Post-Dreamforce Checklist: How to Turn Your Experience into Value

Dreamforce 2022 has wrapped up, and, if you prepared properly, you likely left San Francisco with a lot of new information and insight to bring to your Salesforce relationship.  However, all that planning could go to waste if you fail to put it to use when you return to the office.

Dreamforce is a massive event with a lot happening, so hopefully your team found it easiest to divide and conquer while at the conference.   If you’re like most of our clients, you may be part of a team of employees sent to Dreamforce.  This might include Salesforce admins, sales representatives, and marketers who could learn from the sessions and be exposed to the latest enhancements and product releases.

Hopefully, if you were thoughtful around which team members should attend each session, everyone attending knew their goals before for the event.  If you were really on top of it in San Francisco, you may have even created a worksheet or checklist that documents:

• Who each team member met with from Salesforce and what was discussed
• Who each team member met with from peer Salesforce customers
• Which products interested them and why
• Biggest questions they still have regarding possible mapping to known requirements
• Pending and possible already understood concerns
• Overall impressions

Assuming your team had a process in place for getting the most out of Dreamforce and documenting what you learned, the following are a few things you should consider doing after Dreamforce in order to turn your experience into tangible value for yourself and your company.

1. Hold an Internal Dreamforce Debrief Meeting

With everyone back in the office, hold a town hall-style meeting for everyone to share their experiences and impressions of the event – the sooner, the better.  You’ll get a lot more value from holding the meeting as close to Dreamforce’s ending as possible so that those who attended remember the little details of the event.  Those little details could potentially be used now and during your renewal to drive meaningful conversations and even create leverage you didn’t previously realize you had.

The goal of this meeting is to achieve internal alignment with your team, not just those who attended Dreamforce but also anyone who interacts with Salesforce representatives (such as the CMO, VP of Sales, procurement, etc.) and who can influence your relationship and renewal.  That might even include your CIO or Chief Digital Officer.

In addition to covering the topics listed in your worksheet mentioned above, use this meeting to ask things like:

• What questions do you still have regarding unlocking more value out of current products?
• What questions do you still have about new products?
• Which products should the company be considering?
• Which products did Salesforce seem to be pushing the most?

Anything that happened that could potentially impact your go-forward relationship with Salesforce and the inevitable renewal should be discussed even if you are not sure that it would.  Ideally, the meeting would end with everyone being on the same page and having a holistic understanding of where your Salesforce relationship stands and where you want it to go. Unity is always important and not often the norm, but when it comes to this, it is very important.

2. Follow up with Your Salesforce Contacts

Once you’ve achieved internal alignment and gathered your talking points, you can reach out to your Salesforce contacts.  This is a good time to use what your company collectively learned during your time at Dreamforce or didn’t learn (as you covered in your team meeting) to ask very specific questions and request additional demos, meetings, and reference calls.  The more specific you can be with Salesforce the better.  In some ways, Salesforce will also appreciate the specificity in your asks.  It is of course up to them how specific their answers are in return.

Did a Salesforce representative introduce you to another Salesforce customer right before a session or during an afterparty?  While that may be encouraging, ask for one or two more reference calls after Dreamforce.  You could even seek out your own additional possible references while there through your peer network or through Salesforce advisors who help customers with their Salesforce relationships. You might hear a different story without a Salesforce salesperson present.  Raise the issue.

3.  Meet with Your Vendor Management Teams

This is also a good time to discuss the results of your internal meeting and your specific follow up requests with your procurement or vendor management team so you can start to build your potential roadmap and renewal preparation plan.  Build your concerns with products or your overall relationship with Salesforce into the plan.

Regardless of when your renewal is, the information gained during and shared coming out of Dreamforce absolutely can and should be used in your renewal negotiation strategy.  You can bet that every little interaction Salesforce had with you is being shared with their broader team and worked into their own strategy.  It will pay off to understand how your company appears from Salesforce’s point of view and most importantly, to have one unified message you share with them.  Too often, I see companies losing leverage because they’re sending mixed messages while Salesforce is operating to a well-oiled plan and unified talk track.

In my experience, the most organized and methodical companies have the highest likelihood of successfully restructuring and optimizing their Salesforce relationship as part of a renewal.  Preparing a thorough Dreamforce plan and executing your plan before, during, and after the event is the key to making the most of Dreamforce. Remember that each individual’s interactions will impact the downstream negotiation that will happen.