a series of press releases naming their preview companies for next week’s conference. Here is a link to a story on MarketWatch discussing the conference and highlighted companies. The competition to get on stage was among 82 companies, and we were one of 11 to win. We are presenting at 10:30 on Tuesday. We got a prime spot right after Mark Beniof, the CEO of SalesForce, who is doing the key note. We are extremely psyched. Wish us luck.
Tags:conference, press, SIIA
Posted in CMC, GroupSwim, Review | Leave a Comment »
October 30, 2008
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.
Tags:conference, GroupSwim, SalesForce, DreamForce, UserConference, Planning
Posted in CMC, Enterprise, Random | Leave a Comment »
October 2, 2008
The SIIA OnDemand Conference has a program called “Previews”. The gist is a bunch of companies try out for the opportunity to demonstrate their application to the entire conference. This is a very prestigious conference; Mark Benioff is the key note speaker. In total, eighy-five companies competed for a slot and twelve were selected. GroupSwim is one of the twelve! If you are coming to the conference, please stop by and say hi.
Tags:conference, demo, GroupSwim, SIIA
Posted in CMC, GroupSwim | Leave a Comment »
June 13, 2008
Well, the conference is over and it was quite an experience. Tom McCleary and I met tons of people and had lots of fun. See Tom working his magic.
The mix of people who attended was impressive. There were vendors, CIOs and other executives, analysts, and bloggers. What became obvious was the focus was on larger Enterprises. The attendees and vendors were mostly interested in large Enterprises like Lockheed, Sony, etc.; the SMB market was not well represented.
Instead of a rambling set of observations like Day 1, I’m focusing on 2 sections for this post.
1. Interesting tidbits from customers
The conference featured a Q&A with several large customers (FedEx, Sony, the CIA, Wachovia, Pfizer) and what they learned implementing Enterprise 2.0. Here are the sound bites that caught my attention:
- Openness is required. The minute you stifle employees and what they can say in blogs or whatever, you will fail
- The challenge for getting going is the opposite of what you think. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t build it and employees will come. You need to enlist people and encourage them to get things rolling. It will eventually take on a life of its own, but it takes nurturing first. You need champions (We see this in our customer base as well)
- Brand your tools to help drive adoption. I think it was Pfizer that branded their social network the Pool. While it is a shame they had to steal the name of our customer community, we’ll give them a pass
- Just do it. Don’t over think it or you will never get started
- Go big and audacious. Of course, another customer then said start small and use stepping stones so you decide based on the particular culture and personality of your business
- The hardest thing for most companies is to give up control; this is scary. However, you need to trust your people at some point or it isn’t going to work
- Do not add extra stuff to people’s plates. In order to make this technology catch on, you need to change or eliminate something they hate
- Don’t use artificial incentives. Schwag (boy it keeps coming up) and badges work well, but don’t rely on money to incent participation (I’m not sure I totally agree with this one for managers. I think you should link a portion of performance bonuses for managers to encourage them and their employees to participate. I blogged about if you can force collaboration here)
- Look for email volleyball. This is a great indication of an area that can benefit from Enterprise 2.0 tools and techniques
2. LaunchPad update
To make a long story short, we didn’t win. A company called Veodia took the prize. They streamed live video from a camcorder directly onto the screen. I give them credit; they took a chance on internet connectivity, the demo gremlins who always seem to surface during these things, and hung it all out there. As one of my former clients used to say, the had serious “wow” going. Our approach was to describe what we did, show a scenario, and describe the benefits.
I learned a couple of things from this experience.
- Sex it up. While our powerpoint was clear and accurate, it obviously didn’t have the wow. It may have been my delivery but you can decide
- Video is a great way to create the “wow”. We are learning this on our website and even in the app, but the same goes for presentations
- You can use Twitter to cheat. I’m not saying it actually happened, but it appears that people in the audience were using Twitter to broadcast voting instructions. I use a service called Summize to look for mentions of GroupSwim, and I picked up some interested Tweets during the LaunchPad session. As an aside, I have to give Twitter a tiny bit of credit here as the may be the first time I’ve actually seen people use Twitter to accomplish something useful
Tags:conference, Enterprise2.0, GroupSwim, LaunchPad
Posted in Enterprise, GroupSwim, Random | Leave a Comment »
June 10, 2008
Well, Day 1 of the conference is in the books. We had a great time today. Here are some observations:
- Standing all day demoing GroupSwim is tough on the dogs; bring comfy shoes if you have them
- When people offer to give you their business cards, it is very strong signal. They can always just claim they don’t have them or simply shake hands and walk away. A very high percentage of people that visited with us offered them up
- I love the casual, no eye contact roll-by from competitors. It is no big deal to check each other’s booth out. Why even try to do it in stealth mode? We even let someone take a picture of the application. The way we figure it, they can always create a site or check out one of our demo environments so what the hell
- Use cabs to get around versus public transportation. Preserve the feet because the dogs will be barking later
- If you are doing a session on the main stage, use slides. I saw companies in the LaunchPad prep meeting get all bent out of shape because the computer they are using doesn’t have the right version of flash, etc. I would take all the risk out of the equation if I were them. Let’s not even talk about relying on a fast internet connection that inevitably goes down during your demo
- Ship stuff to the conference, not to your hotel if you aren’t staying there
- It is very easy to tell who is interested in your demo/solution. The eyes, body language and note taking say it all
- I’m happy to say the GroupSwim message is resonating with people who come to the booth. We see lots of head nodding and interest
- We already ran out of collateral to hand out. We are making an early morning run to Kinkos (soon to be named Fedex permanently) to replenish
- Too much schwag seems desperate. I look at some of the booths of companies that have tons of schwag. They are giving out iPods, stuffed animals, etc. If you ask me, if you need gimmicks to draw people over, you are in trouble. If this is the case, they are not inherently interested in your message and are not likely to buy anyway so you just wasted valuable time AND schwag
- Napping in the lobby between demo sessions is awesome; I recommend it
- Don’t use long titles when you register for these things as they will be cut off on your badge. For the next 2 days, I’m VP of Cust
- Bring an air card so you can have 2 demos at the booth. It is much cheaper than paying the hotel for multiple internet drops
That’s it for now. We’ll talk to you tomorrow.
Jason and Tom
Tags:conference, Enterprise2.0
Posted in Enterprise, GroupSwim, Review | Leave a Comment »
May 14, 2008
We are happy to report we’ve made it to the second round of the LaunchPad contest for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in June. This is an “American Idol” type contest where start-ups compete for the opportunity to present to the entire conference, and earn a free demo booth the following year. It is based on voting on videos that the companies submit. Thanks to everyone who voted for us.
Tags:conference, Enterprise2.0, LaunchPad
Posted in GroupSwim, Random | Leave a Comment »
September 18, 2007
We had a big day today showing off GroupSwim at TechCrunch40. Response to GroupSwim has been fantastic! Lots of really enthusiastic responses and new communities created in response to our day of demos. Check us out at TechCrunch40 and be sure and vote for GroupSwim, here!
Tags:conference, demo, techcrunch
Posted in GroupSwim | Leave a Comment »
