I spent last week in San Francisco attending Dreamforce 2010 (Twitter: @dreamforce). The event was nothing short of impressive. With 87,200 customers and $1.7+ billion in annual revenue, Salesforce.com is a major leader in the CRM marketplace, but Dreamforce is more than merely Salesforce.com’s annual CRM user conference. Dreamforce increasingly has grown into the annual host of two critical, interdependent and growing ecosystems – and consequently was an event filled with great demand generation insights.
On one hand, Salesforce.com serves as the cornerstone for a growing software ecosystem around buyer-centric, demand management software. This is a critical evolution – very much the doppelganger to supply-chain management – that is fundamental to businesses increasingly being able get control of and being able to predict and deliver revenue on a consistent and repeatable basis. CRM is a backbone of this ecosystem, but marketing automation technology and related components, such as inbound marketing and analytics, increasingly are expanding the scope and capability of this ecosystem. And this infrastructure is critical to supporting your holistic demand generation strategy and programs.
On the other hand, Salesforce.com has become the leader in cloud-based application infrastructure. It offers the same platform technology that Salesforce.com is built on as a basis for supporting the development and deployment of cloud-based applications. Much of this message is targeted at application developers, but I’ll note that it is this cloud-based approach that also is critical to enabling the demand management software ecosystem I noted above. (And I’ll submit that marketers MUST increasingly care about and be knowledgeable about ‘the cloud.’) Whereas the supply-chain management ecosystem – which has significantly matured in recent years – could rely on suppliers to get on the same platforms and to share information, demand management is more complicated than that. Buyer data – especially sentiment, intent and garnering a complete picture of your organization’s interactions with that buyer – is a lot harder to collect and manage, and even harder to act on. That’s where cloud-based data and processing is a critical tool for marketing leaders – serving as the technology infrastructure necessary to get your arms around your complex, dynamic marketplace and to be able to drive and tune your buyer-centric demand generation engine.
Perhaps what is most impressive about Dreamforce, though, is that there is no other technology-based event that draws such a large group of sales and marketing executives – and the technology vendors that serve them – in one place, at one time for nearly a full week. Some of my best conversations each year occur at Dreamforce, and this year was no different. Not only did I attend some great sessions – especially Benioff’s day-one keynote and Eloqua CTO Steve Woods’ panel, “Marketing as a Revenue Engine,” but I also had many, great meetings with a number of customers, prospects and partners that all helped me get a great check on the pulse of modern demand generation.
So what were my major demand generation insights from Dreamforce 2010?
Here are two major takeaways from this year’s event:
B2B buyer insight is more-pervasive, more real-time and more-accessible via ‘the cloud,’ and marketers must learn to leverage this dynamic asset.
I’ve already somewhat introduced this point, but it’s critical to highlight the increasing importance of cloud-based buyer insight to the success of modern demand generation.
I’ve written on many occasions about the fundamental shift that has occurred in modern B2B marketing. In a Web 2.0 environment, power has shifted from seller to buyer. One of the consequences of this new evolution, though, is that buyer sentiment is increasingly available via Web – via the cloud – more than ever before. So whereas early on, buyers had an information advantage, increasingly sellers have access to a range of demographic and behavioral insight into their current and perspective buyers. It’s no longer a one-sided interaction, but it does represent a fundamental change in how we interact with buyers, and it does require a new level of competency for marketers in engaging this dynamic asset.
Benioff highlighted this new evolution in his day-one keynote, saying “the old Internet is dying off” and we’re seeing “a broad change in Internet usage.” He continued, “What is happening on the Internet has changed,” and he highlighted how social media interactions with buyers were increasingly surpassing email-based interactions. One of his executives echoed this later in the keynote, saying that “your customers are living in a different world, and you need to adapt.”
More than ever our challenge as marketers is not about garnering mass awareness or building traditional brands via traditional broadcast channels. Our new job is to listen to and respond to our buyers – driving more one-to-one, buyer-centric demand generation activities. But how do we do scale this and still lead efficient and sustainable marketing activities? This is where cloud-based data increasingly is a critical success factor.
What is this cloud-based data? It’s emerging in two forms. On one level, we have a growing mass of public data – especially via search-engine-exposed social media, such as blogs and via Twitter. On another level, we have rapid growth in private data, whether via information collected on private networks or via collaborative information and insights on buyer interactions shared internally within companies. On both fronts, we saw several great examples of the role this data increasingly is playing in successful demand generation.
Benioff highlighted the importance of public cloud data, focusing on Twitter and Salesforce.com’s growing integration with this data. “One of the most popular areas in customer service in 2010 is Twitter,” said Benioff. He also highlighted the importance of private cloud data. He focused on his company’s acquisition of Jigsaw – which he called “the world’s leading data cloud” and noted it is based on nearly a million people updating 23 million records. He also highlighted the next phase of evolution for Chatter, which he called Salesforce.com’s “most successful product ever” and said that it is enabling organizations to capture internal buyer insight and interactions and literally index this information back to an individual customer record level.
The opportunity to leverage cloud-based buyer data was driven home in other sessions. One marketing executive on Woods’ ‘Revenue Engine’ panel commented, “I personally believe LinkedIn is the most maintained database on the planet because we do it ourselves.” He further commented that there is a growing “… realization that this big thing out there called social data is becoming more relevant to us [as marketers].”
Woods noted in his own post-Dreamforce blog post that Salesforce.com was not the only vendor focused on delivering cloud-based buyer data at Dreamforce. “Salesforce.com has clearly made a significant investment in this area with their acquisition of (and deep integration of) Jigsaw as a data cloud, but folks like Hoovers, D&B, and StrikeIron were very present on the show floor with data sourcing, append, and cleansing services.” We also saw Demandbase highlighting its ability to identify anyone that comes to your Website. A DemandGen Report article noted the company’s Dreamforce announcement “… that its Real-Time Identification service can now accurately identify more than one billion IP addresses, matching them to over seven million businesses. The BtoB marketing solution provider now represents more than 75% of all business web traffic across North America and Europe.”
The increasingly-important role of cloud-based B2B buyer insight in successful, modern demand generation was a critical takeaway from Dreamforce – one I highlighted in an interview with DreamSimplicity from the show floor. (Note: For those offended by bad celebrity impressions, I’ll warn you that I DO attempt to do Marc Benioff as part of this interview.)
Dreamforce 2010: Adam Needles, Leftbrain Marketing – Marketing In The Cloud, Centralizing The Feed from DreamSimplicity on Vimeo.
Our role as marketers must focus more than ever on delivering leadership and visibility to help our organizations tune their demand generation machines and to ensure tight coupling with revenue outcomes.
Beyond the technology infrastructure powering it, there was rising dialogue at Dreamforce this year around the ‘new science’ of demand generation and the emerging, new leadership role of marketing in this evolution and in steering an organization’s revenue management. And I was pleased to see increasing acknowledgement from marketers I talked with that adopting technology is only a fraction of what it takes to succeed with modern demand generation.
Woods kicked off his ‘Revenue Engine’ panel by commenting, “We all have the same challenge, if we have a dollar of investment to make … where do we put it?” He continued, saying that “… our job as revenue professionals is to optimize the process and make it as efficient as possible.” And he added, “The best organizations have a clear sense of where to invest.”
His panel featured several senior marketing executives talking about their own approaches to demand generation – especially the strategy and processes that underlie their programs and that their marketing technology infrastructure helps them to leverage.
A marketing executive with TrialPay noted, “There’s been a veritable sea change in how demand gen is done. There are dimensions of science that are being brought into the marketing function.” And I was pleased to hear him note that the challenge – and opportunity – for marketers today is to lead the development and management of their companies’ holistic demand generation ‘engine’ – one “… that generates cash, that is ROI positive.”
This requires marketers to take the lead – both from a strategy and from an infrastructure standpoint. A marketing executive with McAfee noted that marketing must move to a “proactive state” in demand generation – beyond merely delivering sales-ready leads. And he noted that merely sales-driven marketing is “like driving with the rearview mirror.” Marketers must not only deliver repeatable opportunities but must also help their organizations constantly understand – and adapt to – a changing buyer landscape.
While people and process are critical elements of this evolution, it also was great to see so many marketing leaders acknowledging that marketing automation is a critical piece of their modern demand generation infrastructure. An Informatica marketing executive on Woods’ panel called out, “I’m using [Eloqua] to allow me, almost from a forensic point of view” to see what is going on with marketing. And Andrew Gaffney’s Dreamforce write-up for DemandGen Report noted, “With both Marketo and Eloqua playing lead roles as Platinum sponsors of this year’s Dreamforce, attendees were no longer asking what marketing automation is, but now more pointed questions about how they could and should be using it alongside salesforce.com.”
That is not to say that everyone at Dreamforce was so enlightened, and I sat in on one panel – ironically the ‘sales and marketing alignment’ panel – and was a bit aghast at some of the statements I heard. Ardath Albee did a post capturing what ensued – so I’ll let you read her thoughts. I’ll say, though, that while there are many progressive attitudes towards the evolution of demand generation – especially at Dreamforce – that is not to say that there are not sales (and marketing) executives out there that still believe the role of marketing is to get names for sales so that salespeople can cold call them. (But I’ll let them figure it out for themselves.)
So all-in-all, lots of great learning at Dreamforce this year – with some great demand generation insights. A sincere thanks to Marc Benioff (Twitter: @benioff) and his team at Salesforce.com (Twitter: @salesforce) for putting on a great show.