#dreamforce13

[paulacabanillas]

Watch the opening keynote of Marc Benioff at Dreamforce 13. You'll see perfect examples of the new platform Salesforce1 and the use of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and ExactTarget Marketing Cloud within it.

[loubicoolin]

The super dapper @Benioff in his self declared custom "cloud walkers" kicking off #dreamforce13

[stevekalush]

Welcome to #dreamforce13 (at Dreamforce 2013)

[buzzfork]

Social Selling Takes Center Stage at DreamForce 2013

Salesforce's DreamForce 2013 conference kicks off in San Francisco today, and has already begun to livestream on Salesforce Live. One of the larger tech conferences of the year, with over 120,000 visitors and keynotes from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Sheryl Sandberg, Marissa Mayer and Deepak Chopra, DreamForce focuses on the intersection of sales, software, data and social media.

Social selling will be a front-and-center topic throughout the week, as sales teams, marketers and CRM providers look for ways to leverage social data and digital relationships to accelerate and optimize lead generation, customer acquisition, customer service and customer retention. Giving weight to the social selling trend is ongoing research and data that shows that, put simply, social selling works: a 2013 Aberdeen study found that sales reps who leverage social selling in their sales process are 79% more likely to attain their quota than those who don’t use social selling in their sales process (15%). 

Moreover, a Sales Management Association survey of 140 companies this past spring found that 96% of their sales teams' use LinkedIn at least once a week, spending an average of six hours per week on the professional networking site. However, despite spending nearly an entire workday each week prospecting for leads on LinkedIn, nearly 80% of teams surveyed had no formal social sales strategy, instead leaving it up to individual sales reps to manage their time, tactics and accounts.

Clearly there's a disconnect, a disconnect companies like SalesForce, Nimble, Hubspot and Marketo are looking to turn into an opportunity to unite social media marketing and the sales process. We've also highlighted how integrating social with sales not only drives more website traffic and inbound leads but also directly increases sales for both B2B and B2C businesses in past blog posts. At DreamForce, dialogue around social selling will be amplified all week long, with panels focused on using social marketing and social data for lead generation, prospect profiling, relationship building, competitive intelligence, and better sales team productivity.

To join the DreamForce 2013 conversation on social yourself, the official hashtag is #DF13. For a list of other hashtags in use at the conference, visit SalesForce's DreamForce 2013 social guide.