Parallel events are saving Dreamforce week

The trend at Dreamforce the past couple years that is in fact saving Dreamforce as a relevant conference has nothing to do with the official Dreamforce agenda.

I spent two days in San Francisco last week attending three mini-conferences put on by Sales Hacker, Radius and Highspot respectively.  Amongst 120,000+ cloud computing professionals, i was able to find my B2B sales & marketing tribe already in town and hanging out just a couple blocks away.

SalesHacker featured several great panel discussions about sales & marketing alignment.  Radius featured three days of Revenue Operations keynotes, panels , best practice sharing and more.

And Highspot rolled out the red carpet for sales enablement professionals at the Sales Enablement Soiree.

The Soiree from Highspot was a great example of turning a too-large conference into something more relevant.

With more than 2,400+ registrants, a marketplace of 12 sales enablement centric vendors, a solution theater showcasing solutions throughout the day, six panel sessions led by thought leaders and practitioners, and a keynote from Peter Ostrow, Research Director at SiriusDecisions, it was a fantastic and tightly focused program that benefitted attendees, speakers and sponsors alike.

I  moderating a panel titled “Revenue Enablement for the Entire GTM Team”, featuring Haley Katsman from Highspot, Jen Spencer from SmartBug Media, Scott Salkin from Allbound and Karishma Patel from Twitter. Karishma had some really great insights about key functionalities that make their sales enablement solution a revenue-driver for Twitter’s go-to-market team.

“One of the things that was really missing was helping the marketing team track the content ROI. We had so many tools that were all integrated that there were multiple drop off points. And now, we’re focused on being able to track the ROI of marketing content. I think the capabilities we’re going to have in the upcoming quarters is going to be remarkable for us.” – Karishma Patel, Twitter

If you missed it, you can catch the full panel podcast here. 

The hardest part of events in most cases is getting people to show up.  So why not run an event when everybody is already there?