More than 120,000 marketers and developers will flood San Francisco on Monday for Dreamforce, a four-day conference held annually by Salesforce.
Initially geared towards educating clients on Salesforce tools, Renny Monaghan, vice-president and head of marketing for Salesforce in Canada, said the conference is now more about taking the pulse of the industry, exposing customers to trends in business and marketing and providing inspiration.
Of course, a line-up that includes Yahoo president and CEO Marissa Mayer, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and new age physician Deepak Chopra is sure to help the CRM and cloud computing company build its reputation, perhaps helping retain customers and attract new ones in the process.
In recent years, Monaghan said businesses have started taking 20-50 people teams to the conference and using it as an “innovation offsite,” taking in sessions and then meeting to decide on the direction they want to take their own companies.
Alongside hundreds of marketing sessions is a full day of keynote presentations by doctors like Chopra, part of trend led by Silicon Valley executives applying Eastern medicine and philosophy to Western businesses. Google, for example, employs a “mindfulness coach” named Chade-Meng Tan who leads a class it calls “Search Inside Yourself” at its California headquarters.
Some of those philosophies have spilled across the border, at least at Salesforce, which offers Yoga classes, massage and a fitness and wellness program at its office in Toronto, according to Monaghan.
Since 2003, Dreamforce has become one of the largest business and technology conferences in North America, rivaling South By South West’s numbers, which attracted about 150,000 people to at least one of its interactive, music and film sessions this spring.
Throughout the week, Marketing will report live from Dreamforce in San Francisco. Watch our Twitter account, @Marketing_Mag, for live-tweeting during the sessions.
