THURSDAY, JUNE 11th! - SALESFORCE.COM SAN FRANCISCO USER GROUP MEETING:

Our featured speaker will be Loic Le Meur - Loic is the founder and CEO of Seesmic, the company behind some of the most popular Twitter applications (Seesmic Desktop and Twhirl), as well as the video conversation site Seesmic.com. Loic also founded and hosts the #1 tech event in Europe, LeWeb.net, with his wife Geraldine. LeWeb gathers together 2000 entrepreneurs from 40 countries in December every year.

Prior to Seesmic and LeWeb, Loic started several other businesses such as Six Apart Europe, RapidSite, a web hosting service (acquired by France Telecom in 1999) as well as B2L, an interactive agency in 1999 (acquired by BBDO). Recently, Business Week Magazine named Loic one of The 25 Most Influential People on the Web. Loic was also named “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum. He advises the World Economic Forum as well, and covers the Annual Summit every year in Davos.

Thursday, June 11th from 8:30AM to 11:00AM

The topic for this meeting will be Product Marketing and Salesforce.com

Here is the detailed agenda:

• 8:30AM - 9:00AM - Welcome, Coffee, Networking


• 9:00 to 9:45 - How To Launch a Product With Your Community with Loic Le Meur


Word of mouth is much more important than marketing these days and the best way to reach good word of mouth except having a good product is to build a community and create your product based on the feedback from its members. Loic Le Meur has founded one of the worlds best known tech conference, LeWeb, entirely on a community and without any advertising. Loic does the same with Seesmic and will share the key success factors he has learned.

• 9:55 to 10:15 AM – Word from our sponsor, Rally Software.
  
  Rally is the leader in Agile application lifecycle management (ALM) dedicated to making leaner development organizations that respond faster to changing customer needs. According to a QSMA study, teams that rely on Rally are 50% faster to market and 25% more productive than industry averages. Rally’s products were honored with four Jolt Awards in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. The company’s end-to-end solutions include Agile University, the largest source for Agile training, and Agile Commons, the largest collaborative Agile community. Rally supports 1,500 corporate customers and 54,000 users in 50 countries. Join them for the Bay Area Agile Success Tour for Project, Program and Engineering Management on Thursday, June 4th from 9am - 2pm. FREE Sign up here: www.rallydev.com/events
  
  
• 10:25AM to 10:50AM - Product Management and Salesforce.com
  
  John Kucera, Product Manager for Salesforce Marketing will be sharing some best practices and answering some questions about how product management works at Salesforce.com, and will be running the gambit from product lifecycle to ideation to usability testing to building it to bug tracking and more.
  
  
• 10:50AM to 11:00AM - Wrap up, and a drawing for a copy of Salesforce.com Secrets of Success: Best Practices for Growth and Profitability hosted by the author, David Taber.

Just a quick note to remind everybody we are not having a user group meeting in November or December, mainly because of Dreamforce coming up next week. I'll be there, as will MANY of you so that is almost as good as a meeting. Right? Feel free to drop me an email or tweet me to grab a drink at one of the events or sit together at one of the breakout sessions...

We'll be back in February after the holidays and year-end settle down. In the meantime, I am presenting at one of the break-out sessions next week and sitting on the panel at onother one, and at least one of our members is presenting in a third so here is the lowdown:

Lead Management 101
Do you understand your entire lead lifecycle? The experts at salesforce.com are here to help! This session features best practices for lead management, such as how to route leads to the right sales teams, build effective qualification and conversion processes, capitalize on workflow automation, and plenty more.
Speaker: Matthew Reznick, 3n Global, Inc
Speaker: Alex Zarowny, SALESFORCE.COM
Speaker: Jason Stewart, Demandbase Inc.
Date: Monday, November 3
Time: 2:15 p.m. - 3:15 p.m.

Marketing Panel: Secrets to Email Campaign Success
Dont waste your marketing dollars -- or your credibility -- on email campaigns that dont produce results. Our panel of email marketing experts shares the secrets of success and answers your questions on list-building techniques and email marketing. Hear the latest trends, evolving opinions, and newest strategies -- and take home tips for improving your email response rates today!
Date: Tuesday, November 4
Time: 2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.

User Group Member Tricia Reilly is presenting here, in a topic close to my heart as a start-up marketer...

Salesforce CRM Marketing for Small Business
Tired of presentations made by companies with big teams and even bigger budgets? If you're the VP of Marketing, Salesforce CRM admin, or Web developer at your small business, then this session is for you. Join us for practical tips to help you appear larger and compete more effectively -- without spending another dime. We'll also give you a three-phased approach to evolving your marketing operations and show you how to evaluate Force Platform AppExchange vendors to find cost-effective solutions for your marketing needs.
Speaker: Tricia Reilly, Bluebird Marketing LLC
Date: Monday, November 3
Time: 11:45 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.

If any other user group members are presenting, let me know and I will post it to the blog!

May the Dreamforce be With You...

Jason Stewart
Senior Manager, Demand Generation
Demandbase, Inc.

SALESFORCE.COM SAN FRANCISCO USER GROUP MEETING ON SEPTEMBER 18th

Thursday, September 18th from 8AM to 10:30AM
LOCATION: Salesforce.com, Oahu Conference Room, 4th Floor
One Market Street, San Francisco, CA

We'll be getting back in to the user group routine in September, ramping up to Dreamforce and talking a lot about the AppExchange. The specific theme this time will be "GUERILLA" SALESFORCE.COM and I am still looking for feedback... I want to know about your favorite AppExchange downloads and add-ons, but (and here's the catch) only if they are completely and 100% free! So, nothing you can install for free and pay for later, nothing that is so cheap it "might as well be free."

We're looking for your favorite free stuff from Salesforce Labs, you're favorite free dashboards, your favorite Apps. Please shoot me a note, and I will be pulling together the suggestions and organizing them to share them with the group.

Here is the detailed agenda:    

• 8-8:30AM -- Welcome, Coffee, Networking
• 8:30 to 9:15 -- Guerilla Salesforce.com       - The best and most useful 100% free stuff you can find on the AppExchange. Share your favorites!    
• 5 minute break    
• 9:20 to 9:45 AM – Word from our sponsor, Informatica.       - Keeping the spirit of the FREE STUFF going -- Informatica has just released a free new tool on the AppExchange that they claim does everything the Data Loader does, only better. They'll be demonstrating that free tool and offering a summary of their overall services.    
• 9:45AM to 10:30AM - Let's Talk About Dreamforce       - Dreamforce is coming. Unfortunately, it's not free (like everything else we talk about today) but we do have the home team advantage. We'll be comparing notes on sessions and scheduling, looking at the new attendee portal and more with the ultimate goal of making sure everyone who goes to Dreamforce in November gets all they can out of the experience. Alumni, share your stories!

Jason Stewart
Demandbase, Inc.
jstewart@demandbase.com

Thursday's meeting at Salesforce.com was a great success, with 40 people joining us to learn about the summer release with Ly Townsend from Salesforce.com (thanks, Ly!). Thanks also going out to Cast Iron Systems for sponsoring the event.

Our next meeting will be in late September/early October and we'll be sharing your feedback on the absolute best free applications on the AppExchange, as well as discussing the breakout sessions at Dreamforce in November so that you will know what not to miss...

Please comment here on the blog if you have any recommendations for great downloads you have made off the AppExchange. Apps, dashboards, report suites are all fair game. The only requirement is that they be free!

A few links that came up at the meeting for you...

• Summer Release Notes
• Idea Exchange
• Ideas we discussed in the meeting are here and here and here.
• Help Create the Conference: Dreamforce Idea Exchange.
• Facebook Group

Thanks again, and I'll get back to you when we have a date set for the September meeting.

Jason Stewart
Demandbase
jstewart@demandbase.com

___________________________________

Our next Salesforce.com San Francisco User Group Meeting will be on Thursday, July 10th at 8:30AM.       

LOCATION: Salesforce.com
One Market Street, San Francisco, CA
Noa Conference Room, 9th Floor

The theme this time will be "What's new?" and will feature Ly Townsend, a customer success manager from Salesforce.com sharing details and insights into how to capitalize on new features in the summer release.

Our sponsor, Cast Iron Systems, will also be raffling off an 8GB iPod Touch to someone in attendance.

In other news, our group has passed the 300 member mark and is still growing! We are the fifth largest SFDC user group overall, and we're still growing fast with increasing attendance from meeting to meeting. Thanks to everyone for your support, and spread the word to friends and colleagues so we can continue growing and teach New York, Boston and Chicago a lesson! (Just kidding!).

On a side note, I have also created a San Francisco User Group listing on Facebook. If you're into that sort of thing and have a Facebook profile you can join here.

Here is the agenda for the 7/10 meeting:

• 8:30AM - 8:45 -- Welcome, Coffee, Treats
• 8:45 to 9:05 -- Summer Release Overview
• 9:05 - 9:25 -– Word from our sponsor, Cast Iron Systems.
  - For more details on Cast Iron Systems and how they help their customers integrate Salesforce.com with other applications, see the bottom of this email.
• 9:25 - 9:50 -- Idea Exchange Overview - What is it, how do I use it?
• 9:50 - 10:00AM -- Q&A, Raffle, Wrap up

Thanks! Hope to see you there!

Jason Stewart
Demandbase
jstewart@demandbase.com

___________________________________       

Description from Cast Iron Systems:

Cast Iron Systems, an AppExchange partner providing an appliance-based solution specifically for integrating Salesforce with other applications will be our sponsor. Dan England, Marketing & Sales Operations Manager will be available to answer any questions you might have about their products and to get your feedback on how to make their product offerings better for Salesforce users. www.castiron.com

Did we mention Cast Iron will Raffle off an iPod Touch (8GB)?    

Well, if you do, Salesforce.com would like to hear about it.

SFDC has created a Dreamforce portion in the Idea Exchange, in order to solicit input from the community on content at this November's event. You can vote on the presentations you would like to see, or if you have an idea for a presentation you want to deliver (that is not simply an advertisement for your product or services) you can out it up there and see if anyone votes for it.

One idea I particularly like was Salesforce Marketing for Small Businesses, although I think it is something that deserves an entire track as opposed to a single session. I actually wrote a bit about just that after the last Dreamforce on my other blog, in a post called Five Things to Make Dreamforce Better. Here's an excerpt:

"Create a new track: Guerilla Salesforce.com -- Bigger does not necessarily mean more interesting. At the keynotes, at the awards, and in the breakout sessions the customer references and case studies are overwhelmingly dominated by big customers. I understand -- big customers are cool. But last time I checked, the vast majority of customers (heck, the vast majority of partners) all have less than 100 employees. I was in one marketing track where the speaker asked how many attendees worked in marketing departments with less than five people in them. Most of the room raised their hands. Here's what you do. Create a track dedicated to best practices and creative ways to use Salesforce.com without a lot of extra development, and without a single App off the AppExchange that you can't download for free....and create an Appy Award that a customer with less than 100 seats has a shot at winning. "Most Creative Use of Salesforce.com Without Spending a Penny."

Check it out here.

The May meeting was a great success, with approximately 35-40 members joining us for breakfast and some great discussion about Sales Operations and Salesforce.com. A special thanks to Xactly for sponsoring the event.

As we discussed at the meeting, the topic for the next meeting will be both new features in the summer release as well as the Idea Exchange. Save the date! We'll be doing it in July, before we take the summer off and then reconvene in the fall.

Thursday, July 10th
8:30AM - 10:30AM
Landmark Building, One Market Street, San Francisco (SFDC Offices)

Here is some housekeeping from the last meeting...

Andrew from Fortinet hunted down the answer to the default lead assignment question...the default lead owner is set using: Setup > Customize > Leads > Settings. The default to the default lead owner is the System Admin. This can be changed to any user (such as a marketing user or customer service user). Thanks, Andrew!

I had mentioned a blog piece about hitting the growth phase in your organization where you are challenged with growing your sales team quickly. It was called The Ramp Phase, Jack Welch and a Coin Flip from the Altos Ventures blog and can be read here.

Thanks again, and look for a more detailed email on the July meeting closer to the end of this month.

Regards,

Jason Stewart
Demandbase, Inc.
jstewart@demandbase.com

We have a location for our next meeting now...

Time: May 15th, 8AM -10AM
Location: Salesforce.com
One Market Street, Atrium Lobby (If you enter from Market Street, it's on your left hand before you get to the food court)
San Francisco

We'll be talking about best practices for using Salesforce.com for your Sales Operations.

Hope to see you there!

Jason Stewart
Senior Manager, Demand Generation
jstewart@demandbase.com
(415) 683-2677
Demandbase, Inc.